Bye Week Review

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner

It is Week 6 of the NFL season, and it has been an absolutely boring week of football. My team is on a bye, and no other team is worth my time watching. The Chiefs need this early bye week, I know that. They need time to work through the significant injuries they’ve had to deal with already. The bye week can give them that. Hopefully, they can come back with an offensive plan that can help mitigate their losses.

Nevertheless, a week without Chiefs football is a sad week for me.

Since there is nothing going on, I decided to do an early review of the Chiefs offense, see what they are doing, and how they are doing it. The website For the Numbers (FTN) offers data for NFL games, and part of that data is participation data for skill players. That data in turn allows me to calculate the personnel groupings the Chiefs are using so far this season.

For those who don’t know, personnel groupings are the number of running backs, tight ends, and wide receivers on the field for any given play. These numbers assume that there are 5 offensive linemen and one quarterback, which leaves 5 total players left: the skill players. These are almost always your RB’s, TE’s, and WR’s, though occasionally a 6^th offensive lineman will come in and declare as eligible. Sometimes LB Leo Chenal will come in and line up as a fullback.