Redskins OC Kevin O’Connell brings play calling common sense, potential
By Ian Cummings
The root of the Redskins offensive inefficiency
It’s understood that the Redskins didn’t always have a choice, in regards to the efficiency of their offense in 2018. By the latter half of the season, the offense was worn down by injuries, and the patchwork offensive line made it challenging to facilitate plays on occasion.
But even so, Jay Gruden did little in an attempt to maximize the tools he had. He put the brunt of the workload on the sinking shoulders of Adrian Peterson, and as a result, the Redskins missed out on a substantial amount of yards.
It wasn’t just the amount of rushing plays overall that hindered the offense, but the timing of said run plays. In a stat provided by analyst Warren Sharp, the Redskins are shown to have been the second worst rushing offense in the NFL, through three quarters, on first and ten.
Their success rate running the football on first down was just forty percent, and yet, they ran it on first down the third-most in the NFL, at a clip of sixty-two percent. Adrian Peterson individually had a dismal 37 percent success rate on first and ten, which per Sharp, ranked nineteenth out of twenty qualifying running backs.
To put it simply, the Redskins were bad at running on first down. And they kept running on first down.