Which NFL Offenses Have the Most Motion?

Plus a quick sidetrack

When writing about football I check my fandom at the door and try to deliver unbiased insights. However, the situation in the city of Philadelphia has become un-ignorable. Today’s write-up includes two portions, the first is another analysis on the league as a whole and what offenses use to succeed on a week-in and week-out basis. The second half, I have to level-set with those around me. So today we’re looking into offensive splits and how each team performs within them, then we’re looking at the Eagles offense on a micro level.

I might be guilty of letting the Eagles fandom seep into my regular weekly analysis, because I’m on the hunt for some outside the box stats that’ll help us find stale NFL offenses. Some combination of metrics that’ll confirm what we see with our eyes when we think of a successful offense and an unsuccessful one, beyond the usual suspects of success rate, EPA/Play, yards per play, points per game, etc.

Let’s dive into this week’s visualization but before I do, I wanted to address my paid subscribers who I owe multiple tutorials. Next week, I will post some more R and Python tutorials until I’m square. Thanks for your patience during this busy time and I hope you’re still enjoying the free content. Let’s look into motion.

NFL Offensive Tendencies

Today, we’re dividing some team offensive stats into different buckets. I grabbed this data from NFL Pro’s Next Gen Stats pages. They have a few different ways you can bucket offensive stats on there, and by combining the split tables into one giant table, we can compare NFL offenses across the board. They have formation splits available (shotgun, under center, pistol) as well as field position (red zone, goal-to-go) and of course splits for our topic of the day, motion.

What is motion, you ask? Besides possessing an enormous amount of steez or aura? In NFL terms, a play is flagged with motion by fancy sensors and cameras using computer vision technology when analyzing offensive plays before the ball is snapped. If there’s someone running around before the center hikes the ball, that player is in motion.

Multiple players are allowed to go in motion pre-snap, but only one is allowed to be in motion when the ball is snapped. Otherwise, the offense gets called for an illegal motion penalty.

You may be asking, why would you send a player in motion pre-snap? And that’s a great question. A quarterback may send a player in motion to gain some insight on the defense they’re facing pre-play. When reading a defense, quarterbacks can only do so much when analyzing where the defensive players are lined up. For example, a defense lining up with 2 safeties high can signal to the quarterback that he’s facing a cover 2 or cover 3 defense. However, these two coverages are drastically different. Cover 2 is a man based coverage most of the time, and cover 3 is a zone based coverage. If you’ve ever played basketball, man and zone have the same meanings in football. Man means the defender will follow his assigned man across the field, while zone means a defender will defend anyone who creeps into his zone. By sending a player in motion, in this example a wide receiver from the left wide of the field to the right side of the field, if a defender follows this receiver, then the defense is playing man coverage. If this defender does not follow the receiver, it may indicate that the defense is playing zone coverage. This is, of course, endlessly complicated as well as there’s disguised coverages and even more defensive formations I don’t have time to cover, but that’s the gist of it. NFL teams use pre-snap motion to gain more insight on the faced defense, or to throw that defense off. Kyle Shanahan loves scheming players open using whacky orbit coverages that confuse defenders.

Motion Graphs

So now that we know what motion is, which NFL teams use the most pre-snap motion? Let’s turn to our data to find out.

So does this tell us anything? Based off these results it doesn’t look like a high motion % is correlated in any way with being a ‘good’ offense.

What if we compared yards per play on snaps with motion and snaps with no motion?

The Lions have the largest split here while 6 teams have the same YPP regardless of pre-snap motion. It’s hard to split hairs in these metrics since we don’t have play-by-play data of pre-snap motion situationally. It’s hard to draw too many conclusions on offensive motion if we don’t know exactly when a team is using it.

Maybe EPA/Play can help add some situational context into this barbell chart? Let’s see:

It’s funny how the Bills and Patriots almost mirror each other, except the Pats offense is better in those motionless snaps and the Bills are better with motion. I was going to dig into some stats about field position and motion before realizing that the checkmarks in the Next Gen Stats portal operate as OR filters, instead of AND. For example, I thought I was pulling redzone motion data, but I was pulling redzone data and motion data separate from each other. That’s okay, maybe another week I can dig into this further. With every passing week these visualizations get a bigger sample size so it’s been fun to see how they’ve evolved. That’s all for this week’s viz, let me know if you enjoyed it in the comments below!

Why do the Philadelphia Eagles Look So Bad?

Those who have been subscribed to The Spade for a while remember when this humble newsletter had double digit subscribers and went by a different name. Back then, 14th Street Analytics was entirely Eagles focused during a really rough year (2023) to be an Eagles-only newsletter. With the Eagles offense flatlining post-bye week, I thought we should return to our roots a little bit and see if we can pinpoint some reasons why. This is mainly a response to the mass hysteria I’m hearing at work, on the street, and at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Truly, why do the Philadelphia Eagles stink right now? I’m going to list out some points:

• Lane Johnson is hurt. The Eagles are 110-57-1 when Johnson plays since he was drafted in 2013. When he doesn’t play, they’re 15-25.

• Their schedule is harder than it was last season. As of December 2, the Eagles have played the 4th hardest schedule this season. Only Houston, Tampa Bay, and the Giants have played harder ones. In 2024, they ranked 15th in strength of schedule.

• Their opponents have favorable starting field position post-punt. Braden Mann ranks 30th out of 33 qualified NFL punters in 2025 in a metric called the ‘inside 20 percentage’ which measures the percentage of punts downed inside an opponent’s 20 yard line, considered unfavorable field starting position.

• Their defense is not as good as it was last season. Teams have had success targeting the Eagles CB2 lately and this weakness has been emphasized even further with the simultaneous Reed Blankenship and Andrew Mukuba injuries.

That’s really it. These are my tempered conclusions after hours of research on team metrics far and wide. I actually expected to come up with some earth shattering rushing stats to throw in here, but on paper the run game is fine. The Patriots actually rank below the Eagles in almost every rush metric (EPA/Rush, Yards per rush, etc.) but neither is in the bottom 5 in the league. Defending a Super Bowl championship is hard, we all know that. But apparently defending an NFC East division title is even harder, since more teams have repeat SB victories this millennium than repeat NFC East titles. I think the frustration from fans is because of the offense’s appearance of sloppiness. All eyes are on the team not breaking the huddle until there’s 10 seconds left on the play clock then committing a false start. And with the secondary injuries, we’re now in deep water where the Eagles need to put points up to win games since they’re getting gashed on deep throws.

That’s all I have for this week, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!