Smart Football http://smartfootball.com Football analysis from Chris B. Brown Thu, 12 Nov 2020 23:03:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.18 No Huddle Tempos, Procedures, Peeks and Tricks http://smartfootball.com/game-management/no-huddle-tempos-procedures-peeks-and-tricks http://smartfootball.com/game-management/no-huddle-tempos-procedures-peeks-and-tricks#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2020 04:04:11 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=5261 A couple of weeks ago in their win over the Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray threw a beautiful touchdown pass to a streaking DeAndre Hopkins down the left sideline. But upon a closer look, it’s clear that Hopkins didn’t get open simply through excellent route running, but instead by a carefully planned feint: […]

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A couple of weeks ago in their win over the Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray threw a beautiful touchdown pass to a streaking DeAndre Hopkins down the left sideline. But upon a closer look, it’s clear that Hopkins didn’t get open simply through excellent route running, but instead by a carefully planned feint: almost all of the Cardinals were looking to the sideline as if waiting for a new playcall, and as a result many of the Seahawks defenders were either looking that way as well or at least had relaxed slightly. Ultimately it wasn’t much — Hopkins was only open by a step and the pass was put precisely where it needed to be — but in the NFL a step is a step, and you get your players open by any means necessary.

Indeed, Murray was caught smiling during the play as he saw their ruse had worked, and Arizona coach Kliff Kingsbury explained after the game that he liked this play so much (other than the fact that it produced a touchdown) because “it unsettles the DBs and our guys did a great job of executing it. Obviously, it was a great throw and a great catch by Hop, but even if we don’t hit it, we kind of freak them out the remainder of the game.”

But Kingsbury didn’t claim to have invented the play, and instead noted that the Cardinals had “stole[n] it from Ohio State. They [Ohio State] ran it against Michigan. Looking to the side like you’re getting a play and try to catch them off guard. Ohio State had it wide open, and the kid dropped it.” And that is exactly what happened:

But to understand why it’s an effective changeup, it helps to have some context as to what it is a changeup to, namely the no huddle cat and mouse game of varying tempos, which is where some of the most fascinating football tactics currently play out.

Among the many advantages offenses in football have, maybe the most overlooked — though undeniably among the most potent — is that the offense knows when the ball will be snapped. And while most fans have some understanding of this, at least when they hear Aaron Rodgers draw the defense off sides with a “hard count” (sometimes by literally yelling, “hard count!”), offenses have more subtle tools as well, particularly with the rise of no huddle offenses. When most think about the no huddle, they think of super fast, warp speed uptempo offenses, which aim to rattle off a maximum number of plays and catch defenses out of position, or even just out of breathe. And that is certainly a powerful tool. But like any other tactic, as defenses have seen more of the no huddle they have gotten more used to it and have adapted; defenses now match offenses’ one word calls with their own, and they practice at the same frenetic no huddle paces as their offensive counterparts. But offenses have countered not necessarily by slowing down, or more accurately they have countered by not only slowing down: most good offenses now use a variety of no-huddle tempos, from standard speed to warp speed to slower variations and everything else inbetween. It’s the constant shifting of gears that keeps defenses off balance.

And by varying the tempos, defenses are forced to treat every no huddle situation as if it might be that warp speed, frenetic no huddle tempo, but now it’s not so clear whether that quick pace will also lead to a quick snap, which in turn means that offenses are often getting something even more valuable than a defensive linemen huffing and puffing a little between plays: the offense is also getting more information.

To understand why, let’s lay out the three most common no huddle tempos: standard tempo, warp speed and “freeze,” or check-with-me tempo. Many teams have many other variations and wrinkles — from full huddling to “sugar huddles” to intermediate tempos — but most teams operate out of these three basic flavors. Below is how the New England Patriots describe their basic or standard no huddle procedure, which I chose not because it’s unique but because it’s actually quite standard. (Click to enlarge.)

The Patriots call this “Rally,” though for many high school and college teams this is simply how they operate all the time, and it’s huddling that requires a special call. In this tempo, a few things happen:

  • The coach tells the quarterback that they will use “Rally” or standard no huddle tempo, and will usually alert the QB to the formation at the same time. In the NFL it’s typically through the helmet radio, though at other levels the coaches will signal the formation.
  • The QB will tell the offense the formation (usually at this point only the formation), either by words or by a signal. At the same time, the QB should be looking to receive the actual playcall from the sideline while he’s delivering the formation to the other players on offense.
  • Once the QB receives the playcall, he will communicate it to the offensive linemen verbally (e.g., “66!” or “Indy!”), and then will separately tell the receivers the play either by words or (more commonly) hand signal. (Aside: This is one reason that run-pass-options/packaged plays work so well for no huddle teams, is they are already used to separated playcalls.)
  • The QB then goes through his normal cadence — and can even audible as well (typically by saying “Easy! Easy!” and then stating the audible, and then restarting the cadence).

The vast majority of teams that use no huddle use a procedure like this, or something very similar, though at the college and high school levels teams that want to go a bit faster in their normal procedure will streamline the communication a bit, so instead of relaying everything to the QB who relays it to the other players on the field, either the linemen, the receivers and/or the entire offense will look at the sideline (sometimes with multiple signalers for different position groups) so they can all get the playcalls simultaneously.  (This is where those big signaling boards and similar mechanics come into play, and of course many teams use wristbands so the coaches only need to signal the number that corresponds to the relevant play on the wristband.) For my part, I prefer the above quarterback driven approach because while it loses some speed, it focuses the players on the field on the QB — they all know he is in control, and they get their information from him, and so he direct traffic and make adjustments. I also believe that signaling doesn’t have to be all that complicated: below is a clip of the always entertaining Hal Mumme signaling a play back in 1998, and there’s not much difference in what you see on Saturdays (and would see on Sundays but for the helmet radio) nowadays. (And many of the Air Raid guys  still use the same signals).

But if the offense wants to go faster, it needs to communicate faster, which is where “one word” playcalls come in. The Patriots call their version “Nascar,” which, for obvious reasons, is a fairly common term for this sort of tempo. (Click to enlarge.)

There’s not a lot of magic to this tempo: The QB yells out a code word, and everyone should know what to do (and they help communicate it to each other) and get where they need to go and do it as fast as possible. The learning methodology is essentially just pure memorization, as the offensive players will simply learn that for that season or even just that game, a particular word will represent a typical full playcall, complete with formations, pass protections, run assignments, pass routes, tags and so on. At the lower levels this might be just a handful of plays; indeed, the Oregon coaching staff in 2010, certainly among the no huddle pioneers, said they went into games with between five and ten of these “Nascar” type of playcalls en route to an appearance in the national championship game. Nowadays, NFL teams like the Patriots might have fifty, sixty or even more one word calls in any given game.


As you can see from the above page from New England, the players initially learn all the component verbiage during the normal offensive installation (e.g., “G Torch Left [Formation] 65 [Protection] Bunker Ohio [Pass Route Concept”), but then for purposes of Nascar tempo will simply memorize that “Jack Nicklaus” is the same as the corresponding longer playcall. (The Patriots have also always been quite good at these mnemonics and word associations, since the underlying concept is “Bunker Ohio,”which becomes “Bunker Hill” or “Jack Nicklaus.” On the other hand, no comment on the bottom row in the above diagram…) One additional virtue of these one word calls is that they also can become the quarterback’s audible menu. See the example below where the Patriots are in a completely different formation, and Tom Brady cuts off his cadence (by saying “Easy!”) and then calls a one word audible (“Jordan!”), which translates to their Hoss Y Juke concept (hitch by the outside receiver, seam by the slot, and the inside guy to the trips side runs a “juke” route).

So far, we’ve looking at how offenses can go faster. But sometimes it’s time to go slower, even in the no huddle, and the simplest and still maybe most effective method is the “freeze play,” or dummy cadence. The Patriots call their version “Oscar,” and it could not be simpler: the quarterback yells out “Oscar” or whatever the relevant code word is, everyone lines up as if they were operating at the Nascar tempo, the QB barks out the cadence and then… well first you see if the defense jumps (and if so quick snap it and try to take a shot of some kind), and if not, then it’s time to look to the sideline and the quarterback and get the real playcall.

Except now, the defense has most likely tipped its hand, because they had to get ready for the potential of a quick, Nascar-speed snap, even if all they got was the freeze play.  Now, while this is a tremendous tool to get cheap offsides penalties, slow down the rush if they are guessing the snap count, and also to glean information, there are teams that can rely on it too heavily. You have no doubt noticed them, those teams that seem to look to the sideline after almost every play, as the coaches seek the perfect playcall every time. And in response, good defenses have learned to “check when the offense checks”: when the offense freezes and looks back to the sideline, then most good defenses will also change their calls — and as a result change their fronts, coverage, move in and out of a blitz, etc. — to hopefully negate some of the information advantage gained by offenses. And that tit-for-tat is where things largely stand, with the good no huddle teams shifting tempos from series to series and even from play to play, while the great defenses continue to innovate not only in their schemes but also in their own communication and tactics to stay right there.

But there’s one more tool, and it’s one we’ve already seen: the “Peek” concept, which Arizona used for a touchdown and Ohio State should have also scored on. By now the reader appreciates why this is a clever trick, as not only does a defense naturally relax if the offense is looking to the sideline, but most defenses have been trained to look for their own new defensive call (sometimes even based on the offense’s signals!). So this tactic not only “freaks” out the defense as Kingsbury alluded to, but it has the potentially to catch defenses doubly unawares and therefore it actively discourages the common defensive practice of changing the defensive playcall when the offense looks to the sideline. Indeed, Michigan’s defense is known for changing playcalls when offenses use the freeze tactic, so when Ohio State coach Ryan Day called Peek he wasn’t just taking a shot, he was taking direct aim at a tactic Michigan defensive coordinator Don Brown is well known for. I first noticed the Peek concept when Penn State used it against Washington in the 2017 Fiesta Bowl under then offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead (though Moorhead had left to become a head coach before the bowl game), and interestingly Penn State used it for a run play, not a deep shot bomb. Of course, their run play was handing it off to Saquon Barkley, so in a sense it was the equivalent of a deep bomb.

It’s a bit subtle from the video, but you can see how Penn State’s players were looking to one sideline and Washington’s players were looking to their own, and smartly Penn State called the run play back away from Washington’s sideline, to ensure that the Huskies were as caught off guard as possible. Below are the specifics of how “Peek” is called, particularly when you treat it like just another tempo where you could call any play, not just a designated special bomb play like Arizona or Ohio State used it.

In football, anything and everything within the white lines can and should be weaponized against your opponent, and how a team communicates is no different. Signals, speeds and language can produce — or stop — as many touchdowns as diagrams and Xs and Os, as we saw with maybe the best example of “Peek,” from last year’s Alabama/LSU matchup.

Appendix:

Below are some additional clips of “Peek” and other fake check with me variations, including some screens off of fake receiver motion. Special thanks to Ben Fennell for a number of these.

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The Science of the Post: Going Deep with “Mills” http://smartfootball.com/offense/the-science-of-the-post-going-deep-with-mills http://smartfootball.com/offense/the-science-of-the-post-going-deep-with-mills#comments Wed, 15 Nov 2017 17:36:18 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=5108 When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherf—r in the room, accept no substitutes. – Ordell Robbie I have an admission to make: while I love a well executed power sweep or double-A gap blitz, and I’m a sucker for a well timed shallow cross or screen pass, and while I even get a […]

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When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherf—r in the room, accept no substitutes. – Ordell Robbie

I have an admission to make: while I love a well executed power sweep or double-A gap blitz, and I’m a sucker for a well timed shallow cross or screen pass, and while I even get a little tingly when I see a run fit that stuffs a runner or when triple option quarterback fakes the pitch before cutting upfield, there is absolutely nothing — nothing — in football that I love more than a perfectly thrown deep post that hits a streaking receiver in stride for a touchdown. If there is one play — one image — that is totally unique to the sport, this is it: the play that would be illegal if not for the game’s early rule changes to permit the forward pass; the play that would be unfathomable without the game’s early innovators; the play that looks at the scrum at the line of scrimmage — the part of the game most tied to football’s past — and essentially says, screw it, we’ll just throw the ball over the top of all that. It is, in short, the play that makes the sport what it is.

“Let’s see if we can pitch and catch a post”

But like everything in football there’s a science to chucking it deep, and it’s only in the rarest of circumstances that the instruction from the sideline is simply to throw the ball deep, regardless of the consequences. The trick to throwing the ball deep down the middle past all eleven defenders is (a) find a way to bring up the defense’s deepest defenders so you can throw the post behind them and (b) if those defenders stay deep, don’t throw the post. The way to accomplish both of those goals is to construct a sound concept around the deep post that can provide answers versus a variety of coverages — and strike like lightning whenever the opportunity is right. And for my money, there’s no better way of accomplishing those goals than the Mills concept.

In 1990, Steve Spurrier took over at Florida, vowing to not only turn around the Gators but also to bring an entirely new brand of football to the Southeastern Conference, namely an aggressive, pass-first system that had its roots in the offenses Spurrier ran as an NFL quarterback, as updated and refined during his years as a head coach in the USFL and at Duke. Before hs first game against Oklahoma State, Spurrier elevated a young QB named Shane Matthews from fifth on the depth chart to starter. Just before the game, Spurrier approached Matthews:

“Coach Spurrier always liked to come around and talk to guys in the locker room while they were getting ready,” Matthews said. “He finally comes to me and asks, ‘Shane, what play do you want to start with?’”

“I’d never started a college game before. A lot of people were giving him grief already for naming me the starter. So, I said: ‘Maybe a screen or a draw?’ “

And Spurrier responded: “Shoot, they didn’t hire me to come down here and run the football. We’re going to throw it.”

That first play was a 28 yard completion from Matthews to receiver Ernie Mills, who had run a post route behind a ten-to-twelve yard square-in, or dig, route. Florida scored a touchdown four plays later en route to a 50-7 victory. The rest was, well, history, as Spurrier’s run at Florida would be one of the most successful — and influential — tenures of any coach in football history.

But it was also the start of something special for Mills, who is currently the receivers coach at Florida A&M University, and, eventually, offensive football itself. “His [Mills’s] senior year he caught [ten] touchdowns from me,” Matthews later recalled. “And I would say about eight of them came on that same deep post play. So after he graduated, Spurrier called that play, ‘The Mills Play.'” The Mills Play would arguably became the defining play not only of the Spurrier era at Florida but also of the offensive revolution that has, over the past twenty-five years, rippled throughout the Southeastern Conference and ultimately football more broadly.

Spurrier didn’t invent The Mills Play, which would eventually come to be known simply as “Mills,” but he called it so often and so aggressively — and was so successful with it — that you’ll see the same set of pass routes labeled as “Mills” (or “Florida” or “Gator”) in playbooks of coaches who never coached under or played for the Ol’ Ball Coach.

The basics of the play are straightforward:

  • the outside receiver runs a post route, breaking towards the near goalpost (hence the name “post”) somewhere between 12 and 15 yards;
  • the inside receiver runs to a depth of 10 to 12 yards and either breaks inside (known as a “dig” or “square-in”) or runs a hook or curl back to the quarterback;
  • the backside receiver runs some sort of route to draw away the coverage, such a corner route, a fade or “go” route or a hook; and
  • the remaining eligible receivers (runningbacks, tight-ends or slot receivers) run underneath routes to be checkdown options if the defense covers everyone else.

Together, the play is typically run with play-action to further pull up the linebackers and safeties. And, as the Fun ‘n Gun heyday era clips below show, Mills could be as beautiful as it was devastating.

But while Spurrier didn’t invent Mills, his Florida teams embodied the new ethos behind the play: strike for the jugular. Indeed, the West Coast Offense teams had been teaching and coaching their version of the play, known as “Fox 2 X/Y Hook,” since at least the mid-1980s. Below is the diagram of the West Coast version from Jon Gruden’s Oakland Raiders playbook:

As taught by the West Coast coaches — from Bill Walsh to Mike Holmgren and on through Jon Gruden and others — Fox 2 X/Y Hook was first and foremost a ball control play: Fox 2 was a core West Coast run play, and this play was the perfect, conservative complement, designed to hit the tight-end right over the middle when the linebackers came up for the run.

The post route was labeled a mere “Alert,” something to think about only in certain circumstances, most notably in the red zone. The below video excerpt is from Steve Mariucci’s offensive installation video from his time coaching the Cal Bears, one year removed from coaching under Holmgren with the Green Bay Packers (on a staff that included Andy Reid and Jon Gruden), and in the clip Mariucci repeats the West Coast philosophy behind Fox 2 X/Y Hook: hit the tight-end for a quick ten yards, and if he’s not open hit the backside split end (the “X”) on a hook, and otherwise check the ball down — only think about the post if it’s wide open. Mariucci even goes so far as to instruct his quarterbacks to “forget the post” versus certain coverages. (By the way, as great as the quality of the information is in this video, somebody really needed to get Mooch a lozenge.)

This is not to say Fox 2 X/Y Hook was not an excellent play — or that West Coast teams never threw the post — but it was, by design, an afterthought, a route to only get to after both the run and the underneath throws had been established.

There was, however, one prominent West Coast Offense pupil who, let’s just say, wasn’t a big fan of when coaches would tell him to “forget about” a route that could be an instant touchdown. This particular pupil looked at the design of a play like Fox 2 X/Y Hook and didn’t see a safe, conservative, ball control pass, but instead an opportunity to blow a game wide open. And, in his own unique way, this pupil was not wrong. I am of course talking about noted offensive guru Brett Favre.

As Favre would explain to Jon Gruden in their excellent Gruden Camp special, when Mike Holmgren (or Jon Gruden) would draw up Fox 2 X/Y Hook and paeans to the hooks and checkdowns, Favre’s attention was instead drawn to the possibilities presented by that deep post route.

While the basic concept behind Mills and its cousin, Fox 2 X/Y Hook, have been around for decades, it was Spurrier’s and Favre’s mindset — along with some evolutions in how defenses are played — that has brought us to the present.

All good passing concepts are built of the same raw materials: (1) horizontal stretches, i.e., two or more receivers aligned on the same horizontal plane (left to right or right to left) that puts zone defenders in a bind as they try to cover each of them; (2) vertical stretches, i.e., two or more received aligned on the same vertical plane (deep to short) that similarly puts zone defenders in conflict; and (3) man beaters, i.e., individual routes or route combinations that are difficult to defend in man coverage, such as a route where the receiver cuts and breaks away (like a slant or crossing route) or some sort of combination that results in a rub (or pick). Defenses have become more sophisticated in terms of mixing and matching zone and man principles into pattern match coverages, but the best and most time tested pass concepts typically feature two or more of these elements.

The most common pass concepts fit this mold. “Flood” routes tend to be three-level vertical stretches, with one receiver deep, another on an intermediate out or corner (often known as a “Sail” route), and another short in the flat, while many so-called ball control pass concepts like curl/flat are horizontal stretches, as they array receivers horizontally across the field to stretch the defense’s underneath coverage. And both work against man-to-man coverages as well because they feature routes that are difficult to cover in man coverage,. In other words, the best pass concepts create horizontal or vertical stretches through routes that are good at getting open against man coverage.

Further, so-called “triangle” stretches are built when a two-man vertical stretch is combined with a two-man horizontal stretch, against through routes that can beat man-to-man coverage.

Mills is, at core, a vertical stretch, but it’s a vertical stretch in a part of the field not always attacked: directly up the seam, or hashmark area of the field. Most vertical stretches like Flood or Smash try to stretch the corner on the sideline, or sometimes there are multi-level vertical stretches in the middle of the field, such as with the Texas concept. By contrast, Mills builds the vertical stretch of the post over top of the dig or hook route directly up the seam, which makes it particularly suited to attacking today’s defenses.

Mills also goes a step farther by building a three-level vertical stretch (deep: post; middle: dig; short: shallow cross or runningback checkdown) and combining it with a triangle stretch between the post/hook and the checkdowns. As a result, while the primary purpose of the play — the Spurrier/Favre aspect — is the deep vertical stretch, if the post is taken away Mills morphs into its West Coast heritage by becoming a horizontal stretch of the underneath coverage.

But the other reason that Mills has come into its own as a vertical “shot play” is that it is uniquely designed to attack the most popular coverage family in both the NFL and college football: Quarters or Cover 4, and its many, many variations. Indeed, Mariucci referenced this in the installation video above when he said to look for the post against what he called “Cover 8,” which was his terminology for Quarters.

Specifically, college, high school and even the NFL has become increasingly dominated by variations of “Quarters” coverage, by which I mean the family of related pattern match coverages that typically put three defenders over two receivers and adjust who “matches” and who helps depending on the release of the #2, or inside, receiver. The coverage was made famous by the Jimmy Johnson’s “Miami 4-3” defenses — first with the Miami Hurricanes and then the Dallas Cowboys — where the basic rule was that the cornerbacks would essentially play man-to-man on the outside receivers while the safeties would align closer to the line than they would with Cover 2 (around seven to ten yards for Quarters versus twelve yards or deeper for Cover 2) and read the release of the tight-end or slot receiver, known as #2. If #2 released vertically, the safety matched him, thus taking away the popular four verticals play; but if he ran a short route to the inside or outside, the safety was freed to double team the outside receiver or otherwise become a free “robber” player who could read the QB’s eyes. (Many coaches refer to this version of Quarters as “Robber” coverage.”)

Quarters has been popular for some time; Gruden’s Raiders playbook from the late 1990s notes that Cover 8 (his term for Quarters) was “the most popular coverage in the NFL today!” But with the rise of the one-back and spread offenses over the last ten or so years, Quarters and its cousins have become even more popular. A big reason for this is the way it can morph and handle different route combinations without providing easy throwing lanes for increasingly sophisticated passing offenses. But another major reason is that as offenses have used zone reads, read-options and run-pass options to equare numbers and superharge the running game, Quarters offers the promise of getting extra defenders near the line for the run. The key, again, are the safeties: in addition to reading the routes run by the #2 receiver, they also read to see whether it’s a run or pass play, and by lining up relatively near the line of scrimmage and shuffling in place at the snap rather than dropping back (known as a “flat foot read”), they can fill gaps and make tackles at or near the line of scrimmage. “Why Cover 4? We get nine men in the box,” Pittsburgh head coach (and Quarters aficionado) Pat Narduzzi has explained. “People talk about, ‘Man, we’re in an eight-man front.’ Well, we’re in a nine-man front.”

But the final key to the explosion of Quarters is that it’s really no longer a single coverage run by all eleven defenders and has become far more mutable. For example, Gary Patterson of TCU uses a split-safety system to call different coverage concepts to each side of the field, say Quarters/Robber to one side and traditional Cover 2 to the other.

And many coaches have taken this a step further and transformed Quarters coverage into something even more flexible, into that elusive defensive concept, a “call.” Bill Belichick calls these “triangle” coverage concepts, but the basic idea is that anywhere there are two or three receivers — whether from a traditional Pro Set, four wide receiver spread, trips, double tight-end, and so on — the defense can put three or sometimes four defenders over them in a pattern matching Quarters principle that vary in subtle ways depending on what the #2 receiver does, with other coverage principles (typically man-to-man but also sometimes traditional zones) played elsewhere. These coverage concepts go by a myriad of names — Robber, 2-Read, Palms, Clip, Blue, Bronco, Key, Trap, Sight, Cover 7 and Red 7, Seahawk, Stubbie, Special, Solo, and on and on and on — but much of modern defense involves mixing and matching these principles with different fronts, coverages and blitzes. It’s fascinating, fun, often subtle stuff. (Or, if you’re Andy Benoit of the MMQB you refer to every single one of these concepts as “2-Man,” but I digress….) To illustrate, below are some examples of Nick Saban’s “Clamp” coverage, which is a form of 2-Read or Palms coverage which looks like traditional Cover 2 if the #2 receiver goes to the flat and becomes more like traditional Quarters (or even man coverage) if the #2 receiver runs vertical.

But if there’s one thread that runs through all of these coverages it’s this: with only a few exceptions, if both the #1 and #2 receiver run vertical (defined as straight upfield for somewhere between eight-to-ten yards) before making their break, then the cornerback locks onto #1 and the safety locks onto #2. And if the safety locks onto #2, then he can’t help on #1, and because the cornerback is often expecting help to the inside he typically plays with outside leverage, which means…

… Mills can be devastating. Especially when coupled with play-action, Mills is uniquely designed to stress all of these related coverages without the offense needing to know precisely which one the defense is in: since both #2 and #1 run vertical before making their breaks they essentially turn into the same coverage, and that coverage is liable to leave a cornerback with outside leverage on an outside receiver running a post route. In short, Mills takes the most sophisticated coverages in football and reduces almost all of them to a matchup between a team’s best receiver running the best route in the game against a cornerback with poor leverage who has essentially no safety help. This is why essentially every coach and QB now thinks about Mills the same was as Brett Favre did: “home run.”

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As a result, teams have been increasingly building the Mills concept directly into existing pass concepts. The most prominent example of this might be how the so-called Air Raid Offenses — the pass-first attack developed by Hal Mumme and Mike Leach that has seemingly taken over college and much of high school football — have adapted one of their staple concepts, the shallow cross, to incorporate Mills. Specifically, the traditional Air Raid shallow featured a shallow cross (to whichever receiver was tagged on the play) and a square-in/dig (known as a “Hunt” route) that came from the opposite side. Those primary routes were complemented by some sort of check-down route by the runningback while both outside receivers simply ran vertical “take off” routes to stretch the defense.

Over time, Air Raid teams began “tagging” one receiver with a post route, as they noticed that safeties would often get nosey and begin trying to take away the square-in. It was an effective adjustment, but it required the coach or QB to call the adjustment at the right time. Many Air Raid teams now have adjusted their version of Shallow to build the post route directly into the play, i.e., there is always a post run behind the dig route. For example, Oklahoma State under Coach Mike Gundy has eviscerated teams with this over the last several years, with the primary beneficiary being receiver James Washington, with a staggering number of his more than 4,000 receiving yards and 35 receiving touchdowns (at an incredible 20 (!) yards per catch) coming on post routes on Oklahoma State’s version of Shallow.

The coaching points for Mills are not particularly tricky, though, as with anything, different coaches teach it slightly differently. For me it starts with the post route, which I like as a seven step route (i.e., seven steps by the receiver, who starts with his outside foot back in his stance). When his seventh step hits (which will be his outside foot), he will nod his head to the outside and explode to the near goal post, with an aiming point no farther inside than the near hashmark. (His seventh step should be within his frame; I’d rather maintain speed than exaggerate the juke at the top of the route.) Once the receiver turns his head he must locate the ball and attack it; the trajectory of the throw will vary depending on the coverage.

As shown above, the inside receiver can run a variety of routes, from a true square-in (in Spurrier’s Mills) to a ten-yard hook (as is the case with Fox 2 X/ Hook), an option route breaking at ten yards or something else. My preferred version is what the New England Patriots refer to as “Middle,” which is a ten-yard square-in where the receiver is given the option to (1) keep running across the field, (2) settle in a zone, or (3) if he’s blocked (“walled off”) he can pivot and return back towards the sideline. This doesn’t take long to teach and ensures that, should the defense take away the deep post, that the inside receiver is a viable option.

The underneath routes will be dictated by the formation and overall concept: if the offense is in a four wide spread, then something like what Oklahoma State does with shallow cross routes makes sense; if the offense is in an I-formation, then the checkdown routes will be runningbacks checking for blitz and then releasing to open spots.

For the quarterback, I like to keep the timing of this brisk consistent with what was shown above with Peyton Manning and Oklahoma State, meaning that I want the QB to throw the post off of a 5-step drop timing with no hitch (3-steps from gun, with the same timing if there is a quick play-action fake). If the post isn’t there, the QB will then hitch up in the pocket looking for the middle or dig route second, and if that is covered as well he will reset his feet and look for the checkdowns. I do not want the QB to drop back seven steps or five steps with multiple hitches waiting for the post route to get farther and farther out of range. If there is no lid on the coverage the QB simply puts more air underneath it, and if there are any kinds of windows the post has to be thrown on a tight rhythm. (Some coaches are OK if, instead of five steps with no hitch, the QB takes a very quick five steps and a quick hitch to gather momentum. I don’t think this is necessary but it works for many.) The other advantage of coaching it this way is the post becomes a legitimate part of the progression — and thus an option on every play — without being an “Alert” that is only looked at sometimes.

Yet while I’m with Favre that the post should be a viable option every time Mills is called, I’m also with Gruden and Mariucci that most of the completions on this play are going to go to the dig/hook or the checkdowns. But it’s those completions that will eventually lead to the touchdown throw that blows the game open.

Although Mills is the touchdown maker, I have to note that it has a somewhat more conservative sibling: the Dagger concept. Dagger is exactly the same as Mills, except the tight-end or slot runs a vertical seam route to draw the deep safety, while the outside receiver breaks underneath on square-in/dig route into the open space. The conceptual stretch on the defense, and particularly the safety, is exactly the same: one receiver deep behind him and another in front of him on a dig. But by inverting the two routes the emphasis changes, and while Mills is designed to hit the post for a touchdown, Dagger is designed to hit the dig route underneath.

The Greatest Show on Turf St. Louis Rams had a lot of favorite plays –F-Post, shallow cross and Y-Sail come immediately to mind — but Dagger was the closest thing those great Rams offenses of 1999-2001 had to a base play. They ran it from every conceivable formation and alignment, and they loved to switch or wrap the releases of their receivers to ensure a free release up the field. And more than any other team, they didn’t mind hitting the deep seam route if it was there.

Rams

And its popularity has not waned in recent years, particularly in the NFL where it is one of the common pass concepts in the league. Philadelphia, Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Washington and others use it multiple times every game.

For purposes of this article, the beauty of Dagger is how little teaching it takes if you are already running Mills: as mentioned above, essentially everything is the same except where the stretch is most likely to occur.

Before leaving Mills behind, I want to touch on a couple of interesting variations. The first is how to run the play from a trips formation that aligns three receivers to one side. The simplest way is to keep everything more or less the same: the outside receiver runs the post, the second or third receiver runs the dig/hook and the other slot runs some sort of underneath route, like a whip/pivot or shallow cross. Below is a diagram (courtesy of the excellent Syed Schemes site):

pivot

But, as is the case against two receivers, there are a multitude of variations of Quarters designed specifically for Trips formations. The most common (and simplest) is known Solo, and it essentially pushes the base Quarters coverage towards the three receiver side
(see this excellent post about Solo coverage for more details). But one of the weaknesses of Solo is that, as the name implies, the backside cornerback is often left one-on-one with the single backside receiver. The common adjustment is to run a coverage commonly called “Special,” that combines three things: (1) the ability of the safety help the to cornerback with the backside single receiver; (2) the trips side cornerback locks on man-to-man on the outside receiver; and (3) the nickel/Sam, field safety and linebacker play three-over-two (triangle) Quarters on the #2 and #3 receivers. The upshot is that most offenses in trips want to throw the ball to the slot receivers or the backside single receiver, and this coverage allows help on both. Below is a diagram from Nick Saban’s Alabama playbook of “Stubbie,” which is his term for Special coverage.

But if the defense can move their Quarters concept over by one receiver — instead of the triangle being over the offense’s #1 and #2, it’s over #2 and #3 — the offense can move Mills over too. And the advantage of this often goes to the offense, because the matchups are better, featuring slot receivers against nickelbacks, safeties and linebackers who aren’t as athletic and also have different jobs than they have on traditional Quarters involving the cornerback.

The result is that one of the best plays in football over the last few years has been a variation of Mills where the #2 receiver runs the post, the #3 receiver runs the dig/hook and the outside or #1 receiver simply runs a comeback or sideline hook route.

The last Mills variation I’ll mention is one that Baylor successfully used under its previous coaching staff. The basic building blocks were the same — vertical route behind a dig/sit — but the approach was more fluid. Specifically, the #2 receiver was taught to simply run at the safety and more or less stop in front of him or bring him in with a dig, while the #1 receiver ran a “vertical option.” His job was to burst off the line, break the corner’s cushion, and then run either a fade or a post depending on the cornerback’s leverage — whichever one would allow him to get vertical the fastest. He was given the option to make one move, but typically it just looked like a footrace.

baylor

This is the same technique used by the slot receiver in the trips example shown above, and Baylor famously ran its version of Dagger where the slot receiver had the vertical option: always vertical (i.e., no option to settle or hook up) but he had the hashmark to numbers area to work, while the outside receiver would simply run to a spot ten yards downfield between the sideline and the numbers and sit down. (For some reason Baylor’s staff called its slot vertical play “New Anthony.”) The QB’s job was to make a play-action fake and either throw a touchdown or a checkdown, where the checkdown was the other receiver who had run to 10 yards and settled to draw the deep coverage.

The beauty of all this — well, aside from those pretty post throws — is how the popularity and efficacy of this play is so closely related not just to offensive innovation or even mindsets, but also in response to specific defensive evolutions. As good as the play is, Mills is not the go-to concept against Cover 3 with a safety playing centerfield; it can work, but there are other options most coaches would prefer. But as defenses have gone to multifarious split safety coverages to slow down one-back and spread formations and the dizzying arraying of run-pass and run-run options that seem to multiply by the day, sometimes the best answer is an old one: go deep.

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Thoughts About Drafting Quarterbacks http://smartfootball.com/draft/thoughts-about-drafting-quarterbacks http://smartfootball.com/draft/thoughts-about-drafting-quarterbacks#comments Mon, 01 May 2017 18:15:45 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=5083 So let’s say you’re [Chicago general manager] Pace, and you’ve determined that you really want Trubisky. You call the 49ers and trying to work out fair compensation if the Browns do not pick him at one. You think Trubisky’s going to be the long-term Bears quarterback, starting in 2018 or later…. The market for quarterbacks […]

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So let’s say you’re [Chicago general manager] Pace, and you’ve determined that you really want Trubisky. You call the 49ers and trying to work out fair compensation if the Browns do not pick him at one. You think Trubisky’s going to be the long-term Bears quarterback, starting in 2018 or later…. The market for quarterbacks is always weird…. For quarterbacks, NFL history says you pay Four Seasons prices. That’s why I can’t fault Pace for what he did. He wasn’t willing to risk losing the guy he loved.” — Peter King, The MMQB

I like my odds

The biggest story from the 2017 NFL draft was the surprise move by the Chicago Bears to pay a hefty price to the San Francisco 49ers — the 3rd overall pick plus the 67th and 111th picks, plus a 2018 3rd round pick — in order to move up a single spot in the draft, where they selected North Carolina quarterback Mitchell Trubisky. It was a stunning trade, in no small part because Chicago, having just spent significant money to acquire free agent QB Mike Glennon, was not an obvious candidate to draft a quarterback let alone pay a steep price to do so. But the Trubisky trade wasn’t the only trade involving a first round QB, as both the Chiefs and Texans also paid premiums to get their (hopeful) quarterbacks of the future, namely Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson, respectively. Per both the traditional Jimmy Johnson trade chart as well as Chase Stuart’s updated version, both trades were expensive for the teams trading up: the Chiefs paid 120 cents on the dollar under the Jimmy Johnson chart and 170 cents on the dollar under Chase’s version, while the Texans paid approximately 125 cents on the dollar under the Jimmy Johnson chart and 154 cents on the dollar under Chase’s chart.

Was this rational? Well, a common response — and it’s the response baked into Peter King’s excellent MMQB piece from today — is that if the QB is a success and becomes a star and leads the team to Super Bowls, then the price tags for these teams will be cheap. The counter is essentially an extrapolation from the trade value charts: while that may be true ex post, on an ex ante basis the price tags are hefty — and later success won’t change that — particularly given that we all know many highly drafted QBs nonetheless fail.

I am not particularly interested in proving one perspective right or wrong (and I have not watched enough of Trubisky to really evaluate him), but I am quite interested in how to think about this question, as it’s one of the most vexing questions in all of sports and it’s a discussion that seems to frequently get off track. Further, it’s clear NFL teams approach QB draft picks entirely different than they do every other person; as Bill Barnwell wrote about and then separately said to me, “Teams are working with entirely different trade parameters for QBs than they are for players at most other positions.” To begin the process of answering the question, I wanted to lay out a handful of statements that I think (believe?) to each be true, although some point in different directions.

  • The most important thing is to understand the concept of “base rates,” or Bayesian probability. The basic idea — which can quickly get complicated — is that if you think there is a 95% chance of something happening (say, of Mitch Trubisky being the next Peyton Manning), the probability of that is not 95%, it is instead a blended probability that includes your estimated probability and the base rate, or historical success rate, for similar selections. Around 50% of 1st round QBs fail, and that number goes up for every round. (UDFAs actually produce more starters than 6th and 7th rounders, but that’s in part because there are so many more QBs that enter the league as UDFA than late rounders) As Dan Kahneman explained in Thinking, Fast and Slow (which every draftnik should read):

    [Bayesian reasoning] is named after an English minister of the eighteenth century, the Reverand Thomas Bayes, who is credited with the firsy major contribution to a large problem: the logic of how people should change their mind in light of evidence…. There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence [i.e., the accuracy of your evaluation of how likely a QB prospect is to succeed] are often exaggerated…. The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized:

    (1) Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate.

    (2) Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.

  • When I looked at the evidence most recently, the best data I could come up with was that QBs selected in the first round “succeeded” (fairly loosely defined; not limited to All-Pros and Super Bowl champs) around 50% of the time. The odds were slightly higher for top 10 picks and then slid down as the first round continued.
  • If you haven’t guessed, the failure to account for base rates is the flaw in King’s argument about Chicago (at least as presented; whether it was in fact a bad deal is something we’ll get to): Even if Pace is “sure” Trubisky was his guy, that doesn’t imply that no price is too steep as the base rates will anchor that probability down to something closer to 60-65%, even assuming a very high degree of confidence by the Bears. Ignoring base rates is one of the largest draft fallacies, and while it afflicts decisionmakers on both sides of the ledger it is most commonly an issue for those who are over optimistic about specific prospects. So trading up for a QB can be very risky.
  • However, having a good starting QB is extremely valuable. It is essentially impossible to win in the NFL with a bad QB. It is difficult, though not impossible, to win without a serviceable or replacement-level starter QB. It is much, much easier to win with a top tier QB. The position is essentially the most valuable one in all of sports.
  • Furthermore, a good QB on his rookie deal is maybe the most valuable asset in all of sports. Hitting on a rookie QB presents enormous organizational-level rewards: not only do you find your franchise savior, the CBA and rookie wage scale — plus the fifth year option for first rounders — results in massive savings for the franchise, money that can be spent on other assets. Barnwell: “No player in the NFL is creating more surplus value for his team than Dak Prescott, who appears to be an above-average quarterback in line to make less than $2 million combined over the next three years. Not far behind him is Carson Wentz, who should still be a massive bargain despite being guaranteed $21.8 million over the next three seasons (with a fifth-year option to come). When you consider that the free market guaranteed Brock Osweiler two years at an average of $14 million per year and Mike Glennon $18.5 million for one season, even the $7.3 million Wentz is going to earn is a relative pittance.”
  • Finding a serviceable QB is a real challenge, one exacerbated by the concept of a draft itself. When combined with a scarcity of good, starter-level QBs in the NFL more generally, the draft hands over to chance whether or not a team will ever hit on a rookie QB: A team needs a top pick in a year when there are such QBs available, and those sorts of QBs only come around every few years. In other years the team either must weigh drafting a QB too high or taking other needs (and teams drafting near the top typically have many). Skill and organizational stability also play roles, but there is a lot that simply comes down to chance — not to mention a negative cycle where downtrodden teams reach for first round QBs and thus propagate the cycle of failure->fire coaching staff/GM->new regime reaches to pick new “savior” QB of the future->failure->repeat, while a few teams go from one top-flight QB to the next, like the Packers from Favre to Rodgers or the Colts from Manning to Luck. Exacerbating this cycle is that elite QBs almost never come onto the free agent market.
  • Nonetheless, it is at least theoretically possible to compare the odds and cost of trading up and paying a premium for a first round QB — and thus taking a 50-70% chance on him becoming an effective starter — versus recreating that 50-70% probability by accumulating QBs in later rounds, i.e., the 2nd through 4th round. (Tom Brady aside, rounds 4-7 rarely produce quality NFL starters, and while there are a fair number of productive UDFAs, that is a much larger pool.) The analogy here is that most NFL draft picks are 2- or 3-star high school recruits, but that’s a quirk of the numbers because there are many more 2- and 3-star recruits by volume than there are 4- and 5-star recruits; a given 4- or 5-star recruit is significantly more likely to be drafted than a 3-star recruit.

Based on the above, below are some tentative conclusions:

  1. Good QBs, and rookie QBs in particular, are extremely valuable, and while the market price to acquire them is high it’s at least arguable that the potential payoffs justify even very steep price tags, even if the binary probability of success versus failure remains near 50% (or worse for later rounds). In other words, it still might be a coin flip whether Trubisky, Mahomes or Watson succeed, but if they do they would produce an incredible amount of surplus value to the entire organization in terms of on-field production as well as relative cost savings versus free agents and stability (i.e., job security).
  2. Nonetheless it is still possible to “overpay” (typically in terms of trade value) for rookie QBs, an issue that is most likely to arise if a team ignores the impact of base rates, i.e., the cost of a trade looks much more attractive if you think the likelihood of success of a potential QB is 85-95%, whereas even if that is your organization’s internal judgment — and I’d question you if it was — the true probability is somewhere closer to 60-70% given the impact of base rates. The same analysis applies in later rounds as well, applied to lower base rates of success (often dramatically lower), albeit compared to lower costs.
  3. It may be possible to more cost-effectively replicate the odds of hitting on a first rounder by taking multiple shots at QBs in the 2nd through 4th round range, until the organization hits on a QB. Seattle effectively used a version of this in hitting on Russell Wilson.
  4. Nonetheless, the most high percentage pool for identifying future star NFL QBs remains the first round, and that’s even after factoring in “first round” QBs who had no business being picked in the first round (EJ Manuel, Jake Locker, etc.).
  5. Finally, none of the above matters if your organization and coaching staff lacks the structure, knowledge and expertise to develop and coach a young quarterback. Without that you are doomed.

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The Evolution of the Inverted Veer/Power Read … and of Alabama and Clemson’s newest wrinkle, the “Toss Read” http://smartfootball.com/offense/the-evolution-of-the-inverted-veerpower-read-and-of-alabama-and-clemsons-newest-wrinkle-the-toss-read http://smartfootball.com/offense/the-evolution-of-the-inverted-veerpower-read-and-of-alabama-and-clemsons-newest-wrinkle-the-toss-read#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2017 05:36:39 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=5051 For the last five or six seasons, the so-called Inverted Veer (also known as the Power Read) has been one of the most effective plays in football, and it has been the weapon of choice for some of college football’s greatest talents, including Cam Newton and RG3 and now Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson and Jalen […]

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For the last five or six seasons, the so-called Inverted Veer (also known as the Power Read) has been one of the most effective plays in football, and it has been the weapon of choice for some of college football’s greatest talents, including Cam Newton and RG3 and now Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson and Jalen Hurts. Yet, as is always true in football, defensive coaches do not stand idly by as offenses innovate and have begun devising better and better ways to shut down the play.

But the cat and mouse continues, as while defenses have gotten better at defending the Inverted Veer offenses have, in turn, responded with new wrinkles, particularly this season and particularly from the two teams who will be playing in the National Championship Game, Alabama and Clemson. But to appreciate those wrinkles one must understand why the Inverted Veer was developed and why it works.

For most of its early history, the play most synonymous with the so-called “spread offense” — at least the version that featured multiple receivers and a dual-threat quarterback lined up in the shotgun — was the zone read play, in which the offensive line blocked an inside zone running play while the quarterback read or optioned an unblocked defender. An ingenious evolution (typically credited to current Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez when he was at tiny Glenville State), the zone read allowed teams to dress up their traditional zone blocking by leaving backside defensive end unblocked and thus either eliminating the threat that he tackles the runningback or making the defense pay if he crashes down.

But the zone read, while a great concept, is essentially just a hypercharged bootleg, and works best as a constraint to control the backside for an otherwise effective zone running game. But traditional option football, which the zone read in part derived from, almost always involves reading a frontside, not a backside, defender. And the reasons are simple: numbers and angles.

As the diagram above shows, a well designed and executed playside option play should give the offense a numerical advantage as well as great blocking angles; in short, the playside of the line can ignore one or two playside defenders who are being read (and thus should be made wrong by the QB’s reads) as they build a wall to seal off the backside.

Birth of the Inverted Veer/Power Read

By the mid-2000s, the shotgun spread-to-run and specifically the zone read had begun sweeping across college football, both as pioneers like Rich Rodriguez and Urban Meyer lit up scoreboards and moved up the coaching ranks and also as bluebloods like Texas used zone read tactics to unleash rare talents like Vince Young. But it wasn’t until the end of the decade that spread teams found a way to successfully meld these shotgun spread tactics with old-school, playside reads. And one of the original vehicles for this innovation was an unexpected one: then TCU quarterback Andy Dalton.

Specifically, TCU, under head coach Gary Patterson and then-offensive coordinator (and current Virginia Tech head coach) Justin Fuentes, unveiled a new read play en route to an upset victory over a Clemson team coached by a first year head coach by the name of Dabo Swinney.

“They ran just one play that we hadn’t seen on film – but it was a good one,” he said. When one reporter asked [then Clemson defensive coordinator Kevin] Steele why the zone read was giving his defense so much trouble, Steele explained the difference between a true zone read and what Dalton was running on Saturday.

“Not to get too technical, but on the zone read, the quarterback fakes to the running back going this way and the quarterback goes the other way,” Steele said. “What they were doing was faking zone read one way, the quarterback would step like he was going this way but they would pull the guard and chase it the other way. It was a new look. We got over there and drew it up, got it adjusted out, but we were doing it on the fly and adjusting it on every call.”

In other words, Patterson and Fuentes had discovered a way to combine the philosophy of traditional offense with the technology of the shotgun spread, and it was so good that Andy Dalton was able to carve up Clemson on the ground. I coined this concept an “inverted veer” because it took the old-school “veer option” philosophy of sending the runner and the QB to the same side but inverted their paths: instead of the runningback inside and the quarterback going around edge, the runningback ran a sweep and the quarterback was effectively the dive player.

I named it “Inverted Veer” in part because I anticipated teams using a variety of blocking schemes for this concept, including traditional veer blocking. But one of the most appealing aspects of the play for coaches was its “cheapness,” meaning that it used a blocking scheme that was already in every coach’s repertoire: the Power-O play. “Power” blocking schemes use the same philosophy as a veer or playside option scheme: the playside linemen leave one or two defenders unblocked in order to get angles and double teams so they can effectively cave in the defense, but instead of reading the playside defenders, in Power the offense brings in additional blockers, typically the fullback and a backside guard.

TCU’s Inverted Veer elegantly combined both concepts by pulling the backside guard to lead around and reading the playside defensive end. As Swinney’s Clemson team learned that day, it was a fantastic concept, but throughout 2009 the play remained on the fringe, a novelty that allowed a QB like Andy Dalton to get a few rushing yards. But it wouldn’t take long for the Inverted Veer’s prominence to rise.

The Explosion: Malzahn and Cam Newton

The 2010 college football season was a wild, fun, rather weird season, as evidenced by the top four teams in the final postseason BCS rankings: #4 Stanford, #3 TCU, #2 Oregon and #1 Auburn. Out of that group only Auburn could be considered one of college football’s traditional blue bloods, and even then the Tigers were just two years from a 5-7 season. But there was a very special reason that particular Auburn team went 14-0 and garnered a National Championship: Cam Newton, and even more particularly the blend of Newton’s rare talents and a novel, uptempo “power spread” offense orchestrated by offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn.

I’ve written elsewhere about Malzahn and his schemes, but for this purpose suffice to say that Malzahn and Newton made the Inverted Veer/Power Read such a prominent part of Auburn’s offense that year — and it was so spectacularly successful — that Newton is essentially synonymous with the play. Indeed, the Inverted Veer was the vehicle for some of Newton’s most spectacular highlights as he powered Auburn to a national title and himself to a Heisman trophy.

And after Newton and Auburn’s spectacular season, the word on the play was out. By the next season seemingly every college and high school team had added the Inverted Veer to their playbooks, including, with the arrival of Malzahn associate Chad Morris as offensive coordinator in 2011, the Inverted Veer’s original victim: Dabo Swinney’s Clemson team. Below is a diagram of how the play crystallized, which comes straight from Clemson’s playbook.

And the play even found its way to the NFL too — though NFL teams were understandably cautious about using their quarterbacks as inside rushers — though eventually the Carolina Panthers realized that Newton was such a rare talent that they incorporated his old college play into their attack, and it was one of the plays that powered them to the Super Bowl last season. (Hat tip: Ted Nguyen.)

Indeed, six years later Inverted Veer is still one of the best plays in football, as it’s a staple play for both teams in this year’s national title game, Alabama and Clemson, and Louisville QB Lamar Jackson just won a Heisman trophy with many of his highlight reel runs coming on this very play.

But while in 2009 Clemson was trying to defend a play they had literally never seen anyone ever run before, by 2016 the every defensive coach in the country has studied, analyzed, and spent extensive time on defending the Inverted Veer. For example, Nick Saban’s 2015 Alabama playbook — which is otherwise essentially unchanged from his 2008 Alabama playbook — includes an extensive section analyzing how to defend the Inverted Veer, or in his terminology, “Read Sweep Q Power.” (Click on the diagram to enlarge it.)

And so, as always, the cat-and-mouse game has continued for the Inverted Veer, with coaches on both sides trying out different tactics and wrinkles.

Early Wrinkles: Jet Reads, Changing Reads, Lead Blockers

The real purpose of the Inverted Veer/Power Read is to widen or at least freeze the defensive end in order to open up the inside power run for the quarterback, but if that end squeezes that runningback on the edge should be a good play. But as defenses have seen the play more that isn’t always necessarily the case, and all too often the read player or even a runningback can successfully play the quarterback from outside-in and also play the sweeper inside-out.

One early wrinkle was to bring the sweeper in motion, transforming the play into a hybrid jet sweep/inverted veer. This was simply a way for the sweeper to have a little extra speed to either threaten or actually hit the edge.

The next obvious wrinkle — already shown in some of the clips above — was to add additional lead blockers for the sweeper. When executed correctly this can put the defense in a bind as the defense must “fit” the extra blockers and get additional defenders to stop the sweep…

… but if it does, it runs the risk of overplaying the sweep and being vulnerable to the quarterback cutting it back. (Hat tip: Mike Casazza.)

The other common wrinkle is to borrow a page from traditional option football and the zone read and to change who the offense reads. Specifically, many teams that feature the Inverted Veer/Power Read like Ohio State often have the backside guard block the defensive end while the quarterback actually reads the playside linebacker whether to hand off or pull. This can be particularly devastating if the linebacker is flowing fast to fit up on the sweeper; the result is often that the guard blocks the defensive end while the linebacker opens up the QB run by simply taking himself out of the play.

These are great, solid concepts, but in the last year or so there have been some truly fascinating new wrinkles, including one that will be featured by both teams in the national championship game. But first a wrinkle run by the only team to beat Clemson this season.

Inverted Veer for the Non-Running QB

The obvious drawback of the Inverted Veer is that it requires the quarterback to be an inside runner; unlike the zone read he can’t take it around end and get out of bounds or take a knee, he must run it inside and take on linebackers and safeties. If you have Cam Newton, great, but if not, then you either can’t run the play (because your QB is not an effective runner) or you can’t run the play very often (because you don’t want him to take many hits).

A somewhat surprising team found a solution to this quandary this year: Pittsburgh, led by offensive coordinator Matt Canada. (Canada has since been hired as LSU’s new offensive coordinator.) Canada has always been a somewhat out-of-the-box thinker and is known for his creative use of jet sweeps and pre-snap motions and shifts, but this year he turned the shovel pass into an offense unto itself. Canada even ran a play that I had once merely theorized about, which combined a shovel pass read with a sprint-out pass:

But maybe the most creative thing Canada did this season was to find a way to run the Inverted Veer while eliminating the QB as the inside runner, namely by replacing him with a player trailing as the pitch man. It’s obviously a tricky read for the quarterback as it happens so quickly, but Pitt’s QB was an effective decisionmaker. And the play was really one of the catalysts for one of the most remarkable games and wins of the season: Pitt’s remarkable 43-42 upset over Clemson.

The downside of this concept is the offense loses the plus-one advantage that comes from using its QB as a run-threat, but it’s still a tremendous way for offenses that don’t have a running quarterback … or that want to put their QB in harm’s way less often.

The Toss Read

The latest evolution in the Inverted Veer/Power Read is a very 2016 story. The first coach I’d ever heard of running this play I only know of as “coachfloyd” on the CoachHuey football coaching message boards, and the first couple of times I read his text-only descriptions of his team’s new spin on the Inverted Veer I honestly couldn’t visualize what he was describing. (A pitch? What’s the technique? How does the read work?) And yet within a few weeks various high school teams had already installed the play — seemingly on the basis of these message board posts and word of mouth — and within a year a variety of big time college programs were each using it, including both Alabama and Clemson.

The adjustment to the Inverted Veer is simple, but its effects are profound. Quite simply, instead of sweeping in front of the quarterback, the runningback lines up next to him and flares out at the snap looking for a pitch. The quarterback makes the exact same read as he does on the Inverted Veer/Power Read, except if the defensive end squeezes he pitches the ball outside to the runningback instead of handing it to him. The effect of this simple adjustment is to put the defensive end in significantly more stress than the traditional Inverted Veer, as instead of relying on the runner to outrun the defensive end the back is already four or five yards outside of him at the time he catches the ball. The below is an example from Clemson’s dominating win over Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl:

clemson toss

And, as with the classic version, when the defense starts flowing outside that opens up the inside run for the quarterback, as shown in the below example with Alabama quarterback Jalen Hurts in the Crimson Tide’s Peach Bowl win over Alabama.

bama1

The result is something that looks a little bit like a speed option with power blocking, though with some subtle differences. First, the quarterback ultimately has a different running track, with a much more downhill track than on speed option where the QB is attacking the read defender’s outside shoulder. And, second, the decision is made almost immediately after the snap, which ultimately protects him better as he either gets the ball to the runningback quickly or becomes a runner, in both cases before the read defender or any other defender can lay a big hit on him while he’s vulnerable.

In short, the Toss Read is a great wrinkle that I expect more and more teams to use, particularly as I’ve increasingly heard over recent years how many issues teams (particularly high school teams) without star players at quarterback or runningback have had with the Inverted Veer. Essentially without fail, every high school coach I know of that has begun running the Toss Read now swears by it.

Yet as with all great wrinkles it’s not just the base concept, but also the variations off of it. And nowhere was this more evident than the Fiesta Bowl, as Clemson repeatedly gashed Ohio State with a fake Toss Read that turned into a quarterback counter trey run the other way.

Ohio State had clearly spent a lot of time preparing for Clemson’s offense and specifically for the Toss Read, but Clemson was able to use that preparation and over aggressiveness against it to produce some of their biggest runs of the night.

Of course, Alabama’s defense has been historically great this season, so Clemson will have to find creative ways generate yards and points. Fortunately for the Tigers, the Toss Read might provide a clue: one of the rare breakdowns in Alabama’s defense came against an Ole Miss team that also began using the Toss Read this season, and more importantly scored on a devastating 63-yard touchdown pass on a fake Toss Read that turned into a play-action pass.

OM pa

But whatever the outcome in the National Championship Game, expect to see a lot of the Inverted Veer and Toss Read — and their many variations and wrinkles — in the years to come.

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Smart Notes – Clemson’s Offensive Playbook, Lamar Jackson’s Passing, Belichick, Match Quarters http://smartfootball.com/grab-bag/smart-notes-clemsons-offensive-playbook-lamar-jacksons-passing-belichick-match-quarters http://smartfootball.com/grab-bag/smart-notes-clemsons-offensive-playbook-lamar-jacksons-passing-belichick-match-quarters#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2016 17:39:24 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=5031 Clemson’s offensive playbook. I’ve now had a few different sources send me Clemson’s offensive playbook from 2013 under then-offensive coordinator (and current SMU head coach) Chad Morris. From 2012 to 2013, the Tigers — led by quarterback Tajh Boyd and featuring weapons like DeAndre Hopkins, Sammy Watkins, Tajh Boyd and Martavis Bryant — averaged over […]

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Clemson’s offensive playbook. I’ve now had a few different sources send me Clemson’s offensive playbook from 2013 under then-offensive coordinator (and current SMU head coach) Chad Morris. From 2012 to 2013, the Tigers — led by quarterback Tajh Boyd and featuring weapons like DeAndre Hopkins, Sammy Watkins, Tajh Boyd and Martavis Bryant — averaged over 41 points per game while compiling a 23-4 record, which included bowl wins over LSU and Ohio State. More relevant to now, Clemson’s current co-offensive coordinators, Tony Elliott and Jeff Scott, were both on Clemson’s staff going back to 2011 and they have largely kept the offense the same, with the primary wrinkles being additional window dressing as well as a few additional passing concepts to play to quarterback Deshaun Watson’s strengths. As a result, the offense found in the the 2013 playbook is essentially the same one Ohio State will see on New Year’s Eve as they face off in the College Football Playoff.

Let’s not get fancy

You can download the part one of the playbook here and part two here.

The first things that should jump out to you about this playbook are:

  1. All of the terminology is built around being run from the no-huddle, so playcalls are limited and primarily use word concepts for play names, as Clemson will often use related words such as NFL team names, cities and mascots to all refer to the same concept;
  2. If you are familiar with Gus Malzahn’s offense it’s exceptionally similar to what Gus Malzahn has run — and not just the play concepts, but in how the offense itself is constructed, called and designed, right down to referring to receivers as numbers (“2”, “5” and “9” being the names for receivers, rather than X, Y and Z) — which should be no surprise given the long history between Morris and Malzahn; and
  3. It’s extremely simple to the point where there’s really just not that much there, as the whole philosophy is to keep it simple so it can all be run extremely fast.

I will admit to my biases in that, while I am always a proponent of simplicity, the sophistication of the passing game in this playbook — or, frankly, from much of Clemson’s film — leaves me a bit cold. Now, as I mentioned, Clemson’s staff has done a nice job adding more to the passing game to better feature Deshaun Watson’s skills, and there’s no reason for Clemson to drop in 500 of Bill Walsh’s favorite pass plays into the middle of a very streamlined, tightly organized offense, but it’s clear that the goal of Clemson’s offense is to make you defend Clemson’s tempo, formations, runs, “shot play” play-action passes behind your secondary and individual one-on-one matchups in the passing game, and only then do you worry about specific pass game concepts.

That said, there is some cool stuff in there in terms of the running game itself as well as packaged plays/run-pass options, such as the below play which combines inside zone with a simplified form of the “Levels” pass play that Peyton Manning made famous:

But in terms of the passing game the most sophisticated things I notice — again, both from watching Clemson and from the playbook — involve staple concepts like Snag where the QB can either read the three playside receivers or make a pre-snap decision to work the backside receiver one-on-one, as shown in the below diagram from the playbook.

There are also a limited number of “coverage reads” in Clemson’s offense, such as the below which combines a slant/flat concept (good against single safety coverages like Cover 1 man and Cover 3 zone) and double slants (good against 2 deep coverages like Cover 2 and Cover 2 man).

If I sound overly critical I don’t mean to be; if anything it’s a testament to the job Dabo Swinney has done building a program over a playbook, and ultimately wins and losses being about players over plays. That said, when you play against the best teams, players and coaches you need to bring your best stuff — and have the right answers when your opponent brings theirs.

The Art of Smart Football and The Essential Smart Football for 99 cents. Amazon is currently running a Kindle special on my books, The Art of Smart Football and The Essential Smart Football; both are currently only 99 cents for Kindle.

Lamar Jackson’s passing. Louisville quarterback and Heisman trophy winner Lamar Jackson is electric, tough, and just plain exciting, but no one is going to confuse him just yet for Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. But he’s also not Tim Tebow, as he has a tremendous amount of raw passing talent and fabulous arm strength (seriously, watch this throw), and he’s been growing and improving by leaps in bounds not only in his accuracy but also his footwork and reads. Jackson has at least one more year at Louisville to learn and develop in Bobby Petrino’s offense — as well as a matchup against LSU’s excellent defense to show his stuff — and I’m looking forward to seeing how another offseason and fall camp benefits him in terms of continuing to improve how he reads defenses, identifies blitzes and coverages and finds secondary and tertiary receivers. I put together a short clip on the Smart Football Instagram page earlier this season showing the early signs of his development; hopefully these trends continue.

The psychology of trick plays. Washington head coach Chris Petersen is — somewhat rightly, somewhat unfairly — branded as a “trick play coach,” largely because of his Boise State team’s amazing last second heroics against Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. The New York Times (with a slight assist from some blogger) delves into the psychology of trick plays, when to use them and how they really benefit a team. Also, Lindsay Schnell at SI did a great piece on the history of that Boise State/Oklahoma game, and it’s also never a bad time to revisit those three crazy plays that led to a Boise win.

So you want to work for Bill Belichick? Here is a great article on the rigors — and long-term benefits — of being a junior grunt working for Bill Belichick. The subtext of this is that football knowledge isn’t necessarily esoteric or even difficult, but learning its intricacies is a grind, and there is really no substitute for that grind.

Belichick on Navy. Speaking of Belichick, here is a great video of Belichick drawing up a play from Navy’s 1959 offense, when Belichick’s father was on the staff. The best part is when Lesley Visser asks, “How well would this play work today?” “Football is football.”

Match Quarters. One of my favorite discoveries of this football season is the Match Quarters site, run by a current high school coach and former Baylor graduate assistant under Phil Bennett detailing a methodical, philosophical approach to 4-3/4-2-5 Quarters coverage in the age of the spread offense. This page is a great place to start.

Offensive line intricacies. Former NFL offensive linemen Geoff Schwartz has been moonlighting for SBNation, and he has a couple of great pieces out. The first is about how defensive linemen frequently get away with holding, and the second is about how teams use their runningbacks and tight-ends to help their tackles in pass protection.

Chop runningback screen. One of the keys to any good runningback screen is for the runningback to sell that he is blocking, which both helps the concept of the screen play — as it effectively makes two players responsible for the runningback, the rushing defender and a dropping defender — and it ensures the runningback can actually get out there for the screen. The below is a nifty wrinkle I hadn’t seen before, where a fullback executes a backside cut block obefore releasing for a screen.

Zen of the day. Keep your head on a swivel when coming across the middle.

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Best Books I Read in 2016: Air Raid, Homo Sapiens, Song of Ice and Fire, Dragons and Tacos http://smartfootball.com/books/best-books-i-read-in-2016-air-raid-homo-sapiens-song-of-ice-and-fire-dragons-and-tacos http://smartfootball.com/books/best-books-i-read-in-2016-air-raid-homo-sapiens-song-of-ice-and-fire-dragons-and-tacos#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2016 21:11:15 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=5012 The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, by S.C. Gwynne. This is the most fun football book I’ve read in some time, which is a credit to Gwynne but also to his subject matter, namely Hal Mumme, Mike Leach and the motley bunch of players, coaches and a few administrators who supported […]

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The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, by S.C. Gwynne. This is the most fun football book I’ve read in some time, which is a credit to Gwynne but also to his subject matter, namely Hal Mumme, Mike Leach and the motley bunch of players, coaches and a few administrators who supported or in some cases simply tolerated the birth of the Air Raid.

gwynneGwynne is an accomplished writer but not necessarily a football expert, but he nonetheless handles the technical aspects of the Air Raid with aplomb, which is in a sense not surprising given that one of the hallmarks of the Air Raid is its simplicity. But the heart of the book — and its true value — is Gwynne’s reconstruction of Mumme’s and later Leach’s journey as they designed and developed what eventually became the Air Raid offense the 1980s and early 1990s at places like Copperas Cove high school, Valdosta State and, most colorfully, Iowa Wesleyan.

As someone who has written extensively about Mumme, Leach and the Air Raid offense, I approached the book with trepidation — OK, fine, my usual policy on books like this is not to bother with reading them — but enough coaches told me I should read, and I’m glad I did. Gwynne’s book filled in for me the offense’s pre-Valdosta and pre-Kentucky history, but what I found most remarkable about the book was its chronicling of the fact that in the early 1980s Hal Mumme was a Division I offensive coordinator (UTEP from 1982 to 1985) who desperately wanted to run a pass-first offense but had no real idea how to do it and didn’t even know where to go to learn. He tried to watch San Francisco 49ers games and he eventually started trying to copy BYU’s schemes under LaVell Edwards, but these were poor emulations off of film without any of the related coaching points (indeed, some of Mumme’s earliest experiments involved Mumme trying to write down the plays he saw BYU QB Jim McMahon run while watching the Holiday Bowl on TV), and there were so few people to visit or spend time with that much of the early Air Raid was just trial and error. (Early in his tenure as head coach at Copperas Cove high school, Mumme tried running a version of the run and shoot but it largely died on arrival.)

Things took off when Mumme made more of a connection with the BYU staff and began meeting with Edwards and BYU assistants Norm Chow and Roger French, and then once Mumme teamed up with Leach at Iowa Wesleyan the two made a variety of pilgrimages to meet with pass-oriented coaches like then-Green Bay coach Lindy Infante and then-Miami coach Dennis Erickson. But again, consider how different this was than the situation in 2016: Nowadays one can watch unlimited NFL all-22 film (for a small fee) and can download countless playbooks and game films, there are coaching message boards and social media accounts dedicated to football and football strategy (plus, uh, some blogs and websites), one can easily buy or borrow a huge variety of books and DVDs, there’s Youtube videos of clinic talks and GIFs of basically every meaningful play, and communication among fans and coaches in general is much easier, and if all else fails there are coaching and consulting services you can pay for where they tell you how to install whatever offense or defense you want to run. But in 1989 the sole option was, more or less, get in the car and drive six hours to learn from someone who is doing what you would like to do, which is why it took Mumme roughly a decade of experimenting at high schools and small colleges to bring the Air Raid offense from conception to completion. On the other hand, however, those established coaches were willing to meet with off-the-radar guys like Leach and Mumme for hours and even days because the two of them had in fact gotten in the car and driven to their offices, rather than sending them some emails or just tweeting at them.

In any event, The Perfect Pass had a few minor flaws: it was probably a bit too charitable to Mumme regarding how his Kentucky tenure ended amid NCAA scandal, though that entire situation was a mess and I’m aware of no evidence that Mumme directly authorized the cash payments made by his staff, and the book’s arguments are weakest when trying to declare definitively that the game is only going in the direction of more and more passing (a weakness of hyperbole shared by the book’s title). But those are relatively minor quibbles, as this is one of the most fun football books I’ve read in years, and I’m glad the story of these guys and this offense finally got the definitive treatment they deserve. And, if nothing else, the following passage alone was worth the price of admission, as anyone who knows me (particularly my wife) simply nods when I show it to them:

[Mumme] spent much of his free time diagramming pass plays. He would often do this on scraps of paper or whatever he could find to write on, scrawling down ideas about how to freeze this or that defensive back, how to flood a zone defense, how to throw a curl/flat combination, how to protect against a blitz. He did this everywhere he went, day and night, so much so that he trailed these little artifacts of ambition and desire behind him at his home and office. They were tiny pieces of the master plan he didn’t have yet. June actually picked them up and put them in boxes. She soon discovered that he didn’t need to keep them. The writing itself was the mnemonic device.

sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. While The Perfect Pass was the best football book I read this year, Sapiens was far and away the best overall book I read. I looked it up after I heard Nobel laureate Dan Kahneman (another Smart Football favorite) mention it on a podcast, and I read a sample chapter with little expectation. But while I was immediately hooked, the book kept evolving as I read it, as what began with a fascinating recantation of the lives and activities of the earliest proto-humans — Neaderthals, homo erectus and early homo sapiens — soon turned to an examination of why it was that homo sapiens, after hundreds of thousands of years of surviving but pretty much existing in the middle of the food chain, suddenly rocketed to the top of it (and in the process driving many ancient beasts to extinction, like giant sloths and mammoths), conquered multiple climates, and eventually began domesticating the world around them, from farm animals and livestock to crops. And Harari includes a fascinating albeit depressing argument about the true nature of our relationship to our most necessary crop, wheat:

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

One of the most important and sustained ideas running through the book is that what ultimately distinguished homo sapiens from all other creatures — other mammals, other apes, and even other “humans” like neanderthals — was not our opposable thumbs or some other physical criteria, but instead it was our ability to generate, believe in and act upon what he calls “myths” or “fictions” (essentially ideas and cultural institutions), particularly on a large scale, collective basis. Legal and social systems, religions and social customs and practices are the stuff that societies, cultures, companies civilizations and, yes, sports are made of, and they allowed us to transform from creatures that lived in small, loosely organized groups (the hallmark of most apes) to our modern status. Sapiens is a fascinating, ambitious and difficult-to-summarize that was also just plain readable. Here’s a Financial Times interview with Harari. Highly recommended.

Winning Defensive Football, by Richard Bell. I had never heard of this book until recently, which is surprising because it’s excellent. (It lands the award for “Best Technical Football Book” that I read this year.) Bell was the defensive coordinator at Air Force for 11 seasons up to 2006, and before that served as defensive coordinator for Georgia, Navy, Texas Tech and West Virginia, and was the head coach at South Carolina for one season. The book is not a narrative book so much as it is a defensive playbook, laying out in copious detail (the book description touts “over 1,000 diagrams”) 400 pages that describe Bell’s 3-4 defense, from run fits to technique to coverages. It’s also all quite modern: the blitz package was excellent and detailed, and the sections on coverages go over not only Bell’s main coverages (Cover 1, Cover 3, Cover 2 and his match-read Quarters concepts, Cover 4 and Cover 6), but also how they each adapt to various offensive formations and route combinations and pre-snap calls and checks for the defense).

My only criticism is that there’s been so much change in football in the last ten years I was at times left wondering how Bell might have adapted some of his defensive calls to, say, a hurry up-tempo spread that used the zone read and packaged plays/run-pass options, in the same way that he has sections on defending the more traditional triple option. But that’s also what the book was about: giving a coach the tools to think through those problems rather than answers in a box. The bottom line is this is a must buy for any defensive coach at really any level, as well as for any offensive coach who wants to better understand a modern, multiple defense.

– A Song of Ice and Fire Series (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons), by George R. R. Martin. I had unintentionally managed both to not read any of these books or to watch any of the Game of Thrones TV series, until on a late night Uber ride home from the office I started watching the the first season of the HBO series. It was good — excellent in ways, obviously — but I can’t say I was consumed by it. I watched two more episodes and then moved onto other things, and then for some unknown reason I bought the first book, A Game of Thrones, on Kindle, and then read the entire book in about a week. I then downloaded A Clash of Kings and read that in about two weeks, and then read the third book, A Storm of Swords, on similar timing, and ultimately ended up reading the entire series in about a two and a half month period. I then of course spent the following two weeks reading every fan and Reddit theory I could find. (I have still only made it to episode 2 of Season 2 of the series.)

Was it good? Martin has his tics (at least 10 different seated characters manage to “rise ponderously”), and there were definitely times when the plot got in the way of story development (I never thought I’d hear a single character say “I am looking for a high-born maid of three-and-ten” so often), but, well, I did read 1.7 million words of his books — which apparently translates to reading War and Peace or Infinite Jest three times over — in a little over two months, and it was certainly a breezy 1.7 million words. That’s as good of a recommendation as I can give (and saying much more would probably be some kind of spoiler), though I will give my ranking of the books:

  1. A Storm of Swords (by far)
  2. A Dance with Dragons
  3. A Game of Thrones (a close third; ADWD I thought had better high points, though AGOT gets automatic points for being first)
  4. A Clash of Kings
  5. A Feast for Crows (I liked AFFC more than it seems most did, and there was both a lot of good stuff to read and it clearly laid the groundwork for much of what is still to come, but a few of the plotlines dragged and it felt like it ended in the middle of the story (because it in fact did))

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck. The concept behind this book is simple: a shocking amount of a person’s success, achievement and growth relates to what “mindset” they bring to the activity, field or endeavor, and people with “fixed mindsets” (i.e., the belief that the relevant traits like intelligence or some other talent, are fixed and unchangeable) systematically do worse than people with “growth mindsets” (i.e., the belief that even the most important traits are malleable and can be developed through hard work and dedication) consistently achieve more. It’s a simple idea — and, frankly, one that arguably is behind most coaching clichés about the importance of “improving by 1% every day” and so on — but Dweck has done remarkable work of developing it and showing its efficacy over the years. And it’s an extremely powerful idea, particular her discussion of how it’s possible to have growth mindsets in some areas and fixed mindsets in other areas as well as the idea that much of what we consider “praise” (particularly telling young children they are “smart”) has the unintended effect of reinforcing a fixed mindset with respect to intelligence that can cause all sorts of problems down the road. But I keep coming back to the idea that concepts in Dweck’s book are in many respects an academic gloss on what you can find in John Wooden’s writings or just in the learned experience of team sports, particularly football at its best. And I mean that as a compliment.

The Dream of Reason, by Anthony Gottlieb. A history of Western Philosophy, over however many books or however many volumes, is an endeavor frought with peril, and as such in my mind graded on a curve. Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy is deservedly famous but it’s also a strange, idiosyncratic and at times needlessly (and unhelpfully) challenging book. Gottlieb’s book is, by contrast, very lucid, easy to read and even funny in parts, and it deals meaningfully with the philosophical ideas of each period and thinker. Whether he spends too much or too little time on this or that idea is the kind of quibble I’ll leave to the professional academics.

Bonus: Best Kids Book I read this year: Dragons Love Tacos, by Adam Rubin and illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. Now that I have children I both read far less and much more than I ever did. I read far fewer normal books, but like most parents most of my evenings end with reading a small handful of children’s books, usually something we’ve read countless times before and sometimes I have barely hit the last page before the request arrives to flip flip back to the first one and start over. So I’m always looking for entertaining kids books (recommendations welcome), and while I’m a big fan of the classics (we are big Dr. Seuss household) I have to admit that I find this book irresistible in tone and style all while teaching eternal life lessons like, if you fail to read the fine print dragons might incinerate your house.

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New Ringer: Chip Kelly’s offense is broken. Really broken. How did that happen? http://smartfootball.com/uncategorized/new-ringer-chip-kellys-offense-is-broken-really-broken-how-did-that-happen http://smartfootball.com/uncategorized/new-ringer-chip-kellys-offense-is-broken-really-broken-how-did-that-happen#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2016 13:40:05 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=4999 I will be writing for The Ringer this fall (which I’m quite excited about). My first piece is about how (and why) Chip Kelly’s offense is fundamentally broken: And now Kelly — stripped of any oversight over personnel — is in charge of a 49ers offense that boasts arguably the worst skill-position talent in the NFL and will be […]

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I will be writing for The Ringer this fall (which I’m quite excited about). My first piece is about how (and why) Chip Kelly’s offense is fundamentally broken:

And now Kelly — stripped of any oversight over personnel — is in charge of a 49ers offense that boasts arguably the worst skill-position talent in the NFL and will be led at quarterback by Blaine Gabbert, whose 71.9 career passer rating puts him behind such exalted figures as Geno Smith and Brandon Weeden. While Kelly’s Oregon and early Eagles offenses broke records by weaving together multiple formations, adaptable running schemes, and multifaceted read-options, all powered by an ingenious spread offense philosophy and a frenetic, up-tempo pace, in the last two years those elements have been undermined or simply fallen away, and Kelly’s offense has become, in Evan Mathis’s words, the most “never-evolving, vanilla offense” in the NFL. How did that happen?

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Read the whole thing.

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Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys and Third Level RPO/Packaged Play Reads http://smartfootball.com/offense/dak-prescott-the-dallas-cowboys-and-third-level-rpopackaged-play-reads http://smartfootball.com/offense/dak-prescott-the-dallas-cowboys-and-third-level-rpopackaged-play-reads#comments Tue, 16 Aug 2016 02:36:37 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=4995 Dallas Cowboys rookie Dak Prescott had about as good of a preseason debut as any rookie could ask for: Prescott finished the game 10 of 12 for 139 yards and two touchdowns, including a perfect strike to receiver Terrance Williams down the sideline. But as impressive as that throw was, Prescott’s most impressive trait was […]

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Dallas Cowboys rookie Dak Prescott had about as good of a preseason debut as any rookie could ask for: Prescott finished the game 10 of 12 for 139 yards and two touchdowns, including a perfect strike to receiver Terrance Williams down the sideline. But as impressive as that throw was, Prescott’s most impressive trait was his calm and poise: In an opening weekend when higher profile rookie QBs like Jared Goff and Carson Wentz looked at times shaky and off-kilter, Prescott looked like a vet. So while there’s no need to get the hype train rolling too fast — it was one preseason game, and Prescott was facing almost entirely backups and guys who likely won’t make the roster — it was a great start.

But, even if Prescott plays great, all he can do is solidify his spot as the backup QB behind Tony Romo, which is why the most interesting play to me was one that told me something about what the Cowboys will do even when Prescott’s not in there. Specifically, on Prescott’s first touchdown pass, a ten-yarder to Dez Bryant, Dallas head coach Jason Garrett and offensive coordinator Scott Linehan called a “third level” packaged play, also known as a run-pass option or RPO. Third level packaged plays are the newest (although not that new) step in the evolution of shotgun spread “read” concepts: When the shotgun spread first became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the defining plays were the zone read and read-option plays, in which the QB read a “first level” defender, i.e., a defensive lineman. The big innovation by the end of the 2000s and early 2010s were, first, built in screens, and later the earliest packaged plays/RPOs in which receivers ran slants, hitches and sticks and the QB would read a “second level” defender (i.e., a linebacker or nickel defensive back playing like a linebacker) to determine whether to hand off or throw.

In recent years a few teams — most notably Baylor, although there are others — began using packaged plays where the quarterback read a safety to determine whether to hand off or throw. This had two primary effects: (1) it is an excellent response to Quarters coverage, in which the safeties read the offense to determine whether to play the pass or the run, often outnumbering offenses in the run game as they are so difficult to account for; and (2) it transforms a read concept that was originally designed to move the chains by having the QB either hand off or throw a screen into a handoff or a touchdown.

Corey Coleman

Which brings me back to Dak Prescott’s play against the Rams. There was nothing that sophisticated about the concept: The Cowboys called an inside zone run play, in which they blocked all of the Rams’ frontal defenders, including the backside defensive end (i.e., no read option element), and tasked Prescott with reading the safety to the side of the single receiver, who just happened to be Dez Bryant. Now, I’m not sure if Bryant was only allowed to run a fade or had some sort of choice in what route he’d run (either choosing on the fly or via a pre-snap signal between receiver and QB), but teams often adjust the route by the single receiver to find the way to best attack the safety.

In any case, given that it was Dez Bryant singled up, all Prescott really needed to confirm was that the safety wouldn’t be able to help, something he was able to do quite quickly and likely even pre-snap. (A savvier safety might have aligned inside and then hurried back outside; Prescott did stare down Bryant a bit.) And with an extra safety stepping up for the run and a freak of nature 1-on-1 near the goal line, Prescott’s choice was simple:

Prescott

So while Prescott’s performance should give Cowboys’ fans hope for what they might see in the future, this play should give them some insight into what they might see this season: A cutting edge concept that, in the end, reduces to a winning formula: Run the ball behind that great offensive line with extra numbers, or throw it to #88. That makes sense to me.

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Smart Notes — Harbaugh’s Coaches Clinic, Mouse Davis R&S Tapes, Twitter, Toenail Fungus http://smartfootball.com/grab-bag/smart-notes-harbaughs-coaches-clinic-mouse-davis-rs-tapes-twitter-toenail-fungus http://smartfootball.com/grab-bag/smart-notes-harbaughs-coaches-clinic-mouse-davis-rs-tapes-twitter-toenail-fungus#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2016 19:05:54 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=4971 Clinic season. Springtime is when coaches get together and — to some extent against their own interests (though not entirely) — share information on the ins and outs of their schemes, personnel strategies and general program management. Sometimes this involves one staff visiting another, but the backbone are the clinics, where (typically) college and sometimes […]

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Clinic season. Springtime is when coaches get together and — to some extent against their own interests (though not entirely) — share information on the ins and outs of their schemes, personnel strategies and general program management. Sometimes this involves one staff visiting another, but the backbone are the clinics, where (typically) college and sometimes NFL coaches give presentations to (typically) high school and small school coaches. There’s an entire ecosystem around these, both as informal job fairs and also as increasingly corporatized events, but they remain tremendously valuable sources of information (even though coaches are more guarded in the age of the internet than they used to be) and an area where the culture of football coaching culture remains unique.

Just three guys talkin' ball

Just three guys talkin’ ball

While most of the name clinics are sponsored by coaches organizations or big companies such as Nike, many individual schools hold annual clinics, largely as a recruiting tool for the local high school coaches. Of course, anytime there’s a recruiting angle involved, you know Jim Harbaugh is going to up the ante, and his Michigan coaches clinic assembled a great roster of speakers — his brother John Harbaugh, Art Briles, Mike Martz, Teryl Austin, Dean Pees, etc. I wasn’t able to attend this year but fortunately another tradition in the coaching community involves the sharing of clinic notes. And, first, James Light picked up some interesting tidbits throughout, beginning with the joint panel with Jim and John Harbaugh and their father, longtime coach Jack Harbaugh (mgoblog has a full transcript of the panel here):

Jim Harbaugh – Coach Harbaugh talked about the type of coaches they’re looking for. Experts in their field. High character people that represent Michigan. Great motivators. Positive energy. Coach Harbaugh also talked about how to spot coaches that they don’t want. He doesn’t want people on his staff that “Coach like Costanza.” He talked about a Seinfeld episode where George reasoned that if you act frustrated and angry, everyone will assume you’re working harder. Doesn’t want coaches who are standoffish. Most times those coaches pretend to know everything because they’re afraid of getting exposed. Don’t be afraid to say I don’t know, but let’s work together to figure it out.

John Harbaugh – John went through a few of the staples of his coaching philosophy

  • Build it the way you believe in. Not what you think someone else wants. They’ll run you out either way.
  • Don’t do the job to keep the job. Do what you believe is right.
  • Coaches compete everyday. With each other (game plan) and against each other (practice)
  • Never stop learning, you can always get better. He talked about how he picked up some power run game ideas from one of the high school speakers, Akron Hoban (OH) Head Coach Tim Tyrrell.
  • It’s not about what you can’t do. Find what you can do. There is opportunity in everything and everywhere. He mentioned a free agent that they lost recently. Rather than dwelling on the loss, Coach Harbaugh said “We’ve got a different path now. Different opportunity. Maybe we can add another pass rusher now, or rebuild the OL to run some different schemes. Find a way.”
  • Football provides an opportunity that no other sport can. Everyone can be a part of the team and contribute in some type of meaningful way, scout team etc. Roster isn’t limited like basketball or baseball.

James Light also has good stuff from Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Teryl Austin (Austin: “We encourage good body language. Bad body language… fosters resent and divineness.” Light: “[Austin] use[d] specific plays from film as examples of bad body language to convey the point…. Coach Austin pointed out the reaction of Louis Delmas after the touchdown. That was the type of body language that they won’t tolerate…. It creates dissension within the team and shows weakness to the opponent.”) and new Michigan defensive coordinator Don Brown:

Defending the Spread Run Game: In terms of defending zone option, Coach Brown will use a PUP technique for his defensive ends, also commonly referred to as squeeze and pop. The defensive end being read will play the QB and the bend (RB cutback) on zone. The unblocked defensive end will stay square and shuffle flat down the line of scrimmage to close the space on any zone cutback. If the Quarterback keeps the ball, then the defensive end is chasing the QB from the inside out to his help. Coach Brown stressed that you have to get the defensive ends help versus zone option. You can’t just assign the DE to the QB with no help and expect him to take away the zone cutback and be able to run down a Quarterback like Deshaun Watson.

Meanwhile Coach Bird has high level notes from essentially every speaker (all the Harbaughs, Pees, Martz, Marc Trestman, Leslie Frazier, Juan Castillo) at the Michigan clinic. And, of course, Art Briles recently announced that Jim Harbaugh will be speaking at his Baylor clinic.

Football technology. There’s no question that in ten or twenty years, many aspects of coaching and playing football will be very different, with technological changes being the biggest driver: efficiencies in film study, player evaluation, data tracking, and teaching methods will have a huge impact on the game. I recently got a demonstration of STRIVR’s virtual reality system, about which I’ll have more to say in the future (the short version is that it’s a tremendous tool and really fascinating, and when a 330 pound nose tackle came at me I couldn’t help but get my hands up to punch him away), but VR will only be one component of the many coming changes.

But, as has been the case more generally, much of the impact of technology on football will be on improving communications. ESPN’s Kevin Seifert has a story about improving something that probably should have been fixed twenty years ago — the perpetual story about one team’s headsets “going out” in the middle of games — but it contains some interesting nuggets about future applications:

Finally, the Internet-based structure will allow for future additions to complement sideline technology. Imagine, for example, a digital play sheet on a quarterback’s wrist that changes based on signals sent in by a coach.

Of course, if the digital play sheet can change based on signals then wouldn’t it be easier to push a button to make the playcall appear on the QB’s digital wrist device and skip manual signals altogether (something that can’t be all that difficult with Apple Watches around)? In any event, the upshot is that this is where it’s all going. Now, the NFL (and especially college football) tends to like to restrict communications like this, preferring the pitfalls of older technology to encouraging a technological arms race, but technology will begin popping up and there’s no question it will eventually be an important part of NFL and college on-field communication. (True story: I played on a team where our opponent’s coaches went over to our offensive coordinator before a game, ostensibly to say “Hello,” but really so they could see what frequency the radio transmitter on his hip was set to. The opposing coaches then listened to all of my team’s playcalls (we lost), and then bragged about it after the game to the parents of one of my teammates over drinks, who for some unknown reason, thought it was funny that their son’s team was cheated out of a game (by the coaches, no less) and told everyone else. So, bring on the Apple Watches.)

Mouse’s Run and Shoot tapes. I recently stumbled on some great old videos on the Run and Shoot from maybe its most famous proponent, Mouse Davis. While I don’t (necessarily) advocate anyone running the “pure” Run and Shoot now, it remains one of the most fruitful offenses for study. (Plus Mouse is always fun to listen to.)

Twitterversary. Twitter turned ten years old on Monday, which I for some reason find a terribly depressing fact. (Though now we have an algorithm that can identify drunken tweets so, yay progress.) The New York Times asked some important twitter users about Twitter, and here’s football-twitter king Adam Schefter:

Twitter has ramped up the news-cycle speed to unimaginable levels. News emerges, it spreads, people react, and within minutes, the story is widely disseminated and analyzed. It’s one of the best parts of Twitter, maybe the best part: the ability to inform. Information pours out on Twitter.

We miss the dominant newspaper days, though it’s hard to pinpoint how much of that has to do with the evolution of Twitter and the digital day we’re now living in. Had neither come along, we might still be sitting at the kitchen table, sipping our coffee, reading the newspaper, rather than hearing about who the next Supreme Court justice is, at almost the same time he is selected.

Let’s set aside the oddness of using the nomination of a Supreme Court justice as the example (the news of the most recent Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, broke only moments before the President conducted a nationally televised press conference announcing his nomination), but it seems to me that Twitter qua Twitter doesn’t do much for the really big stories — earthquakes, wars, national tragedies, political issues, and so on. Yes, those of us on Twitter often read about those things faster than, say, if we waited for the stories to be printed in the newspaper, but making that jump ignores the fact that things like (a) television and (b) the rest of the internet (to say nothing of other social networks) also exist, which tend to do a pretty decent job of very quickly identifying major breaking news (which Schefter acknowledges). Instead, the information flood that Twitter excels at is an ocean of irresistible but ultimately meaningless minutiae, with the announcement of various personnel transactions in a made up game being a prime example. (The philosopher Bernard Suits once defined a “game” as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”.)

But Schefter is surely right that the speed-race for breaking these kinds of silly but heavily trafficked tidbits is increasing every year, with Twitter being a prime culprit, which I suppose is yet another reason why I and so many others find it difficult to celebrate this ridiculous, seemingly poorly managed service that we nevertheless all spend so much time using.

Football and toenail fungus. This is only tangentially related to football, but Valeant — who has, uh, had a rough go of it recently — put out a commercial for its toenail fungus drug, Julia, in which a toe wearing a football helmet tackles toenail fungus (which is carrying a football) before a cutaway to an Xs and Os diagram of toenail fungus — just watch it (or, maybe, don’t):

So that’s both disgusting and ridiculous, though admittedly when it comes to advertisements for treatments of foot ailments it’s tough to improve on John Madden selling Tinactin. But it turns out the football toe commercial is not just a silly, it also drew the ire of the Food and Drug Administration:

The Food and Drug Administration wants to know if these memorable images skew perceptions of risks associated with medications. In a document posted online Tuesday, the agency outlined plans to study how consumers process live action and animated ads….

“Personifying animated characters may interfere with message communication,” the FDA said in the document. “Whether personified characters lead to reduced comprehension of risk and benefit information in drug ads is an important and unanswered question.”

As Matt Levine points out, the interested reader may have the chance to get involved as the study involves 1,500 people watching these ads followed by an online survey. But if you ask me they should just bring back John Madden.

Louisiana’s budget crisis. A few weeks ago Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards announced that the Louisiana state government was in such a deep, sustained fiscal crisis that budget cuts were inevitable, and the programs affected could even include LSU football:

In a rare statewide televised address, Edwards told viewers that the state would be forced to take extreme action — such as throwing people with off of kidney dialysis and shutting down hospice services — if new taxes didn’t go into place over the next few months. . . .

The governor didn’t stop at health care services, but also detailed catastrophic cuts to higher education. He said new revenue was needed to prevent universities from running out of money before the semester ends. LSU, the state’s wealthiest higher education institution, would only be able to pay its bills through April 30, unless some tax increases went into place.

The governor went so far as to say that LSU football was also in jeopardy, due to a threatened suspension of spring classes that would put college athletes’ eligibility in danger next year. . . . “Student athletes across the state would be ineligible to play next semester,” Edwards said. “I don’t say this to scare you. But I am going to be honest with you.”

So none of that is good, and while cuts to football shouldn’t be equated with more important programs like education and other mainstay public programs, it certainly gets people’s attention. And the outlook for football at universities outside of LSU is even worse:

The Southern University System, and University of Louisiana System, and the Louisiana Community and Technical College System are in the same boat: without legislators approving new revenue this special session, some campuses will be forced to declare financial bankruptcy, which would include massive layoffs and the cancellation of classes.

If you are a student attending one of these universities, it means that you will receive a grade of incomplete, many students will not be able to graduate and student athletes across the state at those schools will be ineligible to play next semester. That means you can say farewell to college football next fall.

I was reminded of this depressing state of affairs while reading this article on the broken public defender system in Louisiana, which already had a mixed record to begin with:

The constitutional obligation to provide criminal defense for the poor has been endangered by funding problems across the country, but nowhere else is a system in statewide free fall like Louisiana’s, where public defenders represent more than eight out of 10 criminal defendants. Offices throughout the state have been forced to lay off lawyers, leaving those who remain with caseloads well into the hundreds. In seven of the state’s 42 judicial districts, poor defendants are already being put on wait lists; here in the 15th, the list is over 2,300 names long and growing. . . .

With felony caseloads already far above the professional standard, the public defender concluded that turning down cases was the only ethical option…. Even if state funding remains stable, however, more than half of the public defender offices could be under austerity plans by the fall, turning away clients and laying off lawyers.

“It is in shambles,” wrote District Court Judge Jerome Winsberg in a recent ruling, in which he sought private lawyers to represent several jailed defendants. “Things were not good before, but they are in a terrible place now.”

Other stuff:

Economics of animated movies: “An executive producer who wants to cut costs has only two choice curbs: water and hair. Those are the most expensive things to replicate accurately via animation. It’s no mistake that the characters in Minions, the most profitable movie ever made by Universal, are virtually bald and don’t seem to spend much time in the pool.”

Mark Richt on handling the blitz.

– The Solid Verbal had some great podcasts with coaches Tom Herman, DJ Durkin and Bronco Mendenhall.

Ian Boyd on Katy Texas’s staunch 3-4 defense.

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Farewell to Peyton Manning: Quarterback, Gamesman http://smartfootball.com/quarterbacking/farewell-to-peyton-manning-quarterback-gamesman http://smartfootball.com/quarterbacking/farewell-to-peyton-manning-quarterback-gamesman#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2016 04:47:47 +0000 http://smartfootball.com/?p=4963 Peyton Manning announced that he has played his last down of football, and it’s a sad day for any football fan, particularly this one. It’s also simply difficult to fathom a football season that doesn’t include him: His NFL career spanned an incredible eighteen seasons, which, when combined with his four seasons as a starter […]

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Peyton Manning announced that he has played his last down of football, and it’s a sad day for any football fan, particularly this one. It’s also simply difficult to fathom a football season that doesn’t include him: His NFL career spanned an incredible eighteen seasons, which, when combined with his four seasons as a starter at Tennessee, means he’s been the starting QB of a major college or NFL team for the last twenty two years; it’s been a very long time since we’ve had football without Peyton Manning’s exploits to marvel at. (And, albeit in the pre-internet/recruiting services age, Manning was as high profile of a recruit out of high school as they come; here’s a long-form Sports Illustrated piece on him from 1993.)

peyton-manning12I’ve written extensively about Peyton Manning in the past, and there is much, much more to say, but for now just a few notes. Peter King has a nice retrospective on Manning’s influence on the quarterback position, something that can’t be underrated given that he, along with Tom Brady, bridged the QB position from the prior generation of greats — Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Brett Favre, John Elway — to now, a period when the game itself, but particularly the passing game, changed dramatically.

Much of Peyton’s legacy centers, quite rightfully, around his mental mastery of the position, particularly his audibles and adjustments at the line of scrimmage: The enduring image of Peyton Manning is less about him standing tall in the pocket, arm extended, with a beautiful spiral extending from his fingerprints, than it is of a frenetic Manning gesticulating wildly as he directs teammates and identifies at opponents, while shouts of “Omaha” cascade in the background. But one underrated aspect of his stewardship at the line was his gamemanship: Many of his signals and calls at the line were ploys to trap opponents.

In that 2002 game, Ismail told Manning the Jacksonville corner, Jason Craft, knew that when Manning made a shoveling motion at the line or called the world “Crane,” Ismail would run a short dig route. Later in the game, Manning gave Ismail “Crane!”

“Easiest double move I ever ran in my life. Touchdown,” Ismail recalled.

King doesn’t include a diagram but I know exactly the play he and Ismail were referring to, known as “Dig Pump” in the old Peyton Manning/Tom Moore nomenclature. The diagram below is from Manning’s old Colts playbook:

DigPump

Peyton was notorious for tricks like this I vividly remember him kicking off his remarkable 55 touchdown 2013 season versus the Ravens with a 24-yard touchdown pass to Julius Thomas on a fake receiver screen-and-go, which Manning rather cheekily set up by making the same call right before this snap that he had used earlier in the game to set up a real wide receiver screen pass. Manning, a stickler for fundamental technique, of course sold the fake screen during the play, but the real sales job came from getting inside the defenders’ heads.

touchdown

I have seen Peyton Manning play in person as many times as any professional football player — not to mention the four times I saw him play at Tennessee, including one that remains unforgettable to me (though more for personal reasons than anything particular to Manning or even the game itself) — and it remained a thrill to watch him operate. And two of his seasons are among the handful of very best seasons any quarterback has ever had: 2013, when Manning, after all those neck surgeries and lacking feeling in his hands, launched 55 touchdown passes as he led what some measures indicate was the most prolific offense in NFL history; and 2004, which is possibly the greatest passing season in NFL history:

By ANY/A [Adjusted Net Yards Per Pass Attempt], Manning’s peak seasons were out of this world. His 2004 campaign rates as the best single-season performance in league history. Manning passed for 4,557 yards on 497 attempts, threw 49 touchdowns against just 10 interceptions, and took a staggeringly low 13 sacks. He averaged 9.78 ANY/A per dropback, which is awfully difficult to stop.

There will be (and are already) countless tributes to Peyton Manning. The best tribute I can think of is to continue to admire — and more importantly to study — a body of work that young coaches and quarterbacks will continue to scour for lessons for many, many years to come.

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