NFL Pro NFC Championship preview: Critical insights on Rams-Seahawks

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We’re down to four teams on Conference Championship Sunday, with two games to decide who goes to Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara. As always, to better understand and decipher the storylines of the week, NFL Pro has a wealth of data and insights, carefully curated to highlight what matters most in each contest.

For the AFC and NFC Championships, we’ve broken this week’s insights into two separate pieces, one for each game! These are the four biggest insights to know for the NFC Championship between the Rams and Seahawks, with all the relevant NFL Pro context and the fallout we can expect Sunday — check out the AFC Championship piece for the goods on the Patriots and Broncos!

Naturally, this is how teams make it to the Conference Championship: by having NFL Pro’s most efficient passing offense and by having its third-most efficient passing defense. It’s also what makes these contests so riveting and volatile, as the first two meetings between the Rams and Seahawks perfectly illustrate. In the first, Matthew Stafford threw a season-low 130 yards (and two touchdowns) but won the game 21-19. In the second, he threw a season-high 457 yards (and three touchdowns) but lost 38-37 in overtime. Some of that had to do with volume — Stafford threw 21 more passes in Week 16 than Week 11 — but much of it has to do with scheme and efficiency as well.

Seattle played their highest rate of man coverage all year in the first contest with the Rams (39.6%) but dipped to 19.6% in the second (just below their season average). They also played with a single-high safety at their highest rate in game one (64.3%) and dipped all the way to 37.3% in game two (their fourth-lowest). Curiously, they started the rematch playing just 10.5% man and 15.8% single-high coverage in the first half, but then skyrocketed to 26.9% man and 50.0% single-high in the second half. Notably, safety Coby Bryant left late in that game with a knee injury, and Ty Okada (no known relation) ended up playing a significant chunk of the fourth quarter and overtime. Stafford was more efficient against man coverage this season, with 26 TDs, just two INTs, a 118.7 passer rating and 0.33 EPA dropback — versus 19 TDs, six INTs, a 99.2 passer rating and 0.13 EPA/dropback against zone. So Mike Macdonald’s second-half adjustment in Week 16 might have been more about personnel than plan. But Seattle went very zone-heavy (84.2%) and split-safety (76.3%) in their strangulation of the 49ers last weekend … so don’t be surprised to see more of the same on Sunday as a counter to Stafford and his wealth of talented pass-catchers.

In a complete inversion of the passing game results from Week 11 to Week 16 (see above), the Los Angeles run game was far more efficient in game one of this matchup than in game two. This time, however, it had less to do with scheme change and much more to do with player effectiveness. Yes, the Rams ran to the strong side and outside the tackles more in game one than in game two. But the changes in tendencies were slight.

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