To start, read-option usage is up. Per ESPN Stats & Information (which sourced all these numbers), teams have run 585 zone-read plays amid the first 15,660 offensive plays of the 2013 season, meaning that 3.7 percent of all plays from scrimmage through the end of Week 8 were read-option handoffs.
1 That's more than were run during all of last year, when the league's 32 teams combined for 415 zone-read plays while running 32,882 offensive snaps. That's a rate of just 1.3 percent; in other words, the league is running the zone read nearly three times more frequently in 2013 than it was in 2012.
Those plays, however, have not been as effective as they were a year ago. In 2012, read-option plays averaged a whopping 6.2 yards per carry, with 47.7 percent producing an improvement in the number of points that teams expected to score on the drive in question (per ESPN's Estimated Points Added stat). In 2013, those figures are down; even after the Pryor run, read-option plays are averaging 4.7 yards per carry with a success rate of 42.9 percent. Chalk one up for the skeptics.
What's also interesting is seeing how the teams that ran the read-option most frequently in 2012 have been at the same task in 2013. Each of the five heaviest read-option users from 2012 are among the league's seven most-frequent zone-read teams in 2013. And four of the five have had less success this season:
