BC’s surprising play-action success

In February 2018, The Athletic's Ben Baldwin wrote a guest column for Football Outsiders, in which he used NFL play-by-play charting from 2011-17 to show that neither the frequency nor success of rushing attempts prior to play-action passes had an influence on the effectiveness of the play-fake. About a year later, FiveThirtyEight put out a piece that evaluated the NFL's Next Gen tracking data from 2017, which included 91 games and 1,235 play-action snaps. The article illustrated how middle linebackers bite on the play-fake regardless of how many times a team runs play-action in a game.