Formations, Tendencies, and Packaged Plays

One part of understanding an offense is understanding its tendencies. Some of these might be related to down and distance (“What do they run on first and ten?”), but many are also based on formation. It's obvious that you run different plays out of a 4-wide spread formation than you do out of a three TE power set. Even in spread offenses that are 4-wide most of the time formations play a crucial role in understanding an offense's tendencies and, in turn, in understanding what the offense is trying to do. This post will break down our offense in terms of the plays that we run out of our main formations, and the advantages and disadvantages that each formation has. It'll also look at some of our “packaged plays,” which are closely linked to the formations that we run and do some interesting things to our tendencies. It should be noted that all of my information for this post and those before it comes from the first three games of the season, and so the picture might look different by the time we get through breaking down the rest of the season.

 

The Bear Raid Quick Passing Game

The most characteristic element of our offense is the quick passing game. The quick game doesn't refer to every pass that's thrown short, however. On almost all of our pass plays there are short routes built in, so it's useful to define the quick game as contrasted with other passing plays. One key feature is that it usually uses 5-man protection (protection involving only the OL) while the QB takes a 1-step drop from the shot-gun.  In the most common versions of these plays, the RB is an essential part of the passing concept and so we can't use 6-man protections here. Another feature is that in the quick game the “concept” that's being worked happens less than 10 yards from the line of scrimmage. This contrasts with our down-field passing game, where we'll use more 6-or even 7-man protections, the QB will take deeper drops, and the concept that's being worked is meant to read defenders farther downfield. So, we might throw short routes such as outs, slants, or flat routes on any number of passing plays, but the quick game only refers to a subset of them.