13 Personnel is So Hot Right Now
Inside the off-season's newest buzzword
Good morning everyone,
I’m here to provide a data primer on the hottest buzz-words of the 2026 NFL off-season: 13 personnel. I’ve finally decided to dedicate a weekly write-up about this after hearing a mysterious quote from Chicago Bears QB Caleb Williams about a new tight end no one’s seen yet mixing it into 13 personnel next season for Ben Johnson’s offense. I’ve lost the link to that quote to the sands of time, but I promise it happened.
Today I’m going to tell you what 13 personnel is, why you should care about it, and what this means for the league as a whole. Because it’s a copycat league, so if one prolific offense is mixing more of something in, the rest of the league will too.
Let’s dive in.
What is 13 Personnel?
Three tight ends on the field. That’s all it means. 12 personnel means there’s two tight ends on the field for an offense, 11 personnel means one tight end. You get what I mean. 13 personnel usually means that the offense is replacing wide receivers with tight ends on the field.
The Data
I’ve been on an nflfastR participation data kick and that’s not stopping here. For every player on the field, we have an assigned roster position. So we can create a pretty accurate representation of 13 personnel usage by just querying where a count of three players on the field’s positions equal tight end. I did something similar for this personnel tool on raycarp.com, where you can see just how efficient every NFL offense is in different personnel sets.
The GUT
Given NFL on-field participation data from nflfastR and roster information
Use simple SQL queries
To see if 13 personnel usage is actually trending upwards, when teams utilize 13 personnel the most, and which teams perform best in these 13 personnel scenarios.
The Results
The Rams ran the most 13 personnel in the NFL last year, but I won’t spend too much time covering that because Joshua Franco did a great job in this Twitter thread doing exactly that.
The rumors are true though, here’s a breakdown of the percentage of total snaps in 13 personnel across the league by season:
A jump in 1.4% from last season? That’s what’s spurring all of this talk of 13 personnel? I feel like we need to find some more info because this isn’t strong enough. Here’s a gigantic table showing how often each team used 13 personnel in every regular season since 2016:
The Rams are the clear leader here with the highest total across the entire timeframe last season. But the Tennessee Titans actually averaged the most 13 personnel usage across the 2016-2025 timeline. And then we see a 2024 spike in Pittsburgh at 15.4%? I think I’ve accidentally created an Arthur Smith tracker. Here’s another gigantic table showing how these teams actually performed on these 13 personnel plays, showing each team that over 50 13p snaps and their EPA/Play on those 13 personnel isolated plays:
16 teams with over 50 13p snaps, the highest total. Not to completely hone in on the Rams, but this second table shows me that their main offensive agenda in 2025 was 13 personnel. Does this mean this’ll continue into 2026? With Sean McVay at the helm, probably not. But something tells me they’ll be playing more games from a leading position this year, so maybe that equates to more run plays which means more 13p. Speaking of run plays, here’s a run/pass split of 13 personnel plays by season:
Not gathering any trends from this one here. Teams mix it up pretty evenly. Last thing we’ll look into, are teams switching up when they’re using 13 personnel by season?
2025 was the first season in the 2016-2025 pool where teams used 13 personnel more often on the goal line than they did backed up to their own end one. It’s gone from a more defensive and conservative formation to a dynamic, offensive one, all while maintaining it’s run/pass splits. Fascinating.
That’s all I have for today. Thanks again for reading, liking, and sharing and talk soon - RC