Cincinnati Explosive Passes

How much does the 80/20 ball play into their explosives?

Watching the Bengals in the playoffs this year you heard the story of how 50/50 balls to Tee Higgins were really 80/20 balls. You also heard how Joe Burrow throws a great outside vertical ball. So it led me to looking into how many balls did they complete like this and how did their regular season explosive pass plays breakdown.

An explosive pass is a completion that is greater than or equal to 16 yards. Explosive plays are important to track because there is statistical significance between explosive plays and scoring drives. A run play is considered explosive when it is 12 yards or more.

During the regular season here is the outcomes of Bengal drives with an explosive pass in them:

Touchdown 52.9%
Field Goal 25.7%
Turnover on Downs 7.1%
Interception/Fumble 5.7%
Missed FG 4.3%
Punt 4.3%

Let’s compare the outcomes to drives with no explosive pass in them:

Punt 34.6%
Touchdown 30.2%
Field Goal 14.5%
Interception/Fumble 10.7%
Turnover on Downs 5%
Missed FG 3.1%
End of Game 1.9% (running the clock out)

So, now we have established why explosive passes are to be tracked and why they are relevant for the 2022 Bengals. On base downs Joe Burrow attempted 526 pass attempts (including sacks and scrambles) and 61 were explosives.

Of these 61 completions 5 were a 80/20 jump ball, and 16 were caught shorter and YAC created an explosive play. 2 were created when Burrow left the pocket and created his scramble rules. 1 on a penalty and 1 on a defensive offsides (free play).

So from my findings the Bengals didn’t get a lot of mileage on base downs from outside 80/20 balls. The remaining 40 explosives (which can be seen below for subscribers) split out into a lot of 4 verticals and Y cross.