As our Matthew Marczi recently wrote, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offense reportedly avoids the middle of the field due to Mike Tomlin’s fear of turnovers. Today, we’re examining if that’s true. Do more turnovers happen in the middle of the field than outside the numbers?
First, here are over-the-middle attempts and interception rates. For the sake of this argument, I sorted lowest numbers as best, to clearly see if limiting attempts correlated to less interceptions.
Right away, we see that Pittsburgh fared as one of the best teams in 2024 under these parameters. They had the second least over the middle attempts in the league (44), and were one of five teams with no over the middle interceptions. The others were Chicago, Buffalo, Indianapolis, and the Chargers. Los Angeles was the only team from this group with a higher number of attempts to accomplish this feat.
The trendline (diagonal line) does validate that less over the middle attempts led to less interceptions overall, but there are plenty of outliers as well. For example, the only team with less over the middle attempts last year were the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles. They had just 35 over the middle attempts, but landed slightly below the mean with a 2.9-INT rate (T-18th).
Eleven teams land on the top right, with low over the middle attempts and interception rates: Steelers (10-7), Bears (5-12), Bills (13-4), Colts (8-9), Packers (11-6), Ravens (12-5), Jaguars (4-13), Vikings (14-3), Titans (3-14), Rams (10-7), Cardinals (8-9). Listing their season records in parenthesis reveals mixed results, with six playoff teams and five that failed to earn that pleasure.
If you are going to limit your over the middle attempts, you better take care of the ball. Looking at the bottom right illustrates this point, with four of the five teams failing to make the playoffs: Cincinnati, Carolina, Atlanta, New England, and Denver (first-round exit).
Interestingly, there were a few teams on the top left with a high number of over the middle attempts, that were still able to take care of the football: the Chargers, Giants, Cowboys (second-most attempts), and Saints. Of those four teams, just one made the postseason.
The bottom left of the visual is the highest attempts and interception rates. This includes eight teams that had varied success in 2024: Buccaneers, Jets, Browns, Texans, 49ers, Chiefs, Lions, and Seahawks. Half made the postseason, including Kansas City making the Super Bowl.
Next, let’s compare this with non-over-the-middle results, once again with attempts and interception rates:
Eight teams land on the top right here, including Pittsburgh, with lower-than-average attempts and interception rate. This was 11 teams on the initial view (with varied success), but quality over quantity here, with all eight teams making the playoffs. Also, only three postseason teams landed below average in non-middle INT rate: Green Bay, Minnesota and Tampa Bay.
The trendline also points to less attempts equaling fewer interceptions, as common sense would suggest. No matter where it is on the field, you should take care of the football, right? For disclosure, the mean over the middle interception rate in 2024 was 2.83, compared to a 2.15 for non-over-the-middle.
I also compiled a differential table (total INT rate – over the middle INT rate) including all the data used for the article:
Fourteen teams had positive differentials, meaning they had better over the middle interception rate than in totality, including Pittsburgh. In this group, nine of them had fewer over the middle attempts than the league average. And 18 teams had negative differentials, with 10 of them throwing over the middle more than the NFL mean, with worse INT rates.
Conclusion
We can see the answer to the original question is true, and trends to Tomlin’s belief that over the middle passing can lead to more turnovers overall. Every NFL team had far more non-over-the-middle attempts, pointing to this being a general consensus league-wide. Just like many facets of the game, it’s one piece of the puzzle in terms of team success, though.
One of the many examples were in this year’s championship, with neither team having an ideal over the middle interception rates. The Eagles were the only team to throw there less than Pittsburgh, but they were an interception outlier. Kansas City did it often and notably had a high INT rate, landing them with several high attempt teams in the bottom tier. It certainly supports the question.
Limiting turnovers is obviously a huge goal, regardless of pass location. The question (and answer) is also true for non-over-the-middle attempts. In total, 11 of 14 postseason teams had a below the mean interception rate, with eight of them having a below average number of attempts that all made the playoffs. Specific context that led to even more team success.
Of course, there’s also the risk to reward component, and also challenging defenses to all areas of the field can be beneficial to the overall passing game. An impressive component for Pittsburgh was its 9.1 over-the-middle touchdown rate, which ranked third-best in 2024. Quality over quantity is certainly the decision if forced to choose, as the numbers bared out.
A slight uptick in over the middle attempts, while sticking to your identity of taking care of the football, is feasible in my opinion to get more reward from the passing game. But Pittsburgh’s track record of limiting over-the-middle attempts seems likely to continue, and hopefully the ability to limit turnovers at all areas of the field continues to be a strength in 2025.
