The future of offensive football

Passing is king, and defenses at all levels of football are trying to force teams to run. What does that mean for the future of offense?

Forcing the Run

(Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports)

So, the question becomes for defensive coordinators: If you want the offense to run the football because passing is more efficient, how do you force the QB to hand the football off?

A good starting point for this might be in the Big 12. The conference gets mocked for “not playing defense,” but that could not be further from the truth. Some of what you are seeing trickle into the NFL in terms of defensive concepts comes from the Big 12, often after working its way up from the high school level, because after all if you want to know what the future of football looks like in all three phases, you had best start there.

One of the ways teams have tried to force the offense to hand the football off is by playing light in the box. That brings us to Ames, Iowa. The Iowa State Cyclones are one of the defenses at the front lines of handling the spread/RPO game at the college level, and led by defensive coordinator Jon Heacock, they have found a means:

The 3-3-5 defense.

This is something that many have written about, and back in the summer of 2019, I dove into this defense at length, finding parallels between what Heacock was doing on Saturdays in the Big 12 and what Bill Belichick was doing on Sundays in the AFC East. The premise is this: play light up front with three safeties in your 3-3-5, but trust your overhang players and a hybrid safety to still get into your fits against the run:

That might look crazy, but there is a method to the madness. As Cody Alexander — one of the smartest football minds on defense out there — described it:

The box literally has nine players involved in the fit. By using a safety from depth (JS), the defense is ensuring it has an extra fitter in the box and most likely unblocked. What the Cyclones have done is squeeze everything into one gap in the middle of the formation. If anything bounces, it is cleaned up by a trapping CB to the boundary or the Sam LB patrolling the edge of the box to the field. Against the run, the trapping CB from the field can even make his way into the fit depending on how the offense uses the two WRs.

Here’s what that looks like on film:

You can play light up front, but once you bring the overhang players, as well as that hybrid “joker” safety into the run fit, you can stop the run. Show quarterback a light box pre-snap, make him hand the football off and become a spectator post-snap, and then get into your fits against the run.

Sure, sometimes the offense might break off a big play, but as we have seen from the above EPA numbers, you are better off as a defense over time turning the offense into a run-first team.

This is something Bill Belichick has incorporated over time, and every single time I think of how to stop explosive passing offenses I return to this idea.

There are the Patriots a few seasons ago, facing the explosive Kansas City offense and using a 3-3-5 look down on the goal line to force Patrick Mahomes to become a spectator.

Of course, this is just one way that defenses are perhaps trying to force the running play. Another was touched upon recently by Pro Football Focus; Seth Galina, who is another brilliant mind covering the game. Galina looked at the rise of two-high defensive structures this season in a recent piece for PFF. Titled “Why two-high defenses are poised to take over the NFL,” Galina argues that the Vic Fangio/Brandon Staley defensive structures are the next big thing:

In all, 48.6% of all early-down snaps were played with that middle-of-the-field closed look, down from 53.9% in 2018 and 57.6% in 2019. And the important thing to know about these numbers is who is pulling the average down under 50%.

The Los Angeles Rams led the NFL in expected points added (EPA) allowed per play this regular season and played the fewest early-down pre-snap closed looks — only 11% of their early-down snaps were in a pre-snap closed look. For reference, the 2015 Seahawks did this 75% of the time.

Of course, some teams played a low percentage of snaps in this look before the 2020 Rams came along, but the schemes that spread throughout the league are the ones that dominate statistically. That’s what the Rams did in 2020 with new defensive coordinator Brandon Staley, who landed a head-coaching job with the Los Angeles Chargers after just one year of coordinator experience.

Staley previously coached under Vic Fangio in Denver and Chicago. And for what it’s worth, Fangio’s 2020 Broncos recorded the second-lowest pre-snap middle-of-the-field-closed rate in the league. Back in Chicago, the Bears hired Sean Desai as defensive coordinator this offseason, and Desai has worked with both Fangio and Staley.

Now remember, it was Fangio’s defense back in Chicago that perhaps foreshadowed the fall of Sean McVay/Jared Goff. Fangio’s structure — using Quarters coverage, ignoring pre-snap motion — led to the defenses that slowed down the Los Angeles Rams back in 2018, culminating in Belichick and the Patriots emerging victorious in Super Bowl LIII. Rather than try and bang his head against the wall, McVay did the next best thing: Hire Staley, who worked under Fangio in Chicago.

But the rise of this two-high looks pre-snap is a means of forcing the offense into that decision to run the football. With both safeties deep, the offense is usually “plus-one” in the box, meaning they have the advantage if they keep the ball on the ground. But it is a fool’s choice. Over time — as the EPA numbers tell us — the defense wins when the QB hands the ball off.

Of course, you still need to stop the run from this look, and defenses have ways of doing that. One means is by doing something called “slinging the fits,” which is a concept that Kyle Cogan, a high school defensive coordinator/head coach, has discussed at length both on Twitter and in various podcasts and coaching clinics. The premise is this: If you operate out of a two-high defense, you need to get one of your outside linebackers/overhang defenders into the run fit somehow, otherwise you are going to be out-manned up front.

So. you do what Cogan terms “sling the fits.” If you are one of those two outside players and the quarterback looks at you on an RPO play, you drop and play the pass. If the quarterback is looking away from you, you get yourself into the run fit:

As you can see in that first example, the defense is in two-high before the snap but in order to get one of the SAM or the WILL into the run fit, you need to “sling the fits.” So if the QB turns away from you, you get into the fit. After all, it would take a damn good quarterback to look one way and throw the other…

…which is where this conversation might be headed.

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