Around this time of year in the NFL, anything is possible. The games haven’t started yet, so nobody knows much of anything about what teams will actually do once they take the field for the regular season. And so, we get all kinds of talk about creative plans for once the games start.
To wit: The Detroit Lions have been talking quite a bunch about how they plan to use running backs Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery on the field at the same time.
“As often as we can get both those guys on the field is a good thing for us,” quarterback Jared Goff said this week, via ProFootballTalk. “Finding creative ways to do that is the hard part, and that’s the challenge upstairs for those guys, but they’re doing a good job of figuring it out. You don’t ever want to take either of them off the field, so we’re trying to find ways to throw it to one of them and have one of them block, and then throw it to the other guy have the other guy block, hand it to one of them. It’s a lot of fun and those two guys are good.”
Gibbs and Montgomery are indeed both good players. And finding ways to get them on the field together rather than having, say, backup tight ends or third wide receivers out there is an idea that has some merit.
But this is something that teams routinely talk about during training camp and the preseason, just like they routinely talk about using their running backs in the slot more often. And then those ideas rarely come to fruition. The Lions themselves talked about Gibbs as a slot player in the wake of their drafting him two years ago, for example. Through his two NFL seasons, though, Gibbs has played just 96 snaps in the slot, according to Pro Football Focus — an average of three per game.
He has also rarely been on the field at the same time as Montgomery or another running back like Craig Reynolds or Sione Vaki. We can actually gather the information on how often teams used two backs at the same time last year, thanks to TruMedia. And we can also filter out the snaps that actually included a fullback rather than a second running back.
You can see that the Lions ranked ninth in the NFL in two-RB usage, but that they did it just 21 times — an average of 1.2 per game. And the team that did it the most often — the Commanders — had multiple running backs on the field for just 5.2 snaps per week. The idea that this is going to be a significant part of the offense is likely not going to come to fruition, based on historical trends.
The Lions can of course ramp things up to levels that haven’t been seen in the league in recent years, but even that would mean having two backs out there for something like six or seven snaps a game, which would be something like 10% of their total plays. And even that seems remarkably unlikely.
Doing something like this more often would probably be beneficial, but the rhetoric surrounding the plan right now likely won’t match the reality that we see on the field.