The Passing Game Philosophy: Less (and simpler) is More

Most of the time when we watch football games, we hear about quarterbacks going through progressions; many plays are designed and taught by the coaches to have a primary receiver, a secondary receiver, a checkdown, and a hot route to throw against a blitz.  Chris Brown from Smart Football has many great breakdowns of the differences between progression reads and coverage reads:

Chris Petersen of Boise State once set forth his view of a quarterback’s development as follows:

• Strict progression. Tell him to read first receiver, second receiver, and then third receiver — and then run like hell if they aren’t open. In Petersen’s view, if they don’t know anything else they can know, by rote memory, who they are supposed to throw to. This doesn’t require them to have any advance knowledge of the defense and it is where every quarterback begins.

• Progression with coverage keys. The same progression concept as above except that the progression and sequence of receivers is determined by what the defense is doing. How many safeties are there? What kind of leverage are you getting from the cornerbacks? Is it a blitz? Is it man or zone? Once you’ve determined that, it’s one-two-three.

• Coverage reads. This is the advanced NFL stuff: Tom Brady sees the defense doing X, so he looks one way and then rifles it back to the receiver he always knew he was going to because he understood the coverage, he understood the technique the defense was playing, and he understood the theory of the play he was running. There are few, if any, college quarterbacks who ever do this kind of thing.

There are tradeoffs between using the various systems; an older post on Smart Football provides Bill Mountjoy's summary of the advantages and disadvantages of progression reads and coverage reads:

Advantages of coverage reads:

• Eliminates the struggle of the progression read trying to determine who was more wide open.
• Eliminates the QB from making up his mind before the snap (we shouldn’t do this regardless of if we Progression Read OR Read the Coverage). Read the defenders to get you to the right receiver in Coverage Reads.
• Keeps quarterback on the same page as the Coach because they both know the read and the goal of the play called.
• Quarterbacks don’t need to to stare at your receivers to determine who to throw to because they will be looking at defenders (giving more natural look offs).

Brown actually likes the middle one the best:

Despite listing limitations of progressions and advantages of coverage reads, I much prefer progression reads to coverage reads. Coverage reads are great in theory (and maybe are great for long-term, established NFL quarterbacks) but they are not easy to teach and — because while one defender might react as expected you might not be able to predict where the others are, thus causing problems — they can even be misleading.

One nice part about console football video games is that there are not as many exotic looks that the defense will get by using pre-snap motion and alignment shifts, and the player can see the whole field via the overhead view (moreso with the coordinator camera angle in NCAA 14).  This makes life a lot easier when trying to make coverage reads like the pros:

Given the byzantine schemes defenses have used in recent years, simple coverage keys aren’t always enough to identify an open receiver. Aside from the usual veteran quarterback tricks — look-offs, dummy signals, and so on — Brady and Manning are better than other quarterbacks because they can process more information. They see not only the number of deep safeties, but the depth and leverage of the cornerbacks and the alignment of the linebackers. They see the entire defensive structure. 

This is not to say they always (or even usually) know the exact coverage, but their years of study and practice allow them to make an instant judgment about the basic tactics of a defense — and where it’s weakest.

Instead of trying to do progression reads or even coverage based progression reads, what we will be using is closer to straight progression reads in this offense.  In reality, we'd probably be doing the coverage based progression Brown recommends, but the limitations of the video games makes it all easier and we can concentrate on getting the pre-snap and coverage reads right.  In general, if the player can read the defense adequately well, there are not enough subtle, sophisticated twists built into the code to trip up the "correct" coverage read decision like a real life defensive coordinator might cook up.

Playing smarter is playing faster

Following the lead of the running game, we want to keep the passing game very simple as well.  The idea is to define what we want to do - establish an identity - and drill the plays over and over until everything is instinct.  The more comfortable a player is with the plays they run, the less they have to stop and think about what is going on.  Instead, they just know where each element is supposed to be and adjusting to what is on screen takes less effort and speeds up.  It prevents missed opportunities and taking losses due to the paralysis of inaction:

TarHeelBlue: You talked about playing fast. Which of your guys plays the fastest? 

Coach Huxtable: "Quincy plays fast, which he should, he's got the most experience. He's played that position for a long time. He plays with good eyes, he reads well, he recognizes well, and he reacts quickly. 

"Robert Harris plays fast, sometimes too fast. Sometimes he's going, but he's not going where he's supposed to be going. Once he gets more reps under his belt, he's going to be a really fast player. 

"David Thornton plays fast. Clarence Gaddy plays real fast, but again, he's not always going where he's supposed to go, but he's always going fast. We've got to get him a little more disciplined, making sure that he's recognizing better what he's seeing.

"You play faster through experience and repetition. It's a repetition thing. The more times they see the picture, the faster they can react to what they see."

This is what players and coaches are talking about when they say a guy has "pretty good instincts on where a play is going. . . (and is) able to play faster than (their) 40 time": a physically fast player who has to hesitate and think about what to do can get beat by a slower guy who doesn't need to pause.  Practice and repetition of a small number of plays and concepts lead to smoother and cleaner execution of those plays.



We don't need a ton of plays.  Instead, we need to run signature plays well and be ready to recognize and take advantage of opportunities when they appear.  Consider this bit on Florida State Head Coach Jimbo Fisher from Grantland:

Earlier in Fisher’s career, he asked both his receivers and the quarterback to adjust routes based on the defense, but in recent years he’s simplified things — for everyone but the quarterback. “There are so many schemes and we all want to be gurus in football and think we created something,” Fisher said at the clinic. “I am just as guilty as everyone else, I promise.” Over the last few seasons Fisher reduced the number of plays while building options for his quarterbacks within each play. “Against Clemson [in 2012] we ran the same pass play nine times,” said Fisher. “We completed all nine of the passes, to five different receivers. I did not need a new play.” 

This only works if the quarterback makes the right reads; Winston had few issues in this department. “If we can teach the quarterback to read the defense it will work,” Fisher explained. “I let the quarterback make the decision.”

In the EA NCAA and Madden video games, that decision maker is you, the player.

Maximizing value from fewer plays

If we want to be able to make a coverage read that will beat what the defense presents us with, the called play must have a component well-suited for it, whatever it is.  Packaging coverage beaters into a single play allows us to come to the line and have the ability to pretty much always throw to a route that gives us the advantage because it is specifically designed for the matchup it faces.

Good passing teams package different pass concepts together to give their quarterbacks answers versus a variety of defenses. The coverage read on a given play is tied to these pass concepts. For example, if the route combination to one side is better against single-safety defenses like Cover Three, and the concept to the other side is better against two-deep, split-safety coverages, then the quarterback’s read will be based on the number of safeties.

Plays that are designed to exploit certain defenses can be arranged in the audible system to create a fast tempo toolbox for anyone who feels like adding a no-huddle element.  Suppose the defense is showing Cover 2 and the called pass play does not have good answers for Cover 2, but you know you have another play with particularly effective options against Cover 2 set to one of your audibles.  With enough repetition and practice with each play in the system, it becomes second nature to know not only what play to audible to, but what part of the audible play to attack with.  As this gets faster and faster, it becomes possible to run the base offense at high tempo as the two minute offense as well (I do this often).