Analyzing stats from preseason games is a ludicrous thing to do, but being as I specialize in the ludicrous, below is a look at the personnel groupings the Pittsburgh Steelers starting offense used in their preseason opener against the New York Giants.
Of the 18 non penalty plays that the offense ran Saturday night, eight of them included three wide receivers on the field and it resulted in an average yards per play of 5.0.
The other 10 plays included either two tight ends and a running back or one running back, one fullback and one tight end. Those 10 plays combined to produce a 3.5 yards per play average.
In a previous post, we broke down the length of passes that quarterback Ben Roethlisberger threw during the game and the average of his eight passes was 4.875 yards.
To show just how meaningless all of these numbers are, Roethlisberger told the media Friday that the offense purposefully worked the short passing game against Giants, because they needed to work on their screen game.
While it doesn\’t really mean much during the preseason, I am mostly interested to see how often the first-team offense uses their 12 and 21 groupings as I believe we will see a higher percentage of that this season than we did last season.
| PERSONNEL | TOT PLYS | RUSH | RUSH YDS | RUSH AVG | TD | ATT | COMP | YDS | YPA | TD | INT | SCKS | SCK YDS | TOT YDS | YPP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | 8 | 3 | 25 | 8.33 | 0 | 4 | 2 | 23 | 5.75 | 0 | 0 | 1 | -8 | 40 | 5.00 |
| 12 | 6 | 5 | 20 | 4.00 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 4.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 24 | 4.00 |
| 21 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 2.00 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 9 | 3.00 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 11 | 2.75 |
| TOTALS | 18 | 9 | 47 | 5.22 | 0 | 8 | 4 | 36 | 4.50 | 0 | 0 | 1 | -8 | 83 | 4.61 |
