Every offseason, I’m faced with a challenge: What do I write about? I spend most of my time during the season breaking down plays from the previous game and/or looking ahead to the next one. But without fresh games, what do I do?
During the season, I spend hours each week charting plays from the previous week. Some of the core data comes from sites like Pro Football Reference or FTN, but I do quite a bit of charting on my own, as well. Motion type, play action, RPO, concepts, etc. It’s the concept part
that’s going to drive this series going forward.
In this series, we’re going to be building a callsheet based on what worked for the Packers in 2025. We’re not going to overcomplicate it: We’re just going to be looking at performance by down & distance. We’ll likely hit some variations along the way, but, since we’re using this as a way to review how the Packers did on offense in 2025, we’ll likely just stick to the basics.
Throughout the 2025 season, I started publishing my charting data on Tableau Public. It’s nothing fancy, but that report – the Concept Performance dashboard specifically – is what I used to help build this out. I also have another report published with data for the entire NFL that I used as a way to compare what the Packers had down by down & distance to the rest of the league.
We’re gonna build this section-by-section, and we’re going to be using numbers, diagrams and clips to build this thing. In other words, theses article are likely going to be a bit long. So, today, we’ll simply be setting the table because I don’t know how many people feel like reading 4,000 words off the rip.
The biggest thing to acknowledge off the bat is that, while we say we’re building a callsheet, we are not building a true callsheet. That seems obvious, but I felt the need to point it out. If we were building a true callsheet, we’d be building it with a specific opponent in mind. “Plays that hurt the opponent,” is how Steve Axman put it in The Offensive Coordinator’s Handbook. Since we do not have a specific opponent in mind, we’re just building a general callsheet based on what worked for the Packers in 2025. For our purposes, we’re building this by looking backwards, not forward.
I used a couple of templates as inspiration for this exercise. The first is a template provided by Bill Walsh in his seminal work, Finding the Winning Edge.
The other, more simplified version, came from Brian Billick’s excellent Developing an Offensive Gameplan (a book that is never far from my reach).
As noted above, we’re not going to be filling out every section in these templates, but I wanted to make sure we got eyes on these. We’ll likely stick to Down & Distance, Red Zone and Explosives, but we’ll see how much energy I have as this thing rolls on. We’ll probably find a way to get Play Action and 2 Minute into the mix.
One thing I go back to a lot when it comes to offensive football is the idea of the number of plays needed to be included. In Billick’s aforementioned Developing an Offensive Gameplan, he talks about the idea of “how much offense” to carry, both in terms of a season and a game-to-game basis.
This next image shows what a perfectly balanced gameplan would look like on a given week:
This next image takes that same bank of offense, but a gameplan that is more pass-heavy. The game goes slightly differently in each one.
Figure 1-3 shows that the game went according to plan, with the actual game day plays skewing towards the pass. Figure 1-4 shows the same gameplan, but as the game went on, the run game proved to be more effective.
That idea of “how much offense” is one that I kept in mind while creating this. It was the guiding principle, I guess. So, before we get out of here, I’ll give a quick rundown of what we’re looking at in terms of the number of plays by Down & Distance:
That’s our base. We’re taking 50 plays by down & distance and 11 for the Red Zone. We’ll add in some special plays into different sections (like Explosives and Play Action), but this is what we’re shooting for. So, in the next article, we’ll be building out the 22 plays needed in our 1st & 10 section.
One final note: This is, of course, the bare minimum. We have no overage built in. Billick mentions the need for an overage, as you’re not going to carry 61 plays into a game and assume that’s all you need, or that all of them will work exactly as planned. Billick recommends an overage of 25%-30%; too much more than that means you’re spreading your practice time too thin. If we keep that overage in mind, that would give us roughly 80 plays. The main reason I’m not doing that in this exercise is that I’m not actually giving the full playcalls. We’re talking about this through the lens of concepts, not in-depth playcalls. If we were building out the full playcall – Snug RT 3 Jet Y Flag Bow and all that – we could pretty easily get to 80 plays.
So there you have it. The idea behind this, the guiding principals and the numbers we’re tracking to. This is gonna be fun.
Albums listened to: Charli xcx – Wuthering Heights; Skullcrusher – And Your Song is Like a Circle; Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon; Lizzy McAlpine – Older (and Wiser); U2 – Days of Ash; The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar
