{"id":765067,"date":"2026-02-20T18:21:48","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T18:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/765067\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T18:21:48","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T18:21:48","slug":"packers-2025-callsheet-an-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/765067\/","title":{"rendered":"Packers 2025 Callsheet: An Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every offseason, I\u2019m faced with a challenge: What do I write about? I spend most of my time during the season breaking down plays from the previous game and\/or looking ahead to the next one. But without fresh games, what do I do?<\/p>\n

During the season, I spend hours each week charting plays from the previous week. Some of the core data comes from sites like Pro Football Reference<\/a> or FTN<\/a>, but I do quite a bit of charting on my own, as well. Motion type, play action, RPO, concepts, etc. It\u2019s the concept part that\u2019s going to drive this series going forward.<\/p>\n

In this series, we\u2019re going to be building a callsheet based on what worked for the Packers in 2025. We\u2019re not going to overcomplicate it: We\u2019re just going to be looking at performance by down & distance. We\u2019ll likely hit some variations along the way, but, since we\u2019re using this as a way to review how the Packers did on offense in 2025, we\u2019ll likely just stick to the basics.<\/p>\n

Throughout the 2025 season, I started publishing my charting data on Tableau Public. It\u2019s nothing fancy, but that report <\/a>– the Concept Performance dashboard<\/a> specifically – is what I used to help build this out. I also have another report published with data for the entire NFL<\/a> that I used as a way to compare what the Packers had down by down & distance to the rest of the league.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re gonna build this section-by-section, and we\u2019re going to be using numbers, diagrams and clips to build this thing. In other words, theses article are likely going to be a bit long. So, today, we\u2019ll simply be setting the table because I don\u2019t know how many people feel like reading 4,000 words off the rip.<\/p>\n

The biggest thing to acknowledge off the bat is that, while we say we\u2019re building a callsheet, we are not building a true callsheet. That seems obvious, but I felt the need to point it out. If we were building a true callsheet, we\u2019d be building it with a specific opponent in mind. \u201cPlays that hurt the opponent,\u201d is how Steve Axman put it in The Offensive Coordinator\u2019s Handbook<\/a>. Since we do not have a specific opponent in mind, we\u2019re just building a general callsheet based on what worked for the Packers in 2025. For our purposes, we\u2019re building this by looking backwards, not forward.<\/p>\n

I used a couple of templates as inspiration for this exercise. The first is a template provided by Bill Walsh in his seminal work, Finding the Winning Edge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The other, more simplified version, came from Brian Billick\u2019s excellent Developing an Offensive Gameplan<\/a> (a book that is never far from my reach).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As noted above, we\u2019re not going to be filling out every section in these templates, but I wanted to make sure we got eyes on these. We\u2019ll likely stick to Down & Distance, Red Zone and Explosives, but we\u2019ll see how much energy I have as this thing rolls on. We\u2019ll probably find a way to get Play Action and 2 Minute into the mix.<\/p>\n

One thing I go back to a lot when it comes to offensive football is the idea of the number of plays needed to be included. In Billick\u2019s aforementioned Developing an Offensive Gameplan, he talks about the idea of \u201chow much offense\u201d to carry, both in terms of a season and a game-to-game basis.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This next image shows what a perfectly balanced gameplan would look like on a given week:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This next image takes that same bank of offense, but a gameplan that is more pass-heavy. The game goes slightly differently in each one.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Figure 1-3 shows that the game went according to plan, with the actual game day plays skewing towards the pass. Figure 1-4 shows the same gameplan, but as the game went on, the run game proved to be more effective.<\/p>\n

That idea of \u201chow much offense\u201d is one that I kept in mind while creating this. It was the guiding principle, I guess. So, before we get out of here, I\u2019ll give a quick rundown of what we\u2019re looking at in terms of the number of plays by Down & Distance:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s our base. We\u2019re taking 50 plays by down & distance and 11 for the Red Zone. We\u2019ll add in some special plays into different sections (like Explosives and Play Action), but this is what we\u2019re shooting for. So, in the next article, we\u2019ll be building out the 22 plays needed in our 1st & 10 section.<\/p>\n

One final note: This is, of course, the bare minimum. We have no overage built in. Billick mentions the need for an overage, as you\u2019re not going to carry 61 plays into a game and assume that\u2019s all you need, or that all of them will work exactly as planned. Billick recommends an overage of 25%-30%; too much more than that means you\u2019re spreading your practice time too thin. If we keep that overage in mind, that would give us roughly 80 plays. The main reason I\u2019m not doing that in this exercise is that I\u2019m not actually giving the full playcalls. We\u2019re talking about this through the lens of concepts, not in-depth playcalls. If we were building out the full playcall – Snug RT 3 Jet Y Flag Bow and all that – we could pretty easily get to 80 plays.<\/p>\n

So there you have it. The idea behind this, the guiding principals and the numbers we\u2019re tracking to. This is gonna be fun.<\/p>\n

Albums listened to: Charli xcx – Wuthering Heights; Skullcrusher – And Your Song is Like a Circle; Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon; Lizzy McAlpine – Older (and Wiser); U2 – Days of Ash; The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every offseason, I\u2019m faced with a challenge: What do I write about? I spend most of my time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2072],"tags":[13915,7,41,345,52919,2514,2513,6,428,53820],"class_list":{"0":"post-765067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-green-bay-packers","8":"tag-by-the-numbers","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-green-bay","11":"tag-green-bay-packers","12":"tag-green-bay-packers-analysis","13":"tag-greenbay","14":"tag-greenbaypackers","15":"tag-nfl","16":"tag-packers","17":"tag-packers-film-room"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116104356610247942","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}