The best offenses use the width and the depth of the field

Monday, October 14th, 2019

NFL offenses averaged more points per possession and yards per play last year than ever before by challenging defenses to cover the entire football field:

Fifty years ago, college football was upended by an idea that began this way of thinking. It was a formation called the wishbone. Texas used it to win 30 consecutive games, and other powerhouses like Alabama and Oklahoma soon followed en route to national championships of their own.

The wishbone was based on the concept of the triple-option. A quarterback could hand off, run the ball himself, or later pitch it to another running back. Passing was a rarity. But this antiquated offense was also futuristic: it took advantage of the vast width of a football field. Running was no longer limited to a singular direction. Defenders had to make a choice between going after the guy with the ball, or the one who would later receive it.

But the wishbone shunted another dimension. Because passing was such an afterthought, wishbone teams didn’t push the ball vertically. When Texas went undefeated in 1969, the Longhorns ran for 3,630 yards and passed for only 1,091.

“The best offenses use the width—and the depth of the field,” McVay says.

Other scheming minds looked for an edge by revolutionizing the passing game. The “West Coast Offense,” which Bill Walsh used to win three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers, attacked the edges of the field with a preponderance of higher percentage, shorter-length passes. Observers likened it to reconstructing the running game into a passing attack.

Other twists opened up the vertical element. In 1980, the Chargers broke the NFL record for most passing yards in a season, and by 1985 they had five of the six most prolific passing years ever. They did it with a self-explanatory offense called “Air Coryell.” Their coach, Don Coryell, wanted to air the ball as far down field as frequently as possible.

Still, there was a lingering question: how could an offense attack defenses in every direction on every play? The solution was hiding in plain sight—in college football. It just took shockingly long to trickle up to the pros.

In 2000, the same season the Ravens won the Super Bowl with one of the best defenses in NFL history, something far more important happened: Northwestern won a bunch of football games. The Wildcats didn’t invent the spread offense, but when a bunch of eggheads started using it to topple powerhouses, the whole football world had to pay attention. They beat No. 7 Wisconsin, thumped No. 18 Michigan State and then toppled No. 12 Michigan 54-51 in a nationally televised thriller.

“I saw them almost scoring at will,” Michigan coach Lloyd Carr said afterward.

Variations of the spread proliferated across college football. Teams lined up wide on every play with four or five receivers. They played almost exclusively out of the shotgun. The most radical teams adopted an extreme version known as the “Air Raid,” which played at hyperspeed and eschewed the idea of striking a balance between running plays and passing plays.

[...]

In 2001, NFL teams used the shotgun on just 14% of plays, according to Football Outsiders. In 2006, it was still just 20%. By last season, that had skyrocketed to 64%. [...] The Chiefs lined up in the shotgun on 81% of snaps last year.

A few years ago, Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, looked at Texas Tech’s unorthodox offense.

Comments

  1. Neovictorian says:

    Love the old Mike Leach post! Thanks for pointing it out.

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