Pre-snap motion can be a cheat code for quarterbacks, and here are the NFL’s best with pre-snap motion from the 2020 season.
How positively impactful can pre-snap motion be for NFL quarterbacks? Consider this: In 2020, when former Bears starter and current Bills backup Mitchell Trubisky had the benefit of pre-snap motion, he completed 81 of 111 passes for 856 yards, 381 air yards, seven touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 101.9, which was the league’s sixth-highest for quarterbacks with at least 100 passing attempts. Without pre-snap motion, Trubisky looked a lot more… well, Trubisky-esque, completing 118 of 186 passes for 1,199 yards, 622 air yards, nine touchdowns, seven interceptions, and a passer rating of 82.3, which put him 30th in the NFL.
Not that every quarterback is able to glide off the concept of pre-snap motion to that degree, and no offense to Mr. Trubisky, but if it can turn him into a plus starter, imagine what it can do for the game’s best signal-callers?
When we talk about pre-snap motion, there are two obvious kinds: Motion to indicate, and motion to disrupt. Motion to indicate means that we want the quarterback to have an idea what the defense is doing based on the motion reaction of the defense. Generally speaking, if a receiver goes in motion and a defender follows, man coverage is coming. If the defense stays static and you see adjustment calls, it’s most likely zone. Some defensive coordinators are getting smarter about this, showing man reaction and playing zone and vice versa, and you can expect this to happen more often, but it’s usually helpful.
When we talk about motion to disrupt, we’re talking about the ability to use pre-snap motion to put a defense in a bad position — either by moving a receiver to a spot where he’ll face a defender who can’t keep up with him, or by using motion to establish route concepts in which primary defenders are taken out of the play altogether.
There are those offensive play-callers who have imagined and created all of this to the great benefit of their quarterbacks, and here are the best quarterbacks with pre-snap motion in the 2020 season.
Bill Walsh is known for all kinds of innovations. Add an elevated understanding of pre-snap motion to that list.
Part 1 of Doug Farrar’s “Emotions in Motion” series presented an overall view of the advantages of pre-snap motion, and some level of angst as to the percentage of coaches who refuse to avail themselves of this cheat code. Part 2 took a deep dive into Aaron Rodgers’ enlightened views on the concept through the eyes of head coach Matt LaFleur. In Part 3 of the series, let’s get into the Wayback Machine to discover how Bill Walsh (no surprise there) became the first offensive play-designer to make pre-snap motion a primary construct of his playbooks.
Though most professional football offenses were far more formationally stationary in previous eras than they are today, there were those coaches who experimented with throwing defenses off-kilter with pre-snap motion. Sid Gillman and Tom Landry were two in a small group, and the fact that those coaches are among the game’s all-time greatest innovators fits nicely with the idea of thinking outside the box to throw off defenses that were also far more cookie-cutter in previous eras.
But it was Bill Walsh, more than any other coach, who brought the gospel of pre-snap motion to the field in highly effective ways. Starting with his time as the Oakland Raiders’ running backs coach in 1966 — where he worked under Al Davis, who ingested most of what he knew about the passing game from his earlier time with Gillman — and then as the Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive coordinator under Paul Brown from 1968 to 1975, and certainly as the San Francisco 49ers’ head coach from 1979 through 1988, Walsh saw no issue with using pre-snap movement as a force multiplier in an offense that was as much art as it was science.
But as voluminous and well-thought as most of his innovations were, this came from random chance. In his autobiography, “Building a Champion,” Walsh described how he started to use the tight end in motion from one side of the formation to the other.
“We used the tight end in motion first by mistake,” he said. “Cincinnati was playing the Raiders in Oakland. In the third quarter, Bob Trumpy lined up on the wrong side by mistake. He had to shift over quickly to the other side, and all hell broke loose. At that time, the Raiders had very specialized [defenders]. They had a weak-side linebacker, they had a strong-side linebacker, they had a defensive end who only played on the tight-end side, and they would shift their two inside linebackers. They all ran into each other in the middle of the field, trying to adjust.”
After the game, offensive line coach Bill Johnson suggested to Walsh that the Bengals put motion in the playbook on purpose. Walsh said that they looked at each other and doubled over laughing at first, but that’s how motion became a seminal part of the Walsh offense. And the motion concept was mostly nightmarish for the more static defenses of the time. Against defenses with specific linebacker designations (weak-side and strong-side, strong-side being the linebacker lined up over the tight end), Walsh could direct his tight end to create unfavorable matchups.
“If a weak-side linebacker was fast but had trouble handling a big, blocking tight end, we could force him to defend on the strong side anytime we wanted, simply by moving the tight end to his side,” Walsh said.
Of course, when Trumpy went in motion, quarterback Ken Anderson still had to throw the ball to the right team, which didn’t always happen when the Bengals faced the Raiders in Week 5 of that season.
And here’s receiver Isaac Curtis motioning from outside to the slot against Oakland in the 1975 divisional playoffs. A nifty concept that would have worked but for the fact that linebacker Ted Hendricks sacked Anderson — one of four sacks the future Hall-of-Famer had on the day.
So… it took a few minutes to work out the kinks.
In any event, Walsh started to split Trumpy outside of the formation, forcing those linebackers to stray from their preferred places and opening up other alternatives. By the time he was hired in San Francisco as the 49ers’ head coach in 1979, Walsh was using receivers in motion, backs in motion… everything was about getting the defense off-balance before the snap even happened. Walsh saw the defense as a moveable canvas onto which he would paint exacting structural concepts, and motion was a major part of this. Walsh discovered that by putting different players in motion, a quarterback could discern whether the defense he was facing was man or zone.
“If a back goes in motion and the linebackers begin to loosen, the quarterback can expect a zone,” he wrote. “If a linebacker immediately moves with the back in motion, the quarterback can see man-to-man coverage.”
Again, this worked at a basic level because defenses were relatively rudimentary in the 1970s — the substitutions and hybrid positions of the current era were rarely seen. Teams use motion to discern coverage concepts to this day, though disguised and split coverage concepts are the norm in the modern age. Back then? Teams didn’t know how to adapt.
By the early 1980s, Walsh was designing all kinds of new alchemies. This 23-yard pass from quarterback Matt Cavanaugh to running back/tight end Earl Cooper against the New Orleans Saints looked like something straight out of Andy Reid’s Chiefs playbook in any of the last three seasons, with Cooper as the motion receiver from left to right, and both guards pulling the other way. The pulling guards influenced the defense to head away from Cooper, and the motion — not to mention Cavanaugh’s bootleg to the right — helped to negate the Saints’ all-out blitz. (H/T to John Turney of the awesome Pro Football Journal site for the video assist).
“We called that play because we thought they would be blitzing,” quarterbacks coach Paul Hackett said. “That’s why we wanted Matt to be moving. We used the misdirect action to buy him time, but that pass is delivered quickly anyway.”
By the last game of his time as the 49ers’ head coach and offensive genius, Walsh had developed it to his usual standard — ruthlessly effective, incredibly multi-faceted, and with more wrinkles than anybody else would have considered. The game-winning touchdown in Super Bowl XXIII against Paul Brown’s Bengals was a play called “Red Right Tight F Left 20 Halfback Curl X Up,” and here’s Walsh drawing it up, Michelangelo-style:
As you can see, Jerry Rice is motioning from right to left pre-snap, and as Joe Montana told me this week, that was not only by specific design to open things up for other receivers, it also turned Rice into an option receiver, which just seems unfair.
“The one thing Bill noticed was that … I mean, we used [pre-snap] motion for a reason,” Montana said. “We’d used motions with Jerry [Rice] coming across the formation — this was right to left, but a lot of times, we’d run it the other way as fast as we could before the defender could catch up to him — the man trailing him. We’d bring him across again after throwing it to Jerry in the flat right away, and let him turn it [upfield]. The next time, we’d bring him over in the same look, and we’d start him into the flat, and he’d run an angle back in.
“So, we were hoping that if they were playing man-to-man, they would put him into that, but if not, that motion also kicked [the Bengals] into two deep safeties. That’s where the “X Up” comes into play, where J.T. [John Taylor] had to read. If there’s a free safety, he hooks it outside. And if they were split, and there was no safety in the middle, he does a little nod-out like he’s going to hook, and then he goes to the post. There’s not a lot of time and space between when he runs that hook and before he runs out of space in the end zone. You have to anticipate that.”
Montana also said that when Rice motioned and didn’t have a specific following defender, he knew he was facing a zone defense — one of the primary reasons teams use pre-snap motion to this day.
It’s not surprising that Bill Walsh was able to take something like pre-snap motion that was considered to be something between gimmickry and heresy for other coaches and turn it into a key element of his offensive designs. It’s also not a surprise that even to this day, a lot of coaches are still lagging behind his enterprising genius in this regard.
In Part 4 of the “Emotions n Motion” series, we’ll take a look at the teams who benefited the most in the 2020 season from pre-snap motion… and the teams who, despite that obvious advantage, used it at an unhelpfully low rate.
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.”
[lawrence-related id=110204]
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.
This is interesting. Lions were last in usage of pre-snap motion in Week 2. Here's what Patricia had to say about the Packers' heavy use of motion when I asked him last week. https://t.co/KoyqJl5m8lpic.twitter.com/nK1PEyEHEf
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.
Packers used sweep motion with RB Tyler Ervin to create defensive displacement vs. the Saints on this TD, and Rodgers' 48-yard pass to Allen Lazard. Rodgers rolls the other way. 4 of Rodgers' 9 TD passes are off designed rollouts, which leads the league. pic.twitter.com/iYAX5WarrC
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.
The Cowboys coach says the team will monitor the seven-time Pro Bowl left tackle’s neck issue before Sunday’s home opener versus Atlanta.
Dallas enters Week 2 of the season already looking to backup plans at several key positions. Watching linebacker Leighton Vander Esch and tight end Blake Jarwin get helped off the field in the season opener was bad enough. But news that left tackle Tyron Smith missed Thursday’s practice with some sort of neck issue brings a whole different sense of doom and gloom over Cowboys Nation.
Coach Mike McCarthy wasn’t ready to hit the panic button quite yet, but he knows the readiness of his seven-time Pro Bowl lineman is something that will be monitored closely as Sunday’s kickoff versus the Falcons approaches.
In fact, despite the more obvious holes in the Cowboys lineup, he admits that offensive line is his biggest concern right now.
“Going into the game, I would say yes,” McCarthy told 105.3 The Fan on Friday morning. “Every season, it’s on that list of firsts. You have your first game, you have your first road game, you have your first different types of situations: two-minute drills at the end of the half and end of the game. You go through this all the time, especially in Year One. But this is our first time- experience- with a player, maybe two, that may or may not play come Sunday. It’s part of being a good team, so you have to work through these things. We need everybody; that’s always been my approach as a head coach.”
A player… that may or may not play come Sunday.
That’s a scary thought, particularly for Cowboys fans who recall what happened the last time Smith didn’t suit up against Atlanta. Quarterback Dak Prescott is likely still having middle-of-the-night flashbacks to the six sacks Smith’s replacement allowed that day.
“We’ll see how Tyron is,” McCarthy concluded. “I’m not alarmed right now, but it’s something that we’re looking at.”
That dreadful Falcons tilt took place in Atlanta in 2017. This time, the two teams will meet in Arlington. So the Cowboys will at least have home cooking on their side.
Or will they? Much has been made of home-field advantage in 2020, with most stadiums devoid of fans on opening weekend. The Cowboys will buck that trend on Sunday, allowing AT&T Stadium to be at approximately 25% capacity.
Between piped-in crowd noise and the natural up-close intensity of professional football players trying to beat the tar out of each other, many have argued that empty venues are only strange to fans watching at home, that the players are too locked in to care.
But McCarthy noticed a difference this past weekend in Los Angeles. And he believes it will be good for the Cowboys to play in front of Cowboys fans, even if it’s fewer than usual.
“I would think so. Without a doubt, just going off the experience of last week,” McCarthy confessed. “The fans are such a huge part of the game: just the gameday environment, the enthusiasm, and everything that goes into it. The players really feed off of that. You’ve just got to ‘make your own music’ is the way we’ve talked about it. It’s the way we’ll approach it. I think it will definitely help.”
Of course, a strong showing from the offense will help encourage the fans in attendance to make a little more of their own music. The much-ballyhooed debut of Team Fortyburger never got out of first gear on Sunday night, putting up a pedestrian 17 points.
Many pundits in the days since have pointed to a lack of pre-snap motion in coordinator Kellen Moore’s offensive game plan. When ranked by how much motion each team used in Week 1, the top half of the league went 13-3; the bottom half- where Dallas sat- combined for a 3-13 mark.
McCarthy appreciates the numbers, but emphasizes that it was just one game.
“You have to be honest about statistics. There’s a place for them. But it’s Week 1. To think that Kellen was able to call everything on his call sheet that he may have anticipated going into the game, that’s just not how it works. Shift and motion, you’ll see that in our game plans each week, and how much we use will depend on the flow of the game.”
The flow of the game, certainly on offense, could change dramatically depending on whether No. 77 is on the field for the Cowboys.
More and more, NFL offenses are using pre-snap motion to set defenses on edge. Here’s how it works.
In Part 1 of the “Emotions in Motion” series, Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar takes an in-depth look at the NFL’s increasing use of pre-snap motion, and how it’s changing the ways in which offensive and defensive football are played.
One of the biggest plays in the 49ers’ 26-21 Week 17 win over the Seahawks last season was a 49-yard pass from quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to fullback Kyle Juszczyk. On the play, tight end George Kittle motioned from left to right pre-snap, which gave Garoppolo the indicator that Seattle was playing zone defense in its usual base (three-linebacker) alignment. Juszczyk was aligned in the right slot — fullback displacement has been a hallmark of head coach Kyle Shanahan’s playbooks for years — and as the ball was snapped and Kittle moved back to the left side for a backside blocking assignment.
Garoppolo was able to spot a weakness in Seattle’s defense that he could exploit — Juszczyk covered by linebacker Mychal Kendricks, who was preoccupied to a point by Kittle’s presence aligned to the right side of the formation. Because of that preoccupation, Juszczyk had a free release to head upfield, and though he certainly wasn’t going to challenge Tyreek Hill in any footraces, he was able to run free against a defense that had been forced to react late as a result of Shanahan’s ability to design and implement motion and displacement concepts to the detriment of every defense he faces. Kendricks followed Juszczyk outside, but it looks as if the intention was for Kendricks to cover the flat, while the 49ers extended Juszczyk downfield. Kittle motioning back to the left side also took linebacker Bobby Wagner out of the picture — as a hook/curl defender, he had nothing to defend. Whenever you can remove your opponent’s best defensive player from the equation, you have an obvious advantage.
“I would say that Kyle’s the best at that right now,” former NFL quarterback and current ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky recently told me. “Kyle takes people out of the play without doing anything other than motion and alignment. I’ve said this – Kyle’s the best mathematician in the NFL.”
Of course, the 49ers took Shanahan’s brilliant offense and Robert Saleh’s radically re-energized defense all the way to Super Bowl LIV, where they lost in late-game fashion to Andy Reid’s Chiefs on this particular play.
Not that any of this is new. Pre-snap motion has been around for decades — Tom Landry did as much as anyone to develop it with the Cowboys in the 1960s and 1970s, and Bill Walsh was not above availing himself of the concept with the 49ers back in the day. In a
If you want to see another play in which the quarterback heads right as the guards head left, leaving an open target against a confused defense, this is a good example (Thanks to John Tunney of the excellent Pro Football Journal blog for the highlight pull).
In an NFL where defensive front versatility is the order of the day and coverage schemes are more advanced than they’ve ever been, it behooves those who design offenses to bring to the table anything possible to plant their flags in the turf. Pre-snap motion, which is used to varying degrees throughout the league to varying degrees of effectiveness, has become a mandatory construct among many of the most effective offenses.
But none of the public subscription-based football metrics services — not Football Outsiders, not Pro Football Focus, and not Sports Info Solutions — make pre-snap motion charting-based stats available, and therefore, we as football fans and and football analysts have no way of knowing the exact effectiveness of the methodology. The first real reference I saw to pre-snap motion in an analytical sense was in Warren Sharp’s 2020 Football Preview, and Sharp laid it all out in compelling fashion.
Per Sharp’s charting, NFL teams used pre-snap motion in the first three quarters of games on 39% of passes, 49% of rushes, and 43% of all plays in the 2019 season. The 49ers led the league with pre-snap motion on 66% of their passes, followed by the Patriots (65%), the Titans (63%), the Ravens (57%), and the Chiefs (53%). Two of those teams made the Super Bowl, the Ravens were the AFC’s number-one seed, the Titans made it to the AFC Championship game, and the Patriots ranked 11th in Football Outsiders’ Offensive DVOA metrics despite a receiver group that couldn’t bust a grape.
However, they used pre-snap motion at below average rates, yet saw much more improvement when passing with pre-snap motion. Look at the comparison vs the league average with the advantage gained by using pre-snap motion prior to passes.
Per Sharp’s metrics, teams had 0.2 more yards per attempt, a 3% success rate increase, and 0.02 more EPA per attempt. The Vikings, who used the 20th-most pre-snap motion on passing plays last season, saw a bump of 1.6 in yards per attempt, a 6% success rate bump, and an increase in EPA per attempt of 0.25. The Buccaneers, who could have desperately used anything to make Jameis Winston more efficient in 2019, used pre-snap motion on just 37% of their plays, one of the lowest rates in the league. The league average was 40%.
With Tom Brady now on board in Bruce Arians’ offense, expect a big uptick. Brade has utilized pre-snap motion for years to help discern coverage concepts, to isolate and remove specific defenders, and to give his receivers an advantage that their physical gifts don’t always present. One the Bucs have a new sense of pre-snap trickeration and Brady has Mike Evans and Chris Godwin to throw to… well, things could get interesting.
When talking about the specific schematic advantages of pre-snap motion, most people will point to the ability of the quarterback to read man versus zone coverage based on the motion defender. If the defender follows the motion receiver through the formation, it’s generally man. If the defender stays put and hands the responsibility through the formation, it’s generally zone.
But defenses are starting to show dummy man/zone looks, and as Orlovsky told me, that’s not the ultimate advantage for quarterbacks — or, for that matter, anybody on the offensive side of the ball.
“Yeah, I think we’re all past man vs. zone,” he told me. “We’re kind of beyond that. The big thing was creating leverage on certain players. That’s a big deal. You could get certain guys – when you line up in your formation, and you’re moving your personnel, you can get certain [defenders] to move where you want them. When you use motion, and you kind of know how your opponent will respond, you will call certain plays to be run at certain guys.
“We’re seeing more coaches understand that… motion doesn’t have to be married to man/zone. It could be to try and get your run game to be run at certain people. Or, to try and get your passing game directed at certain people, whether it’s man or zone. Because if that nickel defender doesn’t kick over to trips, you can have your slot receiver working on a safety. So now, just off motion, even if it’s against a zone defense, you have really created an advantage. That safety really wants to play the run more than he wants to play the pass. So, it’s really about trying to create advantages, whether it’s via leverage, or via fits in the run game. I think we’ve seen great growth on that in the NFL.”
Pre-snap motion also creates specific advanatges in the run game — it’s a big reason the Ravens had the NFL’s most schematically evil rushing attack in the NFL last season.
Change: to make or become different. Right now in the NFL outside of the talent-it’s the #1 marker of a good offense scheme wise. Some teams are great at it, like @Ravens and some aren’t. If you’re not-you’re behind everyone who is. #NFLGamepass#nooffseasonpic.twitter.com/krSqIEWi2R
Ravens offensive coordinator Greg Roman has been brilliant at cooking up different kinds of motion concepts, which is the next level of this — when offensive minds continue to realize that it’s the complexity of motion that really puts defenses on a string — as the Ravens, 49ers, and Chiefs already have — the advantages grow in an exponential sense.
“I don’t necessarily care if an offense motions,” Orlovsky said, putting his defensive coordinator hat on. “But when they have different motions, that’s when I’ve got a problem. [Remember when] Chip Kelly was the greatest thing in the world because he played with tempo? Well, defenses caught up and started playing with tempo. Then, the great coaches, Sean McVay being one of them, they’ve got all different kinds of tempo. They’ve got stupid-fast tempo, then the fast tempo, then the ‘okay no-huddle’ tempo, then the slow tempo. That’s what screws with defenses. Because then, you don’t know. You’ve got to be ready all the time. That’s when you’re on your heels, and you’re guessing rather than dictating. Those offenses that are constantly changing the way they’re doing the motion – for defenses, you can no longer feel confident in what you’re doing. You are always going to be a step slow.”
In part 2 of the “Emotions in Motion” series, we’ll get into more specific examples of run and pass motion concepts that have taken over the NFL. In Part 3, we’ll talk about what defenses need to do to put a cap on these particular innovations.
