NFL finally beginning to do a 180 on spread offense quarterbacks

Thursday, 22 September 2011 , by : Chris

From Don Banks’s latest piece:

NFL Has Started to View the Spread Offense as its Friend

And that comfort zone that rookie quarterbacks feel extends to the field, various NFL sources said. The NFL coaching and personnel communities are rapidly changing how they view the spread offenses that have come to predominate college football. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that spread offense quarterbacks get to the league relatively unequipped to play the game in a pro-style passing attack. But what was once seen as a disadvantage may now be one of the keys to the early success of passers like Newton, Bradford, Freeman and McCoy. Coming out of the spread, quarterbacks come to the pass-happy NFL very used to seeing the field, making quick decisions, and throwing, throwing and throwing some more.

“What’s happening is you’re get a lot of these read-option quarterbacks, and they have to make a lot of decisions on the field,” said former Bucs and Colts head coach Tony Dungy, now an NFL analyst on NBC’s Sunday Night Football. “And quarterbacking is so much about decision-making. It’s not the same type of decision-making necessarily, but they’re still in the decision-making mode in college and I think that’s helping them. So it transfers a little bit quicker.

“People have kind of gotten away from the stereotypical thinking we used to see about the spread. I remember when [Florida State's Heisman winner] Charlie Ward came out and they said, ‘Oh, he plays in the shotgun.’ There were all these different reasons why he couldn’t succeed, and it just baffled me. I said ‘Do you see what the guy is doing? He’s making plays to win games. He’s making decisions, he’s throwing the ball, he’s on target, he’s moving away from the rush, all the things you have to do in the NFL. Taking a snap from the center is the easiest thing to learn, all those other things are hard. But I think we’ve kind of gotten away from that kind of thinking, and we’re looking at what these guys do positively. They can make decisions, they can throw on the move, and they can get out of the pocket. So you say, OK, let me build off of what their strengths are.”

The success of quarterbacks like Newton and Bradford atop the draft the past two years has influenced the league’s instinctive distrust of spread-offense passers, and if Gabbert succeeds as well, NFL personnel decision-makers will have another recent example to point to. While much is made during every spring’s draft scouting season about whether or not spread-offense QBs can master the center exchange, no one seems to be worrying much about that in the fall these days.

“I think it’s a knee-jerk reaction to the spread offense, which I’ve had as well, when I scout college quarterbacks,” said NFL Films guru Greg Cosell, who serves as creator and executive producer of ESPN’s NFL Matchup, for years the most respected football analysis show on television. “I’m going to watch them totally differently now because of the reaction to guys like Cam Newton and Blaine Gabbert. People say almost automatically, ‘Oh, these guys have a two-year learning curve.’ But that’s no longer true. We don’t know how Newton will play the whole year. Defenses will get a look at their offense, and who knows, maybe if teams figure it out it’ll be different. But I don’t think the guy’s going to go from what he did the first two games to being a total bust.

“It does make you re-evaluate things. The public perception is that the spread in college does not prepare a guy for the NFL, but there are NFL coaches who I talk to who are saying the exact opposite. Because those quarterbacks are sitting back there, they take the snap, they’ve got to know where to throw it, they’ve got to make decisions, and they’re in a passing offense. They’re throwing the ball, and seeing the field, and that’s what you do in the NFL.”

The piece is still muddled because it continues to be confused about what a spread offense quarterback is, particularly the implication that spread offense pass-first quarterbacks like Blaine Gabbert and Sam Bradford fall under the rubric of “read-option quarterbacks.” This is just silly. But the bit of wisdom NFL coaches are finally coming around to is that the spread is much more demanding of the quarterback than other offenses, particularly in the amount of responsibility the quarterback has before the snap. The piece focuses on post-snap reads, but the real benefit is that these quarterbacks operate in the no-huddle and learn to scan defenses and check runs, passes and screens depending on what the defense is giving them. They may have all new keys and frameworks in the pros, but the “traditional” quarterback may have operated in a far less demanding offense — maybe not so much physically in terms of deep play-action comeback routes, but mentally, with their responsibilities.

What is disconcerting about the piece, however, is that all of this has been obvious for some time, but, by the piece’s own admission, NFL scouts and “gurus” like Jaworski and Greg Cosell were willingly blind to it. And yet now, after — wait for it — two games, the analysis has completely changed. Jaworski is rethinking his beliefs; Cosell is rechecking his biases. This is not evidence of a well thought out position.

I’m probably too harsh. But while pieces like this are encouraging, they are still evidence of some rather shallow analysis.

 

Related Posts:

  • N/A
Posted in the Category: Uncategorized 13 comments
Bookmark and Share
  • Homyrrh

    Watching Buffalo quietly spread as wide and as often as a given college team or another — and having success in doing so — is encouraging as a fan of both football and progress.

  • http://mountaintiger.wordpress.com/ mountaintiger

    It seems like Philly is a bit ahead of the curve on not just bringing in spread quarterbacks but building the roster and playbook around mobile spread quarterbacks.  Bringing Vince Young in was the high profile move, but Mike Kafka was an excellent runner in a spread offense as well.  Using Vick on the zone read against Atlanta suggests that the coaches are trying to incorporate at least some basic spread run concepts into their basic offense.

  • Jon

    Don’t forget Chan Gailey was in the college game for a while before coming back to the NFL

  • Drskbox

    Philly is implementing it some as a package.  Do you guys think that the zone read could eventually be implemented in the NFL as a base system?  I’m very curious to see what Jon Gruden does when he gets back into the league, perhaps in Miami.  He seems to be studying the zone read system used by different colleges and has also paid attention to the pace that some play at.  I very interested to see if Gruden comes back to the NFL and attempts to bring the zone read as a full time offense or as just a package of a spread formation based offense.

  • Gian3074

    Watching what Buffalo does is pretty awesome because it flies in the face of conventional strategy in the NFL. I remember hearing after the Kansas City game that 1 in 5 offensive snaps for Buffalo were with four receivers on the field.

  • Eee

    I think zone reads and spread veer variations will always have trouble taking off in the NFL for a couple reasons. One is that you need a much higher level athlete at the QB position to make it work in the pros. In college a middling athlete at QB can still pick up a reasonable gain if he makes his reads well. In the pros, there are ends and even interior linemen that are quick enough to disrupt both options, and your guy has to be fast enough to beat them. If your QB is slow and the keeper never breaks for any big gains, it’s not worth running it.

    The other reason is injuries. A good QB is just too expensive and too hard to find. Because of that, I just can’t see it being implemented as a full-fledged system. 

    Philly seems to use it the most, because they have the one guy (outside of maybe Newton) who can run it with great effectiveness (point #1), but just look at the injury scares they’ve had with Vick over the past couple years (point #2). They seem to have settled on bringing it in as a package for certain situations. I also like that they do some Wildcat stuff with Ronnie Brown now on the team. Vick adds to the effectiveness of the Wildcat because he’s more than just a placeholder on the field. He has to be accounted for to make something happen on a reverse pass, or even catching a pass. Just last week they ran a reverse pass out of the Wildcat, it broke down, and he still scrambled for ten yards or so.

  • Jon

    Also w/ Brad Smith, the Bills have the whole option package in out of the spread as well

  • Zkinter36

    I think that it is very important to make the distinction between a “spread” quarterback who is primarily a runner, and a spread quarterback who plays within a system which asks him to utilize pro style route combinations in the passing game.  I think that it comes down to preparation, anticipation, timing and decisiveness.  Where the Qb lines up is relatively inconsequential in comparison to the responsibilities placed upon him within the teams passing game.  I’m really sick of the term “spread”.  There are so many variations of teams who play primarily out of the shotgun, that the term should officially be retired. 

  • Aaron B.

    I think Chris nails it here. Two games. TWO F*&*ING GAMES!!

    How about we wait a little while longer before we make broad assum-, er, conclusions about these players and the NFL as a whole?

  • Anonymous

    Ron Jaworski at least from the quote cited in the article was not talking about spread  offense quarterbacks in particular; instead, he was talking about whether quarterbacks needed at least a year of sitting on the bench before being thrown in as starters.  Jaworski was suggesting that perhaps NFL playbooks should be reduced so that rookie quarterbacks could more easily run the offenses well.

    I think it is totally uncalled for to put Jaworski’s description as a guru in quotes as if there is anything questionable about Jaworski’s credentials for analyzing NFL football.  This reflects a distressing attitude of disrespect I seem to be reading on this site towards certain professionals.  There is no need to have an agenda as if the ideas discussed are politics–it’s just a game.

    This site in previous years justifiably had an article praising the innovation and genius of Sid Gillman.  Read these words from Ron Jaworski about his experience with Gillman and tell me Jaworski isn’t on the same side.  For shame.

    http://www.amazon.com/Games-That-Changed-Game-Evolution/dp/product-description/0345517954

  • Anonymous

    I never said Jaworski didn’t know football, or at least the passing game. (Though his book was a bit disappointing, I thought.) I think he has generally been skeptical of what he perceives to be non-traditionally trained quarterbacks, i.e. “spread quarterbacks” and the like. Sometimes that skepticism is justified, but too often recently it has not been. He came up in a certain way, at a certain time, playing the position a certain way. He had excellent training and worked with excellent coaches, but I just don’t think that he, from his NFL-centric vantage point, quite perceived some of the changes at the lower levels. Fortunately, that view still seems to be changing.

    But what concerns me about this piece is that these guys had a shallow but strongly held view — all “spread” quarterbacks are unprepared for the NFL, whereas if you play in a “pro-style” system (which seems to mean you took snaps from under center) you’re far more ready — but not that Andy Dalton and Cam Newton played a couple of good games that thinking goes out the window. I’m sure you know what’s next: those two rookies inevitably struggle, and then they’re back to the previously held view. I just think they substitute this kind of thinking for actual analysis sometimes.

  • Zkinter36

    I don’t understand why so many “spread” advocates have an apparent chip on their shoulder towards NFL people.  I love this site.  Their is no other site which contains anywhere near the quality of content that is present on this one.  The one thing that drives me crazy however, is the constant “indirect hating” on pro style offense.  As a high school coach I have utilized both types of offenses, and both have been successful.  I think that the qb you have to work with should determine what offense you use.  So I don’t really have a bias one way or the other for where I am at.  I think that both approaches can be highly creative and successful at the HS and College level.

    As far as NFL people go however, I totally get where they are coming from.  Why would you invest millions of dollars on a player who has not executed the same system/schemes/techniques, that your team runs?  Sure, some of those guys are going to pan out, but is it really a wise investment.  To me, guys like Aaron Rodgers and Matt Ryan are a much safer investment because they have actually executed the same types of plays as the ones they will be runnimg in the NFL.  How do you evaluate a guy whose success is based upon things that won’t happen in the NFL?

    Another thing that is very apparent to me, is that an NFL style offense is much more complex in terms of personnel groupings, formations, shifts, motions, protections and route combinations.  That’s not to take away from the inherent advantages and complexities present within a system that operates out of the shotgun with a running Qb who reads unblocked Dlineman with veer and inverted veer concepts blended with inside zone, power and counter blocking schemes.  Both are exceptional ways of playing football when executed properly.  But at the end of the day… The NFL is the highest level of football.  I have to believe that they would implement “spread” football if it meant that they would win more games.  It is a business after all.  Instead of being haters, spread advocates should recognize that their brand of football is not utilized at the highest level of football.  It does however present HS and College football teams with another method of being highly successful on offense should they have more of an athlete than a drop back passer at the Qb position. 

  • Anonymous

    I don’t mean to be too critical, though if you think I’m “constantly hating” on pro style offense I’m not sure you’ve been reading what I’ve actually written. (I’m writing many features on the NFL for Grantland now!) I enjoy some brands of non-pro-style football, but it’s all football and it’s all great. A lot of what the pros do is because of the luxury of having pro-style QBs: in a perfect world what I would do would be very pro-style. (There are also other factors, like free agency and so on that require the NFL to have a bit of a plug and play element.) The NFL is obviously the most complex; those guys eat, sleep and breathe football, while college guys spend time on recruiting and have practice limitations and most high school coaches teach classes.

    I also have said numerous times on here that I totally sympathize with NFL coaches in evaluating quarterbacks. It’s truly a difficult task, and I think they are often adverse to “spread” guys as a product of those systems often being too successful: obviously a guy throwing for 5,000 yards or being a run/pass threat doesn’t, by itself, mean he’s NFL ready, so they have to look at all of the other factors that go into making a quarterback. I think many of the NFL guys — or at least the commentariat — go the next step to saying there is something *wrong* with a system that took an undraftable guy and turned him into a Saturday hero, but as I said it’s a real challenge evaluating QBs. My only point was that the anti-spread hyperbole had gotten a little silly. There are good spread QBs and bad spread QBs, guys who are NFL ready mentally but not physically, guys who are ready physically but not mentally, and everything inbetween. My larger point was that “spread QB” doesn’t mean one single thing and some guys seem to get the label for no reason whereas if you’re successful you somehow avoid the label even if you played in a spread system (see Joe Flacco for one). If you are a “spread QB” but you make NFL-style checks at the line in the run and pass game, have NFL-style pass progressions, and have the NFL talent to succeed, it’s not useful analysis the label “spread QB” into the evaluation because it neither adds nor subtracts anything.

    On your last point, I’ve written extensively about the NFL’s complexity. The NFL is much more complex than most college or high school schemes, but complex in a different way. There is little variation between the strategies of teams (they all use similar dropback concepts, they all run zone, power, counter, etc), but tactically and often in technique terms they spend endless hours working on little points that can make the difference between a win and a loss. I totally respect that and the NFL generally has the best coaches in the land (which makes sense given their salaries). Much of that complexity is driven by talent issues.

    I think your characterization of me as a “hater” or even as an “advocate” for one brand of football is just silly. We can get into many of the reasons why the spread isn’t used at the NFL level. Keep in mind that even if it doesn’t make sense for an NFL team to use it — if you have Tom Brady, why would you? — but every coach will tell you that when you introduce the quarterback as a run threat it significantly cleans up a lot of the “junk” defenses can throw at you in terms of weird blitzes and fronts and so on. It doesn’t mean it’s superior, it just means that some of the things they do at the NFL level that cause them endless headaches with a great but stationary quarterback doesn’t necessarily make sense for a college or HS guy: better to put him in the gun and make him a run threat with reads or options and they’ll stop the Rex Ryan wannabe overload blitzes pretty quickly. There’s lots of ways to skin the cat.

    In any event, I’ve both seen teams have success with all manner of styles and coached several different styles. To use modern examples, I like watching Paul Johnson’s Georgia Tech squad, I like the spread-option teams like Oregon, I like pass-first teams like Houston and West Virginia, I like pro-style teams like LSU, Alabama, Arkansas, Stanford (love Stanford’s offense with all the tight-ends); the same analysis for defenses of all colors. I’ve even seen teams run for 300 yards using the straight-T formation, I’ve seen them do it from a pro-set, I’ve seen them do it from the wishbone, the spread, the I, and everything inbetween. I’m really agnostic about styles of football; if I’m an advocate for anything, it’s being open minded. Why the spread isn’t more common at the NFL is an excellent question, and there is no cheap or simple answer. It isn’t, and may never be, but there’s one constant in football: the game will continue to evolve.