Downfield Passing Game

First of all, this post will make use of some of the stuff discussed in my “terminology” post (http://calfootballstrategy.blogspot.com/2014/01/this-is-meant-to-be-reference-post-that.html). If you don't know/remember how to number WR's from the defense's perspective, you should definitely take a look at that post before getting too far into this one.  Also, if you want to skip ahead TouchedTheAxeIn82 has put together a video of a bunch of these plays, and that plus some written commentary is at the bottom of the post.

This post completes my basic introdution to the Bear Raid offense by looking at the downfield passing game. The name “Air Raid” might make you think that the passing game is sophisticated, but it's really not. The theory is that there are only so many coverages that the defense can run. If you have a play (or two) that can beat each of those coverages, how much more do you need? Sonny tells a story about how the Texas Tech coaches would go around the clinic circuit, meet with other coaching staffs, etc. during the off-season, and they'd all come back with great ideas and things to add to the offense. They'd present their findings to Leach, and his answer would be “That sounds great. What are we gonna cut?” If the new play was better than something they already had, then they had no use for the old play. If the new play wasn't better than something they already had, why add it?

This might make the passing game sound too simple, but certain route combinations are just plain tough to defend with certain coverages. It doesn't matter if the defense knows what you like to run against Cover-2, because if they're running Cover-2 when you're running your Cover-2 beater they're in trouble. This is a point I can't emphasize enough: The defense doesn't figure out an offense by understanding how individual plays work, they figure out an offense by knowing when you're going to run those plays. This post, then, is going to take you through each of these concepts against the coverages they're designed to beat. I should also note that no matter what coverage the defense is in, every concept has a route that should gain positive yards against it. There is a limited number of concepts in the offense, but the idea is that through repeating the same concept over and over again you can make it efficient in a lot of different situations. This is the philosophical opposite of having a different play for every situation.

Finally, we hardly saw any man coverage in the first three games, which is why I've emphasized concepts that beat zone coverages in this post. As I work through the rest of the season we'll talk about man-beaters when we get to gameplans that used them.

Shakes (Cover-2)

As we saw in the quick game post, Cover-2 puts five defenders in underneath coverage and can do a pretty good job of covering the quick passing game. It also gives the defense good run support against outside runs. If you've watched our offense at all you can guess that a coverage that takes away the quick game and stops outside runs is a concern, so we'd better have a Cover-2 beater. For us that play is “Shakes.”

In Cover-2 the safeties are going to divide the deep field into halves. They're going to align a little deeper than you'd see in a quarters look, and at the snap their first steps will probably be backwards and outside. For any zone coverage the weaknesses will be at the edges of the zones, so Cover-2 has three soft spots deep: the space down each sideline, and the middle of the field. The underneath coverage is going to help the safeties defend these soft spots through good, physical play. The CB's are going to line up outside of the #1 WR's and they're going to bump them and re-route them to the inside, preventing them from getting deep down the sidelines too quickly. The LB's will line up inside the #2 receivers and will bump them and reroute them to the outside, preventing them from getting to the deep middle too quickly. When done correctly, this should funnel all receivers to a spot near the hashmarks, making it easy for the safeties to cover anything over the top.

With those assignments in mind you can see that Shakes is a good option for attacking this coverage. The #2 receivers are running corner routes deep. Remember that the OLB's are lined up inside of them to prevent them from getting to the soft spot in the deep middle. This leaves outside breaking routes like corners uncontested until they get to the safeties. As long as they run good, aggressive routes to push the safeties deep, they have good leverage and a lot of room to break into that open space to the outside.

The safeties will have a hard time defending the corner routes, so if the defense is going to stop this it's going to be up to the CB's. In Cover-2 the CB's are technically responsible for the flats (short outside zones), but they have another important responsibility: They have to sink underneath deep corner routes like the ones in Shakes. This forces the QB to put more air under the ball and gives the safety more time to make a play on it. While sinking like this they're also watching anything to their flat. They're supposed to sink under the corner route until the QB commits his shoulders to throwing to the flat, and then they come up to make the play on the short stuff. Obviously, depening on the team you're playing CB's are more or less disciplined with ID'ing this kind of thing, and you can imagine that a defense playing against an Air Raid passing game gets so tired of seeing passes completed to the flat that they start to jump the short stuff early, so you should get plenty of deep shots to the corner routes on this play.

From the QB's perspective, he's trusting that the receivers running the corner routes can beat the safeties and so he's reading the CB's. If they sink, he throws the out route underneath them. If they come up, he throws the corner. This kind of route combination, using two receivers to create a high-low read on a flat defender, is called a “Smash” concept. “Shakes” is just a double smash, because we're running this on both sides of the field with the QB choosing which side to work based on match-ups and other game-planned factors.

You can run this with a 6-man protection where the RB stays in to block, but we like to run it with the RB releasing deep down the middle of the field. If the safeties are widening really aggressively to cover the corner routes then they'll be creating a huge hole in the deep middle of the field. The OLB's are busy looking to wall the #2 receivers, so the MLB will be the guy left covering the RB deep. We ran this with Bigelow and Muhammad last year, and you can imagine that we like that match-up when we can get it.

Y-Cross (Cover-3)

In most playbooks you'll get a few pages on the offense's philosophy before you get into the technical stuff. Here you'll get a bunch of bullet-points showing the big-picture things that the coaches want to emphasize. In Hal Mumme's Air Raid playbook from the 1998 Kentucky season, one of those bullets said “Everything works against Cover-3.” Shakes might not (at least not the deep routes), but other than that it's pretty true. In this coverage the CB's and FS will divide the deep field into thirds, leaving four zone defenders (3 LB's and a safety) to cover the underneath zones sideline to sideline. Simply put, when the offense can use four WR's and a RB to stretch those four defenders shallow, or when they can send four WR's deep to attack the three deep defenders, everything works.

One concept that's especially good against Cover-3 is Y-cross. Until Leach started going crazy with 4-verticals (which I'll get to next), this was probably the best deep shot that the Air Raid had. Above we saw that “Shakes” uses a “Smash” concept, which uses two receivers to create a vertical stretch on the CB. Y-cross is a “flood route,” which also creates a vertical stretch but uses three receivers to do it:

The X, Y, and H run routes at three different levels on the left side of the field. To understand exactly how this combination works we can look at the responsibilities of the zone defenders in Cover-3. The CB's are responsible for defending the deep sidelines first and foremost, since they have help from the FS on anything to the middle of the field. When X runs his post route, the CB is going to stay with him and squeeze him toward the middle of the field. This allows X to take away the deep coverage on the left side of the diagram. Once the deep coverage is out of the picture, you simply get a high-low read for the QB on the WLB. The WLB needs to run with H here, because if he doesn't then he'll get outflanked and lose contain, leaving H to get big YAC's down the sideline. If he stays shallow and moves outside with H, though, he's creating a big window for the QB to hit Y on the crossing route behind him.

If the defense is going to stop this then the MLB has to stay with Y as he widens. The Y is coached to run “under Sam (the SLB) and over Mike (the MLB),” making this pick-up tough. When the SLB sees Y running what looks like a shallow cross he's going to pass him off to the MLB. When Y cuts behind the MLB, though, he can get lost. You can make this pick-up even more complicated by having the RB run something shallow, or by having the RB run a play-action fake at the MLB. The MLB would be responsible for the RB on certain route combinations or for stopping the run, so there's a good chance you can catch his eye and help spring the Y. Of course, if the FS comes up hard on Y instead of covering the deep middle, you've got great leverage to throw the post route to X. If the QB feels like he has enough room to throw the post, he'll take that shot for the home-run.

If all else fails, the curl on the right side of the diagram is safe against Cover-3. The CB has to stay over the top of Z, so assuming that Z does a good job of selling the go-route and driving him deep he should be able to hitch up in some open space. The SS might be able to drop underneath this route, but if he's good at that then you can have the RB run a route at him to hold/move him. As you can see I haven't drawn anything in for the RB in the diagram above. From week to week you can do different things with him depending on the strengths and weaknesses you see in the defense's pass drops. The post route and the crosser will stay constant on this play, but you can tag just about anything else. You can have Z run a post on the backside, you can have H run a go instead of an out, you can flip the concept so that X runs the curl, H runs the crossing route and Z runs the post, you can run it from trips (something we like to do), etc.

Four Verticals (Cover-3)

The most obvious way for a spread offense to attack a three-deep zone coverage is to send four receivers deep. This concept wasn't always common in the Air Raid, but when Leach came around to it it became one of his favorites. The concept is really simple, but there are a few points worth emphasizing:

First of all, this route combination is very much about landmarks for the receivers. To ensure that they get the right horizontal stretch on the deep defenders, the outside WR's will take outside releases and the inside receivers will go down the hashmarks. The QB will read the FS here. Whichever inside receiver he drifts toward, he'll throw to the other. If this seems too easy it probably is, since many teams won't just let you run four receivers deep against three defenders. A lot them will have their SS run with the seam by Y here and will have the FS take H to let them cover all four routes, but the read will work the same way. This works because the Y has a few options to get open against that SS. I've drawn two route possibilities for him here. If the FS stays in the middle of the field, Y will continue down the seam. Since the FS isn't moving over to H, there's a good chance the QB can fit it in there to him in this case. If the FS does leave the middle of the field to Cover H, Y has the freedom to bend into the space that's been vacated in the deep middle, a cut that might also help him break free from the SS. In general, all four receivers also have the option to pull up their routes and settle down in space if their DB is playing really deep. In a nutshell, the rules for this concept are to stay in your vertical lane, but to do what you have to do to get open within it.

On this play you also have options with the RB, but the most common thing is to have him leak out and run an option route where he's trying to find a soft spot anywhere in the underneath coverage.

You can run this out of whatever formation you want. The receivers will work to the same landmarks to give you the right horizontal stretch. Here it is out of trips:

We've introduced a number of concepts by name so far (triangle read, smash, flood). 4-verts is just a deep horizontal stretch. This concept sends one more receiver deep than there are deep defenders. With that in mind, you can note that our version of “shakes” with the RB going deep down the middle combines two of the concepts we've talked about so far. It uses a smash concept on each sideline and a three receiver horizontal stretch on the two deep defenders.

Post-Wheel (Quarters)

This is another concept that works against a few different coverages, but we got the most out of it (91 yards and a TD) against Northwestern's quarters coverage, so that's the context I'll talk about.

We ran post-wheel two times in a span of 30 seconds. The first time was a long TD to Harper. After that TD Northwestern fumbled the ball almost immediately. We ran a botched reverse that got us to 2^nd and 27, but then completed another post-wheel to Treggs for 39 yards. The commentator blamed Harper's TD on a bad safety read, but what gets missed is that the play to Treggs was the exact same concept run against the other safety, who made the exact same bad read. When two different guys make the same “mistake,” it seems more likely that we've picked up a schematic weakness in the way that they ran their coverage. The safeties didn't do what they were supposed to, but that's because we knew their responsibilities and made it hard for them to do their job. To draw this out, I'll do a quick summary of a variant of quarters coverage. There are a lot of ways to run it, so we'll focus on a tag called “read”

Quarters is a nice, versatile coverage because it divides the defense in half. On each side of the field the safety, CB, and OLB are in communication with each other, and they have a series of checks that they can make based on the formation that the offense uses. They can get into whatever check they need to be in without their decision impacting the rest of the defense. In the diagrams below we'll be focused on the CB, SS, and WLB on the right side of the screen.

In the last paragraph I mentioned that quarters breaks the coverage down into two units with a safety, CB, and OLB in each one. It is the job of those three players to defend the #1 and #2 receivers on their side of the field. When I talk about “checks” that can be made in the coverage, I'm talking about different ways that the CB, safety, and OLB can divide up responsibility for those two receivers.

The most important question for those three players to consider is “How much help can we get from the OLB?” In this diagram you'll see that F is the #2 receiver on the right side, and the WLB is in good position to cover him: 

In this diagram, there's little risk that the WLB will get beat to the sideline by F. The safety can, accordingly, call a check that makes the WLB responsible for the RB out of the backfield. We can imagine a formation where this wouldn't be the case: 

Here, F is split out wide and the WLB is defending the QB draw or some such thing, so he can't cover F. The safety would have to check to something that didn't require the WLB to cover #2. Those are some of the basic considerations for understanding different quarters checks.

If the WLB can cover the #2 receiver, then the safety can make a “read” check, which is what we'll be interested in here. This will divide up coverage responsibilities in the following way: The CB will stay over the top of #1 on anything downfield or outside no matter what. The safety and the OLB will then divide up coverage on #2. If #2 runs vertical, the safety will cover him: 

If he runs out, the OLB will cover him and the safety will “rob” under #1:

 

This, then, is how “read” divides up coverage responsibilities.

Now that we know the basic responsibilities, we can see why our play worked twice against Northwestern. The formation here is really important:

 

We're running a post-wheel pattern to the right side. The WLB will ultimately be responsible for running with F on the wheel, which means that the SS isn't responsible for it. When the RB releases to the right, he becomes the #2 receiver on that side of the field. The defense appears to be in “read” coverage. This means that until the routes develop, the safety has two possible assignments. If #2 runs vertical he has to cover him, but if #2 doesn't then he's supposed to get under any vertical route by #1. On this play the fact that #2 is coming out of the backfield is huge. If #2 were on the line of scrimmage, the safety would get a quick read about where the route was going and could make a quick decision to get under #1. Because #2 is starting five yards deep in the backfield, however, he doesn't even get to the line of scrimmage until #1 is several yards downfield. The fact that #2 is starting in the backfield forces the safety to make his read later and leaves him in no-man's land, where he isn't responsible for covering #2 but is also too late to help with #1 on the post. The post route here is hard for the CB to defend one-on-one, and we were able to exploit this match-up with two different receivers against two different DB's.

On the trips side of the play we're doing something that looks different but is actually very similar conceptually:

Without seeing this coverage against more route combinations I can't say for sure what Northwestern's rules are against trips, but to me it looks like the CB is locking down #1, and then the SLB, MLB, and FS are playing “read” on #2 and #3. So, for purposes of coverage you can forget about X and the CB entirely and pretend that H is #1 and Y is #2, then just apply the same coverage rules that we saw above. The SLB will cover H on anything vertical (a great match-up for the receiver), the FS will cover Y on anything vertical, and the MLB will cover Y on anything outside. What this means practically is that the FS has to watch Y until he knows for sure that he's not going deep. We're putting that FS in a bind by running Y on a 10-yard curl and then running H on a post behind him. He can't take his attention off of Y until he breaks off into the curl, making it hard for him to get under the post. This leaves us with a WR running a post route against a LB which, frankly, also would've been a TD if Goff would've chosen to go there. This kind of concept, which threatens a quarters safety with #2 on something short and #1 on a post behind him, is often called a “seal” concept. It's a common quarters beater, and on this play through our use of formation we were able to get two really good match-ups out of it.

Video and Commentary:
As a caveat, the coverages labeled on the video are the ideal coverages that I talked about in the post, not necessarily the ones being run in the video.  I'll discuss any differences in my notes on each play.

Special thanks to TouchedTheAxeIn82 for the video.

First Shakes Play: Portland State is playing a 3-deep zone with a 3-man rush, so this is Cover-3 with three LB's and two CB's playing short zones.  At the top of the screen we're running an out and a corner just as in the shakes diagram, but at the bottom of the screen Muhammad is lined up as a receiver and runs a post, putting him in the deep middle instead of the RB, who stays in to block.

Second Shakes Play: Ohio State's actually playing a 3-deep coverage, but the CB at the top of the screen is supposed to stay with #1 deep or outside instead of playing a true deep 1/3 zone.  This keeps him from getting to his deep third, leaving a massive void for the corner route.  Unfortunately there's pressue.  When Goff gets pressured the short receiver at the top of the screen goes deep and is actually the guy who catches it.  I think Goff was throwing to the corner route, though. 

First Y-Cross Play: I think PSU's running a quarter-quarter-half coverage here.  We don't run a true flood-route since there's no short receiver at the top of the screen.  Instead, the play-action fake sucks up the WLB (the LB at the top of the screen) just like a short route would.  He comes up hard and Rodgers catches the ball in the void behind him.  We're essentially using play-action to do what the short receiver in Y-Cross normally does.

Second Y-Cross Play: Here, from the same game against Portland State, we do run the RB on a short route, giving us a true three level concept to the offense's left.

Third Y-Cross Play: On this play Goff throws the backside curl to Lawler. 

The 4-vert plays are straight-forward, except Ohio State rolls from a 2-deep shell to a 3-deep coverage.  I've already talked about the post-wheel plays in depth.

Conclusion

That does it for the basics of the offense.  I haven't included stats for these plays largely because we didn't complete any of them enough for patterns to emerge. As a general note, this is an area where our execution can improve a lot. If we can't complete these concepts consistently then we can't attack the vulnerabilities of certain coverages, meaning that the defense can run them with impunity if they're stopping our other stuff. If we can't use the deep passing game to force defenses out of coverages that are taking away the run and short passing game, we can't do anything.

As always, discussion on this post can be found on BI:
http://bearinsider.com/forums/showthread.php?p=842293509#post842293509