2021 Seahawks, Russell Wilson Injury and Offensive Philosophy

Problem

The 2021 Seattle Seahawks got off to a fast start, but their season was quickly derailed after Russell Wilson injured his throwing hand in Week 5. How did this injury affect the Seahawks’ offensive identity and the efficiency of their quarterback play?

Collecting Data

Seahawks, 2021 – Passing Efficiency and Run-Pass Rates – Jupyter Notebook, R

I defined “offensive identity” as a product of run vs. pass play-call rates. NFLFastR’s play-by-play dataset doesn’t include this information natively, but we can easily derive this information and add columns to track cumulative run/pass plays (by game and season) and dynamic run/pass play-call percentages.

**Adding columns for cumulative run-pass play-calls and dynamic run-pass share percentages.**

Building a Solution

Now that our dataset includes the data we’re interested in tracking, we just have to segment the data into three subsets: Pre-Injury (Week 5 vs LA), Post-Injury (Week 10 vs Green Bay), and Geno Smith’s time as starter in-between.

Plotting the run-share column we created earlier shows how the Seahawks’ offensive identity shifted over time, going run-heavy with Geno Smith to pass-heavy after Russell Wilson’s return, and then back to the run as Wilson struggled in his return.

**The 2021 Seahawks’ offensive identity drastically swung between run-heavy and pass-heavy.**

We can further our analysis and look at how dropback efficiency was affected by the shifts in run-pass share. Russell Wilson’s efficiency dipped during weeks 10-13 and rebounded after Week 13 vs SF, coinciding with the shift to a run-heavy offensive philosophy. Was this spark a product of the offense, or his improving health and return to form?