The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are building an offense around their play-action game. And it’s working. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from Football Outsiders’ data on offenses and play-action: only five teams ran more play-action than the Bucs did, and the Bucs were the second-best play-action offense around.
At first glance that might be surprising: the Bucs didn’t actually have a good running game, after all, so why would defenses bite on play-action?
The answer to that is fairly simple and something that keeps coming up, but everyone refuses to believe: there is no real correlation between play-action success and running game quality.