Projecting team-level play-calling requires an understanding of both pace and pass rate. ETR’s Pat Thorman is the leading pace guru in the space and has already started on his team-by-team pace previews for the 2025 season.
To project pass rate, we can lean on stats such as previous-year pass rate and Pass Rate Over Expectation (PROE), but summing an entire season into one number often misses key context. Today, we will dig into 2024 PROEs and highlight certain teams whose pass-rate tendencies evolved throughout the season. We’ll focus only on teams who retained their quarterback and coach from last year since losing either of those pieces makes past-season data much less valuable. Basically, we’re digging into last year’s PROE numbers and explaining why looking at certain subsets of the data is preferable to simply taking the full-season number at face value for some teams.
TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS
Tampa Bay started the season as one of the pass-heaviest teams in the league, sporting a +3.0% Pass Rate Over Expectation through the first seven weeks of the season. That’s particularly notable considering the NFL as a whole skewed much run-heavier than usual to open the year; the average PROE league-wide in Weeks 1-7 was -3.0% as teams adjusted to two-high shells, which depressed passing efficiency.
In Week 7, Chris Godwin suffered a season-ending dislocated ankle injury in garbage time. Mike Evans also played just 28% of snaps that week and missed the next three games due to injury. Around then, the Buccaneers transitioned to a run-heavy offense, though they interestingly still had a positive PROE (+1.0% in Week 8 and +3.3% in Week 9) in their first two games without both Evans and Godwin.
After Tampa Bay’s Week 11 bye, they averaged a -3.7% PROE and had just one individual game with a positive PROE (compared to being +PROE in eight of their 10 games pre-bye). This also coincided with Bucky Irving‘s second-half breakout. Irving out-carried Rachaad White 82-80 in nine games they played together before Tampa Bay’s bye week and 111-64 afterward, averaging 5.7 yards per carry on those 111 carries. Todd Bowles has long emphasized the importance of a good ground game, and T.B. really leaned into that once they had a competent runner at their disposal (and were down one Pro Bowl WR).
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