LNBS: Calling options / Adding reverse action downfield
 

Offense in the NFL is evolving rapidly, and outpacing Defense at a record pace.

Watching the close games the past few weeks, I’ve seen two “hook and lateral” plays, and it got me thinking:

If you can predict with a reasonable degree of certainty what the safety or corner will do in a particular coverage, you should be able to determine what they will do post-completion as they track towards the ballcarrier. At this point, you could anticipate - and plan for - where the next pocket of space will open up.

For so long it’s been a one hit approach: find the open man, and he runs in space until he scores, gets tackled, or goes out of bounds.

What if it was a combo approach? Find the open man, gain yards, and provide him with an option to lateral to a crossing receiver who should be able to get another chunk.

You see this with rugby runs all the time. Why not more often in football?

Biggest risk: turning the ball over.

If you trust your team to execute, be smart and make the right decision in space, this could be a disgusting next level of dominance.

You could even run a crosser by the ballcarrier as a diversion to freeze the tackler. The mere threat of a downfield reverse would be terrifying to account for.

When it goes wrong you turn the ball over. That's the last thing coaches want to happen.

It doesnt happen because it's really ****ing dumb.

I agree. BUT you can mitigate this risk a bit through practice and coaching the players to make the proper decisions.

You could have the crosser come close enough for it to be a handoff instead of a lateral, as well.

I mean, can you imagine Kelce on a slant, who then hands it to Tyreek running the opposite direction?

What if the Chiefs put Tyreek in the backfield and Kelce inside (either next to Fisher or Schwartz; doesn’t matter which).

Fake the handoff to Tyreek to Kelce’s side. Kelce releases into the flat and Tyreek follows him. Dump the ball to Kelce.

The speed option is then set up in the flat. The corner has to either try to bring down Kelce or stick with Tyreek.

The turnover possibility is still very real and the play will never happen, but it’s fun to think about.

Next offensive revolution will be rbs who pass and the two rbs and qb lateral around until the play opens up

So is passing it to your OT in the red zone, or having your DT throw a jump pass.

Why do they do it late in games when they need a huge play? The element of surprise.

If it was a regular package defenses had to prepare for, it could be a strategic advantage.

They do it on kickoffs and punts. I don't see why it couldn't be done on offense with practice in the right situation.

EXACTLY.

Layered options downfield. Defenses would be so ****ed.

DE’s get destroyed on having to pick poison on read options in the backfield. Imagine a CB having to do this for the first time.

I think the continued evolution of the offenses will primarily be based on getting the ball into space as fast as possible to make the offensive line less and less important.

It’s really hard to have 5 good AND healthy linemen. That’s also 5 guys that you have to pay eventually. You can have a revolving door at RB or WR and you’ll be just fine. The more unimportant you can make the the line, the better from a contractual and health standpoint.

If a play like that was effective getting Hill isolated in open space, it would be as close to unstoppable in the NFL as you can get.

I could see something like that being used a couple of times a year out of a normal offensive formation as a trick type play. Anything more is asking for trouble. NFL defenders are to fast and to good at reacting to regularly get beat by those plays. Even the fluky, "Miami Miracle" plays are extremely rare. For every one that works there are 20 that end in fumbles recovered by the defense/kicking team

It's one thing when the defense knows something like that is coming because there's 5 seconds left, it's another when you bust out out on 2nd and 3 in the 3rd quarter.

Yep.

The most similar concept I can compare it to was the inside pitch packages we had last year. We ran the same line up like four times and had a different variation on it each time. It was crisp, everyone knew their assignments and executed it really well.

Or, like when the dolphins busted out the Wildcat on the Patriots. They had no clue what to do.

Or, like when Kaepernick destroyed the league with read-options.

This year, it’s the ‘QB as a receiver’ trend after both the Pats and Eagles ran it in the SB.

If we have the same focus and have a handful of successful double-action plays (downfield options, route + lats, downfield reverses) we would crush in the playoffs.

Reason #1: The defenders don't have to stay behind the ball as they do in rugby. There is always the chance of a defender on the pitch man, making it beyond risky.

Reason #2: Pitching the ball MUST be practiced if used regularly. If it's a gadget play, you rep it a few times per week and save it for The Alamo. If you're going to do it a lot, you must practice it a lot. Juice and squeeze ratios must be met, which they wouldn't be in this scenario.

I've actually been thinking for sometime with our talent there should always be a second receiver when possible coming over for a lateral off the primary receiver.

What I want to know is, what happened to all the pre snap confusion on offense? We look too vanilla lately

I've noticed a rash of false starts and illegal motion/formations lately. Maybe the mental reerunation of the defense rubbed off on the offense?
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These are the kind of non-forward thinking opinions that coaches like Bob Sutton use before they become a ****ing fossil.


I take it No-look passes are ****ing dumb?
Oh, I know... how about drafting an NFL QB with a baseball background and not touching his throwing mechanics.... is that ****ing dumb?

This doesn't mean that any idea is necessarily a good one, nor that it should be tried to prove it.

You really want to turn a nice downfield completion into a turnover.

Yes, that's ****ing dumb. You do that when there are no options, or as a gadget play.

WHY would this always be a turnover?

It's 1946 and the Chicago Cardinals are like.... "Gee, ya know... everytime we pass the ball we could have an interception... lets just run the ball everytime."

You know when you practice consistently, you typically get good at it?

It's why today we have a passing league, and not a run dominant league. Teams thought outside the box, and they practiced.



PS: Elon Musk will NEVER have a self landing rocket!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe Andy will unveil it in the playoffs, along with an 8-man defense to confuse the QB. Hell, we're basically running 8 functional guys out there as it is.

First, "outside the box" is not as outside as you think.

Almost everything that's "new" is just recycled old. Hell, RPO isn't new.

Now, running twelve downfield laterals per game, that'd be new.

Sure. Please do. I think you'd have great success with it until you didn't.

I'd also review how logic works. You see, skepticism doesn't make an idea true, simply because other, unrelated ideas were proven true in spite of skepticism.

People were skeptical of using leeches to cure foul humours in the blood....

I think the downfield lateral idea is similar to that.

I used to run it all the time in Madden 96

Contact after downfield completions occurs too quick typically to attempt it. You could draw some stuff up for short routes for when the defense is playing deep I guess but then every team has plays for that and they only use it when they're desperate at the end of half or 4th quarter. And you see how those plays typically work out...

This reminds me. When we had 4 seconds left I was hoping our offense would get a chance. Yes they squibbed it right down the middle but hell they could have told the returner to quickly throw it out of bounds slightly behind them or run out if possible. I wanted to see Mahomes try to throw a 75 yard hail mary lol.

He could have just taken a knee and used zero seconds. Do not know what that didn't happen.

Yeah you're right. A knee would've worked too. I guess they figured a return was their best shot. I would've said to let the offense get the final play. Who knows you might get a penalty and have a shot at a game winning FG.

Better odds than a multi-lateral kick return UNLESS the offense doesn't have that gadget and KR does. Judging by what I saw, the KR unit didn't have one.

It was our version of the Music City Miracle. The Kansas City Pitiful.

You train your receivers to read the defenders and analyze if/when they should lateral to the crosser. Or, you call each route with a chaser route and have the primary receiver catch it, then run the option downfield - keep or pitch.

What are you cutting from practice to install this?

Also, what cyborgs are you drafting to run it?

Because scheduling the install for new packages is something that professional football players and coaches aren’t accustomed to doing.

As far as the type of player capable of handing the ball to a teammate or not handing the ball to a teammate, I’m just not sure. We’d probably have to develop them in a lab.

I give up...go find a team and run it. Post video here please.

Here's one example, dad.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uqLUFdTfQ2g" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Imagine this in the third quarter of a game, Kelce on the catch with Hill coming up the sideline:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LUHqAxXjSs8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Good luck catching Hill / DAT / Pringle on one of these:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GDqIuUnu9nU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Not sure if I missed if someone else's mentioning it, but doing it in the backfield or on a punt/special teams return is meaningfully different from doing it downfield. Why? Because in the former two instances, you're not dealing with the defense being underneath. Not only does that increase the likelihood of a turnover (because in a sense you're not as "alone" if you have a simple miscue), but you also can't easily plan for the spacing you may or may not have given that you'd have to go into the next dimension of the play in considering where the defenders would be during the lateral downfield. It would truly be some next level shit if that became a regular part of the playbook.

I'm happy for someone else to figure that out first. We have enough gimmicks in our offense.

This one is less risky because if the receiver mistimes the lateral, the ball goes out of bounds along the sideline.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uEVHr3zwwlA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Maybe you scout the defense's reaction to certain receptions when they are in a particular coverage, and know where the space will open up.

Also, if you call these along the sideline, the ball just goes out of bounds if the pitch is missed.

This team ran one in the middle of the second quarter:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cCdz3DKuapM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If Eric ****ing Fisher got a playoff TD like this, CP would melt the **** down.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zNqCVTs38nU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

We could be the Harlem Globetrotters of the NFL.

We can go reverse, reverse pass, double reverse pass, double reverse fake pass, flea flicker, lateral skip double pass, double pass, double throwback pass, fumblerooski, Bumerooski, circus, gate, double gate, overload gate....

So the argument is not longer about making gadget plays a core part of the offense, simply that they exist, people have run them, and it's on film?

Great argument. I relent. Fire Reid and hire the CP collective to draw up an entire offense of nothing but rugby laterals.

It's bulletproof.

Here's one my team ran.

https://youtu.be/CbK7Xk-_YDA

Um. You said that, I didn’t. You’re arguing with yourself. This is a LNBS thread. Don’t be a drama queen.

I proposed us having a few plays per game where we use the fastest weapon in football history in space with an unsuspecting defense.

I discussed the primary risk of turning the ball over, and how to mitigate that risk.

Your argument was that “it’s dumb” and that our coaches would have to sacrifice practice time to work on it.

Actually it's dumb because the team would have to use too much practice time to make it a regularly effective weapon, time that could be spent invested into projects with far higher rates of return.

I'm not opposed to a gadget, I'm simply of the opinion that an NFL offense should not invest heavily in them.

Good day.

You guys play too much Madden.

You don't need to score a TD on every play. Sometimes controlling the clock and having a long 5-8 minute drive can be very effective towards setting the tempo of a game.

The idea of using a lateral scheme sounds like something you'd want for a team that lacks the ability to score points, so then takes an all or nothing approach to every drive.

Bumping this thread now that we have Hardman, Hill and Thompson.

Hook and Lat from Kelce to Hardman or Hill? Jesus.

Kelce has no accuracy throwing. Hill is even worse

Why do we need gimmicks?

Just line up a center, four tight ends wide on each side (keeping three of them on the line of scrimmage, of course), and then put Patrick at QB and Tyreek at HB. It's a score every time.

Hi there. Do you know what a lateral is?

The jet sweep is a gimmick. Last year when DAT walked into the end zone in Week 1, that was a gimmick. Or Kelce taking an inside screen shovel pass. Or Pat No-looking.

Andy is innovative. Every year there’s weird wrinkles.

I just don’t think it’s as wild and far-fetched as it sounds to have a guy with the ball toss it to a faster guy that’s running right next to him. You see it in rugby all the time.

None of those plays you listed are gimmicks. They're frequently used in college football every week/game. Hook and lateral plays aren't used frequently on any level.

Patrick Mahomes don’t need no gimmicks. He’s got Hill, Watkins, Kelce, D-Rob, Hardman, Thompson, and a rocket launcher of an arm. Somebody gonna be open.

"Hungry Pig Toss"

"Hungry Pig Right"

2 plays we've run 2 times in 7 years...?

Alex ran the pistol for a year.

Don't act like Reid isn't innovative or mess with opposing defenses.

I understand this idea is outside the norm, hence the LNBS tag. I'm not advocating that it become our entire offense. I'm simply saying this would be one hell of a wrinkle for other teams to have to account for each week.

JFC ROFL

We have Patty MVP. No need for madden level bullshit gimmicks

There she is

What if we used the fumblerooski?

A playbook based off hook and ladders and rugby tosses ROFL ROFL. Wow....just wow

EAT MY WHOLE ASSHOLE

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We’ve talked about the next wrinkle.<br><br>THIS. IS. IT. <a href="https://t.co/OEBFm3mQVC">pic.twitter.com/OEBFm3mQVC</a></p>&mdash; Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharpFootball/status/1178396038975168512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 29, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Still horny. Don’t care.

Just a regular ol’ hook & lateral back to the QB in the red zone. Probably just some fun for the fans, but also...

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I really dont think the NFL is ready for what is coming �� <a href="https://twitter.com/RealMNchiefsfan?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RealMNchiefsfan</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/LockedOnChiefs?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@LockedOnChiefs</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Dantej21?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Dantej21</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/EddieHigh?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@EddieHigh</a> <a href="https://t.co/N8LAvz3mzz">pic.twitter.com/N8LAvz3mzz</a></p>&mdash; 816Loyal (@Dooley816) <a href="https://twitter.com/Dooley816/status/1297264585548988416?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 22, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I'm going to continue to bump this over the years when relevant.

Missed this play from the Jets earlier this year. Would be wild to have Kelce or Bell (former QB's) throw this or something similar to Hardman or Tyreek.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w5_2jpJlGkg" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

IIRC, I saw 2 this last weekend. One was the Cardinals and it ended up being an illegal forward pass back across the field. The other was a true lateral but I can't remember which team did it.

One issue I foresee is Kelce and Hill are both covered very tightly nowadays. To run anything like this, it would require space after the initial catch.

In this recent example, the defenders are playing to defend the sticks and don't mind allowing a catch with some space underneath. When they swarm to tackle the ball carrier, it even further frees up the receiver who gets the lateral. If the pass misses, it goes out of bounds and they punt. If the guy is covered, don't lateral/throw it, and try to get the first down on your own.

It would require a mix of 2 things:

- Game situation. 3rd and long, middle of the field, middle of the game would be perfect. Ideally you have a slight lead to further pad yourself if it fails.

- Role players. As mentioned, Kelce/Hill are going to draw heavy focus. Someone like Hardman, Pringle or McKinnon would be less covered, and have the speed & wiggle to get a big gain.

My dawg

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">From one tight end to another �� <a href="https://twitter.com/tkelce?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@tkelce</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DENvsKC?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DENvsKC</a> on Prime Video<br>Also available on <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NFLPlus?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NFLPlus</a> <a href="https://t.co/U9rA3YdBnZ">https://t.co/U9rA3YdBnZ</a> <a href="https://t.co/DsZ5ZTHWJk">pic.twitter.com/DsZ5ZTHWJk</a></p>&mdash; NFL (@NFL) <a href="https://twitter.com/NFL/status/1712627215215837507?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 13, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is what I mean when i say desinged downfield laterals are the future offensive innovation in the NFL. It works <a href="https://t.co/3sZT7Mh2Jy">pic.twitter.com/3sZT7Mh2Jy</a></p>&mdash; PFT Commenter (JMU 5-0) (@PFTCommenter) <a href="https://twitter.com/PFTCommenter/status/1712627804389380185?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 13, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Sigh. I'll forever be sad about this one. That's what this thread was made for.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">All 22 angle of the Kelce lateral/Toney offside play. Doesn&#39;t appear Toney once checks with the sideline judge on his side from this.<br><br>Also amazing job still from Kelce finding him in space. <a href="https://t.co/UyiVABuBSp">pic.twitter.com/UyiVABuBSp</a></p>&mdash; Shaun Newkirk (@Shauncore) <a href="https://twitter.com/Shauncore/status/1734071439869788421?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 11, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Only Kelce could even attempt this shit lol, it's sad that Toney was lined up because that play would have been an all-timer

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I think you’d take a lot of risk out if the planned lateral receiver is running down the sideline so an errant or dropped pass goes out of bounds.