Now that each team has played three-quarters of their regular-season games, it’s time to take a look at one of the areas in which a team can either get an efficiency boost over their opponents or jettison value faster than Lamar Jackson can scamper out of the pocket for a first down: Second-down plays.
As with all of our analyses, the models are built with the aid of AWS.
Second downs at the middle child of football. First downs happen more frequently and have seen a great deal of innovation. The rate at which teams have passed the ball on first down has increased steadily from 46.