Personnel Groupings

NFL personnel groupings by team

Every NFL offence is really several offences stacked on top of each other. This board splits a team's season by the personnel grouping on the field and scores each one by expected points added per play, so you can see which packages actually work and which ones a coordinator keeps calling out of habit.

The second chart flips the view to what the defence answered with. Base, nickel and dime are counted from the actual defensive backs on the field for each snap, not estimated from down and distance.

Why EPA by grouping beats a raw usage rate

Usage rate tells you what a team does. It does not tell you whether it works. An offence can run 12 personnel on a third of its snaps and be bad at it, and that combination is a very different projection from a team that runs it a third of the time and is efficient.

Expected points added handles the situations that yards per play cannot. A three yard gain on third and two is a good play and a seven yard gain on third and twelve is not, and only EPA scores them that way.

The gap between an offence's best and worst grouping is often larger than the gap between two whole offences. That is where the exploitable information sits.

Reading the defensive package chart

Defensive packages are named by defensive back count. Four defensive backs is base, five is nickel, six is dime. Nickel is now the default in most of the league, so the interesting reads are the extremes: an offence that shreds base personnel is telling you it wants heavy sets against teams that stay in base, and an offence that struggles against dime has a problem in obvious passing situations.

On the defence view the colours flip. Green means EPA below zero, because for a defence keeping expected points down is the good outcome.

Projecting a new playcaller

Personnel usage is a coaching fingerprint more than a roster one, which is why it moves so hard when a playcaller changes. The playcaller view rebuilds the chart from the seasons that team's incoming 2026 playcaller actually called, weighted toward the most recent, and shows the change against that team's own last season.

Treat it as tendency, not prophecy. It says what a coordinator has called before, not what a new roster will force him into, and the basis note on each team tells you how thin the underlying sample is.

Frequently asked questions