Welcome to FantasyPros’ weekly pace and efficiency report. Each week of the season we’ll survey trends in snap count totals while examining pace and efficiency data. Opportunity is king in fantasy football, and teams that run more plays have more opportunities to score fantasy points. Snap counts are the product of pace and efficiency, so examining each factor provides insight into future game environments, changes in coaching philosophy, and offensive growth or decline throughout the season.

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Teams Projected for High Week 3 Snap Counts

Green Bay Packers

The Packers usually don’t profile as a high-volume team, but they might be one this week. They run essentially a league-average pace, but combine their 76.5 CER with Tampa’s CER of 19.7 and slowish pace, Green Bay could see their plays spike this week. Aaron Rodgers and his offense were clicking more on Sunday Night (albeit against the Chicago Bears), while Brady and his injury-ravaged team struggled to move the ball against the Saints for most of the game.

Detroit Lions

Are the Lions good? That’s a little muddy right now, but what is clear is they are good on offense. Detroit boasts a 63.0 CER through the first two weeks of the season and they take the shortest time to snap the ball in the league. They battle the Vikings in Week 3, a division rival coming off a rough game against the Eagles. Minnesota has run just 60 plays/60 minutes this year on top of possessing the definition of league-average efficiency (50.0 CER). The Lions should run plenty of plays in this contest and will have a good chance to win this game straight out.

Atlanta Falcons

Instead of simply writing up the Seahawks in the latter section of this article every week, I’m going to highlight their opponent in this former section. Seattle’s two opponents this year have run 64 plays and 70 plays, respectively, against the Seahawks, both of which are above the league average. While Atlanta runs a league-average pace, they have a 53.6 CER, good enough to project them to dominate the play count when they face off against the slowest offense in the league in Seattle.

Teams Projected for Low Week 3 Snap Counts

Pittsburgh Steelers

Remember when we thought the Steelers had an upgrade at QB? About that. Trubisky and his Steelers’ offense have been putrid thus far, running the fifth fewest plays/60 minutes and earning the second-worst CER (14.6). In Week 3, they will travel to Cleveland to face a Browns team that is not nearly as bad on offense as many of us thought they would be under Jacoby Brissett, as evidenced by their top-10 ranking in both pace and efficiency. Expect the Steelers’ offense to yet again watch a majority of the game from the sideline.

San Francisco 49ers

This one is more of a gut feeling after looking back on the 49ers teams Jimmy Garoppolo has led in the past. They tend to run the ball, play good defense and win in low-scoring contests. San Francisco’s CER will likely rise as Jimmy G has been quite efficient when he’s been at the helm of this offense. San Francisco also gets the Broncos, who have been efficient, despite their coach trying to do everything within his power to get fired. Denver will likely only get better as the season wears on, so I would not be surprised to see their pace and efficiency increase this week against the 49ers.

Chicago Bears

If you have been disappointed by Bears players in fantasy, I am here to explain what’s going on. Chicago is giving Seattle a run for its money by averaging 48.5 plays/60 minutes, a number that is just barely higher than the Seahawks’. Combine this with a 21.6 CER and you get an offense to stay away from. They welcome the Texans to Soldier Field in a game that profiles as a low-scoring affair for both teams (40.5 O/U). This is a stay-away game for fantasy purposes, if possible.

Noteworthy Trends

• The two league leaders in plays/60 minutes, the Jets and Bengals, play each other this week, but I am neglecting to highlight either as both have been relatively inefficient. Will this game be a shootout? Maybe, but I think there’s difficulty projecting that based on both teams’ inability to move the ball without lots of volume.
• I’d like to bring up again this week that we’re still dealing with a small sample size. For example, no teams last year averaged more than 70 plays/60 minutes or less than 55 plays/60 minutes. So far, we have a total of eight teams outside of that range. This isn’t to say that nothing we’ve seen so far matters, but we do need to remember that it’s still extremely early in the season, so some of these outlier numbers you’re seeing will creep more toward the average over the next 16 weeks.
• In the 2021 season, nine of the top ten teams in CER made the playoffs. Of the top ten teams in CER in 2022, just three are playoff teams from 2021. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Jaguars and the Browns, for example, are destined to make it into the playoffs, but it’s something to keep an eye on considering the accuracy CER had at predicting playoff teams in 2021.

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*Data from the table comes from as follows:

• https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/2021/
• https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/minutes-played?date=2022-01-10
• https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/nfl/pace-stats/2021
• https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/yards-per-play?date=2022-01-11
• https://rbsdm.com/stats/stats/

**Composite Efficiency Score is a statistic I created using regression analysis of the efficiency metrics on the table.