In an interesting article titled “A Look Into Offensive Personnel Diversity” posted to Sumer Sports on Thursday, Tej Seth offered a quantitative analysis of 2022 NFL data to argue that forcing opposing defenses to deal with a more varied offensive attack really helps.
While it may seem obvious that playing personnel matchup games should provide advantages, it’s always nice to see conventional wisdom confirmed with actual data. In this case, Seth plotted expected points added per play (a widely-used advanced stats metric used to judge how successful an offense is compared to what they are expected to achieve in a particular situation) against the number of different personnel groupings used by offenses in 2022 regular season games.