Emotions in Motion, Part 2: The education of Aaron Rodgers

When Aaron Rodgers and Matt LaFleur started working together, pre-snap motion was a problem. Now, it’s revolutionized Green Bay’s offense.

In Part 1 of the “Emotions in Motion” series, Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar took an opening look at how some teams are using pre-snap motion for their own advantages, and for the defensive displacement of their opponents. In Part 2, let’s zero in on one team’s conversion to the gospel of pre-snap motion, and how it’s made Aaron Rodgers as effective as he’s ever been in his Hall of Fame career. 

The 2009 Saints and the 2013 Broncos were the last two teams before the 2020 season to score at least 40 points in each of their first two games. Both teams made the Super Bowl in those seasons — the Saints beat the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV, and the Broncos set a record for the most points in a regular season before they ran headlong into Seattle’s Legion of Boom in Super Bowl XLVIII.

The 2020 Packers also at least 40 points in each of their first two games — 43-34 against the Vikings, and 42-21 against the Lions.

The 2019 Ravens, the 1998 49ers, and the 1991 Bills are the only teams before the 2020 season to total more than 80 points and more than 1,000 yards in each of their first two games. The 2020 Packers also did that with 85 total points and 1,010 total yards.

Only the 1991 Bills made the Super Bowl from that list, and we don’t want to go into that result, Bills fans. The point is, Green Bay’s offense is on fire, and it continued to be just that when the Packers beat the Saints 37-30 last Sunday night.

And if Green Bay’s offense is on fire, Aaron Rodgers is en fuego as he’s ever in his already remarkable career.

In the same year that saw the Packers trade up in the first round for Utah State quarterback Jordan Love, leading some to believe that perhaps the Packers were looking at the back end of Rodgers’ career, Rodgers has completed 64.6% of his passes for 887 yards, 8.5 yards per attempt, nine touchdowns, and no interceptions. This also after a 2019 season in which he struggled at times to meet the more specific parameters of new head coach and offensive play-designer Matt LaFleur’s playbook. Under Mike McCarthy for most of his career, Rodgers was tasked to make the most of McCarthy’s extremely limited playbook with plays outside of structure, so it took a second for Rodgers to accept the new reality.

LaFleur’s coaching background put him with Kyle Shanahan in Houston, Washington, and Atlanta, and with Sean McVay in Los Angeles. You can see hallmarks of the Shanahan/McVay influences in the creative uses of tight formations, and especially of pre-snap motion. In Part 1 of the Emotions in Motion series, I wrote about — and discussed with former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky — the importance of pre-snap motion in Shanahan’s offense, and how brilliant Shanahan is at creating defensive displacement. My Touchdown Wire colleague Mark Schofield has written here and here how McVay has turned what was a bland and surprisingly ineffective 2019 Rams offense around with more creative and effective pre-snap concepts.

LaFleur brought all of this to Rodgers’ table right away, and Rodgers benefited immediately, though incrementally.

(Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports)

Last season, Rodgers had a Success Rate of 41%, a YPA of 6.5, an EPA of -0.03, and a passer rating of 94.9 without pre-snap motion. With pre-snap motion, he had a Success Rate of 46%, a YPA of 7.4, an EPA of +0.20 and a passer rating of 96.5. The Packers used pre-snap motion on 28.1% of their plays.

They’ve used it much more in 2020, to the offense’s decided strength.

But for Rodgers, who was used to the necessity of creation after the snap, it was a but much to take in at first. In June, 2019, NFL.com’s Mike Silver interviewed both LaFleur and Rodgers, and published a story that created a great hue and cry regarding the supposed disconnect between coach and quarterback. Depending on your side of the aisle, either LaFleur was a guy who needlessly wanted to change one of the NFL’s greatest quarterbacks, or Rodgers was  a stuck entity who didn’t want to change for the better.

In truth, the story revealed a fundamental — and fascinating — example of the league changing, and two talented people trying to navigate that change.

“It’s a conversation in progress,” Rodgers said back then. “I don’t think you want to ask me to turn off 11 years [of recognizing defenses]. We have a number of check with mes and line-of-scrimmage stuff. It’s just the other stuff that really not many people in this league can do.

“That’s not like a humblebrag or anything; that’s just a fact. There aren’t many people that can do at the line of scrimmage what I’ve done over the years. I mean, obviously, Tommy (Brady) can do it, no doubt. Peyton (Manning) could do it. Drew (Brees) can do it. (Patrick) Mahomes will be able to do it. Ben (Roethlisberger) has called the two-minute for years. There are a few of us who’ve just done it; it’s kind of second nature. And that’s just the icing on the cake for what I can do in this offense.”

LaFleur didn’t disagree; he wasn’t stupid. He understood just how unique Rodgers is and has always been. All he wanted to do was to capture that magic and make it more of a repeatable factor in favorable structure.

“We move a lot more,” LaFleur told Silver. “There’s a lot more motion. There are a lot more moving parts. And so if you just let the quarterback have that freedom to just get to whatever, I’m afraid it would slow our guys down. Now, he is a special talent and he’s got an incredible mind, so as we move forward throughout this process he’s getting more freedom. It’s just, where is that happy medium?”

The happy medium was to give Rodgers freedom within the structure. To allow him to boot out of the pocket with a plan in mind as opposed to hoping against hope that his generational talent could once again break the league. To present him with route concepts that had defined openings. And to implement pre-snap motion in ways that would leverage defenses and eliminate top defensive players from the plays.

Coming into the 2020 season, Rodgers sounded more like a reluctant convert than an old guy who wanted his new coach to get the hell off his lawn.

“It’s hard for me to remember all the motions,” Rodgers said in mid-September. “That’s why I got that trusty wristband. Our calls get a little wordy at times. [But] I can tell you that the motions aren’t going anywhere. Those are going to stay. For a long time around here, I didn’t want any motion. And [former head coach] Mike [McCarthy] didn’t like a lot of motion, either. We just kind of lined up and went.

“And then, as defenses changed tactics, you saw more condensed formations taking off in this offense and in other places, with condensed formations and bunches and fly sweeps and fly motions, I think we’ve seen more teams across the league do it. For us, it is a part of our offense. Every play has the possibility of having motion in it. Everything has a purpose. It’s all about pre-snap, stressing the eye discipline and fits and the defensive recognition. It’s a lot of learning every week, for all of us.”

Lions head coach Matt Patricia, who watched his man-based defense take a serious butt-whomping at the hands of Rodgers and the Packers with a 42-21 final, didn’t need any additional convincing.

“It’s definitely a copycat league, so once something trends the year before, you’re going to see a lot of teams doing it,” Patricia recently said. “Certainly, Andy Reid has done a great job of this stuff for a while with misdirection and some of that motion we saw from Green Bay last week. A lot of it is what we call ‘eye control,’ and making sure that we’re really disciplined [in] what we’re looking at. Some of that has a purpose; some of it is trying to leverage the defense and get outside and take advantage of the space out there. Some of it is a bit of window dressing, as we like to call it, [to] try and distract you from maybe what you’re looking to get, and get you out of a gap, or get a little bit more space inside as opposed to keeping everybody down in that area down by the box.

“It’s something that we’re used to, we’ve been seeing, but I think a lot of people tend to do their offseason projects and offseason study, and now we’ll see a lot more of it because it was successful last year — just like everything. It certainly is a problem, especially with young [defenders] because it is an eye discipline thing.”

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It was a problem for Patricia’s Lions on this 11-yard touchdown pass to tight end Robert Tonyan. LaFleur had to know going into this game that the Lions played more man coverage than any other defense, and also that they were among the worst and most assignment-deficient when doing so. So, down 14-3, the Packers used subtle pre-snap motion to leverage a bad defense into doing something that it would find problematic.

 

The Packers used motion on 32 of their 74 plays from scrimmage in their Week 1 win over the Vikings, per PackersNews.com, and one of the plays LaFleur called was a sweep motion handoff to halfback Tyler Ervin for a 21-yard gain.

You’ll want to put a pin in this play, because LaFleur used it to set up the Saints twice two weeks later.

Here’s the 48-yarder to Lazard, in which Ervin motions from left to right, stressing the defensive left side, and allowing Rodgers just enough space downfield to make the big-time throw. You can see defensive back Chauncey Gardner-Johnson hand Lazard off to cornerback Marshon Lattimore (who, after three games, is allowing a perfect 158.3 opponent quarterback rating), and you can also see the running back motion cause deep safety Malcolm Jenkins to hesitate for a split second (perhaps an altered assignment based on Ervin’s position?) before heading downfield.

In the NFL, a split second is a lifetime.

If Rodgers tries to make this throw in the McCarthy era, it’s just as likely going to be an incompletion unless he makes a perfect throw — which, of course, is more possible than not. But now, Rodgers has the confidence in the system to make the throw even under less than ideal circumstances, because he knows the percentage of success based on alignment and defensive displacement.

“Yeah, it just comes down to discipline, eye discipline, understanding what the offenses are going to do,” Jenkins said after the game. “And all it takes is one guy not to be doing his job in those plays, control the game, getting people ahead of the sticks. So, [it’s] something that we’ll continue to see until we get it fixed.”

Eye discipline again? Yeah, you hear that a lot from rueful defenders who are trying to deal with the NFL’s best pre-snap motion offenses. And now that the Packers count themselves among that group, they bring things to every game most defenses — and opponents in general — can’t match.

In Part 3 of “Emotions in Motion,” we’ll take a closer look at how defenses can clamp down on this expanding trend, and why some offensive coaches are reluctant to adopt it.