Team Play-Calling Trends From the 2025 Season

The two key variables for projecting team-level volume output are play volume and pass rate. ETR pace guru Pat Thorman is the best in the business at forecasting pace (and his team-level pace previews will be a must-read), but that’s only one side of the coin. Pass rate is also critical, and simply looking at seasonal pass rate or even seasonal Pass Rate Over Expectation lacks the key context of how teams evolve throughout the season. Today, we’ll dig into team play-calling trends and evolution from the 2025 season and discuss what we can take away from that for next season.

It’s worth mentioning that 21 NFL teams this year have a new offensive coordinator — far more turnover than usual. That makes this more difficult than usual because the data becomes much less useful with a change in play-caller, but we’ll make do as best we can. Let’s get to it.

The Lions began 2025 with eight straight games with a negative Pass Rate Over Expectation, peaking with a -3% PROE during that stretch. The Lions’ first game with a positive PROE came in Week 10, which also marked Dan Campbell‘s first game calling plays after taking those duties over from the now-fired John Morton. The Lions had four games with a positive PROE over the second half of the year with Campbell calling plays, though they still didn’t appear overly pass-heavy because they had two games with extremely low PROEs (-22% in Week 13 against Green Bay and -16% in Week 17 against Minnesota). They lost both games with the extremely low PROEs.

Detroit flipped David Montgomery to Houston this offseason and added only Isiah Pacheco to replace him. It appears Jahmyr Gibbs will be close to a three-down workhorse in 2026, with Pacheco likely mixing in some on early downs just to keep Gibbs’ workload from getting too high. Gibbs is, of course, a prolific pass catcher out of the backfield, and the talent downgrade from Montgomery to Pacheco in the “thunder” portion of the “thunder-and-lightning” RB duo could indicate the pass-first tilt is here to stay for the Lions.

Detroit hired Drew Petzing as their new offensive coordinator; while Petzing led the NFL’s pass-heaviest offense in Arizona last year, they admittedly fell into some extreme game scripts and basically gave up on their season down the stretch with Jacoby Brissett at QB. Plus, Petzing led two run-first offenses with the Cardinals in 2023-24, so it seems difficult to consider him a major boon for team pass rate despite what happened with the Cardinals last season. Considering Campbell was seemingly the engine behind the increased pass-heaviness, it’s unclear how much that will carry over with Petzing calling plays in 2026. The change in personnel both at running back and on the offensive line could indicate a more balanced attack from the Lions this year as opposed to the clearly run-first philosophy we saw in 2023, 2024, and the first half of 2025.