As it was done for the the game against the Oakland Raiders, now that we are a few days past the completion of the Arizona Cardinals' game against the Green Bay Packers, we now go back and look at the offensive sets and playcalls. For today, though, we will only look at the first-team offense led by Kevin Kolb.
What does it look like?
In their three series, the first teamers were set for what should have been 33 snaps. Two of those snaps were scoring plays on field goals by Jay Feely. Three other would-be snaps were nullified by pre-snap penalties.
Looking at the use of the tight end again, even with Todd Heap out, it was quite prominent. Only four plays were with four players lined up wide. However, in two of those cases, a tight end was one of the players (once Jim Dray and the other Robert Housler) lined up as a receiver. Another play was lined up with three receivers and two backs. So only three plays formations out of 33 did not have a tight end.
11 of the plays were on first down. The team ran the ball nine of those times and on a tenth Kevin Kolb scrambled on a pass play.
Last season, there was one statistic that was weird -- the amount of times that the team passed the ball when there were two yards or less left to get a first down. With the first team offense, they only had three instances of having this situation. They passed once, ran once and gained a first down by virtue of a pre-snap defensive penalty.
Overall, it was pass heavy. The team had 11 designed running plays and a 12th play that became a run on the Kolb scramble.
With two tight ends in the game, they passed the ball only twice in nine times (eight if you take away a pre-snap penalty).
They ran 15 sets with two backs. Nine of those plays were designed ones, one was a scramble and one was no play with a penalty.
There were five sets with two tight ends and two backs. One was a defensive penalty. The other four were running plays.
Tomorrow I will look at the rest of the game's offense and then on Wednesday hopefully break down the defensive snaps.