Not Much Success In Rushing Success
September 11th, 2025
Good news/bad news.
There’s bad news and good news here. But as Gregory Peck once said in the movie “MacArthur,” good news can wait. Bad news can’t.
So Joe will start off with the bad news.
The Bucs’ run game stunk at Atlanta to begin the season. Just looking at Bucky Irving’s stats, you don’t have to be a trigonometry major to figure that out.
According to the advanced NFL stats Twitter feed of @DougAnalytics, the success rate of Bucs running plays was largely unsuccessful. The Bucs had the seventh-worst success rate on runs in the league on Week 1.
A successful play in advanced stats is when an offense gets 50 percent of yards needed to convert on first down, 70 percent on second down and 100 percent on third or fourth downs.
So the Bucs, running at a 31.6 success rate on running plays, struggled. Joe is going to guess a rearranged offensive line with two weeks to practice together was a factor here.
Now the good news: The Bucs had better success with the run than the Dixie Chicks did with a healthy Bijon Robinson. That’s a very good thing.
Atlanta had success on its running plays 29.2 percent of the time.
So while the Bucs running attack seemed stuck in park, the Bucs run defense seemed to be in midseason form.
And now Vita Vea may just be going up against a backup center on Monday night. That will be fun!
Offensive Rushing Success Rates
• Broken down by run concepts
• % within bars is the success rate of that run concept pic.twitter.com/nI1kPkyvfL
— Doug Analytics (@Doug_Analytics) September 10, 2025