Who Is the NFL’s Stephen Curry?

A couple years ago, in Grantland, Robert Mays proposed the idea that play-action passes are to the NFL what the corner three is to the NBA: the league's most efficient (and therefore valuable) offensive play. Mays used ESPN's Expected Points Added stat to come to his conclusion, and indeed the play-action pass has been about ten to 12 percent more effective than a regular pass over the past three seasons, according to Football Outsiders' DVOA numbers. It's true that teams like to run play-action when they're way ahead in downs and distance, which tends to inflate those stats, but it's hard to think of any one offensive play that does more for a NFL team.

In basketball, the corner three—and shooting well from beyond the arc more generally—is often held up as the epitome of the modern, enlightened NBA style, and no team does that better or more frequently than the Golden State Warriors and their world-historic three-point-shooting machine Steph Curry. Even though they didn't win the title this year, Golden State dominated the league in historic fashion for an entire season thanks in large part to exploiting their offensive edge. That leads us to a follow-up question: if the play-action pass is so efficient as to resemble the shot that changed basketball, which football teams are taking most advantage of it, and which ones are stuck in the dark ages? In other words: who is the Steph Curry of the NFL, and where are the Warriors?

Of course, NFL plays are not quite as binary as NBA ones, where mostly you either score or you don't; a successful play-action pass in and of itself doesn't give you points—it just puts you in a better position to get them. You also don't want to oversaturate an opponent with so much play-action that linebackers no longer bite. And in large part, the play's success depends upon your personnel: is your quarterback ridiculously athletic, or practically immobile? Do you have receivers that can stretch the field? How reliable is your offensive line on plays where they have to block for more than three seconds? The answers to those questions, inevitably, will have a lot to do with the play's success.

Assuming that dual-threat quarterbacks are more likely to run play-action, however, is not necessarily the way to think about it. Marc Trestman, for instance, has had his offenses finish in the top ten in play-action attempts even though his quarterbacks were Jay Cutler and Joe Flacco. The best play-callers are the ones who realize that a) play-action does great things for a team and b) if your quarterback can run, play-action takes advantage that skill set particularly well.

The former is true even for teams who consistently rank at the bottom of the league for play-action passes. The San Diego Chargers, for example, stay away from play action like the plague. Philip Rivers is an old, old man by NFL standards, and he's also had compromised agility ever since he played in the 2008 AFC Championship game with a torn ACL. Even so, San Diego was able to excel on the few play-action passes they used—at least, up until last season, when the Chargers had no real deep threats.

Do you really want Rivers trying to buy time behind a bad offensive line as an integral part of the game plan? Probably not. But as a change of pace, it's been incredibly effective when they've pulled it out. Optimizing play-action passes can rely as much, if not more, on the coaching staff recognizing the limitations on the roster as on the actual pieces in play on the field.

In today's NFL, however, the Seattle Seahawks' Russell Wilson is undoubtedly the ideal play-action quarterback. Looking at the past three years, he is clearly the closest thing the NFL has to a Stephen Curry, in this sense. Seattle has run play-action more often than any team over that time, and Wilson runs more than any other quarterback besides Cam Newton (even though, at this point, most of those are not designed).

Wilson's ability to scramble keeps defenses guessing the same way Curry being able to sink a three-pointer from 28 feet stretches NBA defenses to their breaking point. Seattle had employed plenty of play-action with Tarvaris Jackson, but once the franchise drafted Wilson, its usage skyrocketed, from 22 percent in 2011 to 35 percent in 2012. The Seahawks kept that up the following season, when they won the Super Bowl.

Since then, however, Seattle's play-action has become much less effective by DVOA, although it's still above league average. Its usage plummeted last year, to 24 percent—nearly pre-Wilson levels. This probably has less to do with Wilson himself, than with the team's terrible offensive line, which was bad enough that Wilson dropped weight last season to try to improve his mobility. That's what happens when you trade Pro Bowl center Max Unger and let other offensive line starters walk in free agency. And it's only going to get worse in 2016, with Russell Okung and J.R. Sweezy also finding more money from other teams.

A good offensive line is especially necessary in play-action, in order to protect the quarterback for the extra time it takes to sell the play-fake. Without it, there's a lot more pressure on the quarterback and a lot less time to make the deception work. Even with the massive turnover on the O-line, Seattle still managed to stay around league-average on play-action passes with Wilson at the helm. In a way, that's a bit of a miracle. The Seahawks might not be crushing the rest of the league in true Golden State fashion, but the fact that Wilson is still able to do what he does under these circumstances is proof that he's a special player compared to his peers.

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