FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. — Any coach or player will tell you the same thing: The bye week is a natural time for self-scouting. Quarterback Kirk Cousins went as far to say that the team needed to ask tough questions during the Week 11 bye, but, more importantly, they needed to find some answers.
Well, now that the bye week has officially come to a end, it's time to face up to those answers.
In his first press conference after a week away, head coach Raheem Morris discussed some of the key points of learnings the coaching staff zeroed in on during the bye. An interesting note that he landed on was the use of play action in the offensive attack through 11 games. Or rather, the lack thereof.
As an offense, the Falcons have not utilized play action very often when compared to other units across the league. According to TruMedia, Atlanta ranks last in the league with play-action passes amounting to 8% of its total plays. It's important to note that "PP%" is a stat generated by Next Gen Stats and tracks the percentage of plays in which a team or player uses play action.
That number is something the Falcons want to improve upon, according to Morris.
"It's something that we want to increase, something that we want to do better, something that we want to make more important, more a part of our game," Morris explained.
For context, the Washington Commanders are ranked No. 1 overall at 22%. While a team like the Los Angeles Rams — who's offensive scheme Falcons coordinator Zac Robinson has roots in — sits at No. 10 with 17%.
Morris stopped short of saying anything that would "give away" the team's true findings and plans for the future, but he did say that is one very specific takeaway from the bye week recapping. Especially, Morris said, when it's something Kirk Cousins does so well.
And he's right about that. Cousins' history as a quarterback in this league is littered with success in play-action passing. Since 2016, Cousins has a 24% play-action rate which ranks No. 10 amongst quarterbacks who have started a minimum of 75 games. Players like Patrick Mahomes (No. 9) and Matt Ryan (No. 11) are quarterbacks around Cousins in this stat, while — of course — Lamar Jackson sits in the top spot with play action accounting for a whopping 38% of his play total.
However, the Falcons are the only team using play action less than 10% of the time through 12 weeks. This marks the lowest percentage of such plays run by a Cousins-quarterbacked offense since he was with Minnesota in 2018, when 20% of Cousins' passes were off a play action. He's at 14% so far this season.
(Editor's note: The discrepancy between the Falcons' 2024 PP% of 8% and Cousins' 2024 PP% of 14% is because a player's PP% is calculated differently. For Cousins, the metric tracks only the plays he's a part of, which excludes virtually all of the team's run plays. For the offensive total, the metric tracks all offensive plays. So, 14% of Cousins' passes have been play action whereas 8% of Atlanta's total offensive plays have included play action. Additionally, TruMedia did not start tracking play-action play percentages until 2016).
It's also important to note that it's not like the Falcons didn't have play-action plans in place already. They do. They just haven't really gotten to them for one reason or another.
"It just so happens that we have had success in so many different areas on offense when it came to passing the football in our drop back game, in our quick game or even running the football in any particular game," Morris said. "We didn't necessarily get to some of those calls.
"We have 'em, we got 'em. They've always been in our program and always will be a part of our program but its something that we definitely neglected it."
Overlooked or intentional, the new plan is in place because of the learnings of the bye week. In simplest form, that new wrinkle is that the Falcons want to incorporate more play action into their offensive scheme. How that looks in the second half of the season, post-bye week, will be something to monitor.
"It's definitely something we can add to our arsenal in order to make (the offense) better for us just across the board," Morris concluded.
