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Unfortunately, Football Ousiders only splits passes between Short (up to 15 yards down the field) and Deep (over 15 yards). That, to me, is too simple.
I decided to split passes 4 ways. Behind the LOS, Short (0 to 10 yards down the field), Medium (11-20 yards down the field) and Deep (21+ yards down the field)
This is where the ball is thrown, not the end result.
1st and 10, Own 20-39 yard line.
17.79% - Behind the line of Scrimmage (Football Outsiders doesn't list if a pass was a check down of a screen)
49.43% - Short
20.61% - Medium
12.16% - Deep
And back to the topic of "Teams open up their playbook on 2nd and short", there were 48 pass attempts on 2nd and 1 from a team's own 20-39 yard line. 3 went more than 20 yards (6.25%).
I'm not see much variation in pass distance on 2nd down. On 2nd and 4 up to 2nd and 10, Short passes go up some, 57% of passes. Behind the line of scrimmage goes down a bit, 15%, Deep drops a bit to 10% and Medium drops a bit, down to 18%. On 2nd and 1-3, Short drops down to ~50%, and Behind the line of scrimmage goes back up to near 20%.
On 3rd and 1 to 6, teams pass short about 65% of the time. But then if falls quickly down to about 35% as Medium rises.
And just as teams get more aggressive in picking pass plays the closer they get to their opponent's red zone, their passes get longer too.
1st and 10 from their opponent's 21-39 yard line
15.37% - Behind LOS
46.69% - Short
20.14% - Medium
17.80% - Deep
A jump of 5% in Deep passes with a little off the rest. That trend holds true for 2nd down passing as well, Deep start increasing as the rest drop a bit.
Jumping to the red zone, obviously only short and behind LOS passes in the last 10 yards, with the vast majority being short passes, 90%+.
And everything from 11-20 is Behind, Short or Medium.
1st and 10 in those situations are 17.81% Behind, 34.35% Medium and 47.84% Short The rest are fairly similar. The frequency goes Short -> Medium -> Behind LOS.
That should give me enough to build some kind of play calling look up table.
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