This series is a work-in-progress glossary of football concepts we tend to talk about in these pages. Previously:

Offensive concepts: RPOs, high-low, snag, covered/ineligible receivers, Duo, zone vs gap blocking, zone stretch, split zone, pin and pull, inverted veer, reach block, kickout block, wham block, Y banana play, TRAIN

Defensive concepts: Contain & lane integrity, force player, hybrid space player, no YOU’RE a 3-4!, scrape exchange, Tampa 2, Saban-style pattern-matching, match quarters, Dantonio’s quarters, Don Brown’s 4-DL packages and 3-DL packages, Bear

Special Teams: Spread punt vs NFL-style

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This segment has a sponsor! Reader/business attorney/blogger Richard Hoeg loves football because he says it is the most litigious of all sports. I can’t say that’s why I like football, but I really like that this is why my lawyer likes football.

Richard recently left a lucrative career in big law to start his own firm, where he helps outfits like ours start, operate, fund, and expand their businesses. His small group has clients including a national pizza chain and a major video game publisher, plus an array of university professors, entrepreneurs, and licensees. Hit up hoeglaw.com or Rick himself at [email protected], or read his blog(!) Rules of the Game.

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THE PLAY:

I think something happened here.

Depending on whom you’re talking to, today’s concept is a concept, an offense, a philosophy, or a way of life, though all who use it will agree anyone who defines it differently than they do doesn’t know what they’re talking about.* Though nobody on Michigan’s schedule commits to it fully, bits of it populate every passing offense today, and big chunks have been reintroduced to Michigan’s schedule with Kevin Wilson going to Ohio State, and Minnesota and Purdue hiring P.J. Fleck and Jeff Brohm, respectively.

It’s the Run & Shoot, the Libertarianism of football philosophies, and like its third-rail metaphor the first thing you need to know about it is that few people can talk about it without getting pissed off. Observe this salty convert to the Church of Shoot:

“Going somewhere where they don’t have route conversions into certain coverages was just absurd,” said Jacobs, who played nine NFL seasons. “They’re just running routes in the defense, getting people killed. Size and strength is what they had, and that’s why they won. Let’s be real. They had great assistant coaches, but Jim didn’t know what he was doing. Jim had no idea. Jim is throwing slants into Cover-2 safeties, getting people hurt. That guy knew nothing, man.

That was the Brandon Jacobs line that got him into one of this offseason’s more unexpected Harbaugh news cycles, with Michigan fans, Harbaugh fans, and anyone who knows their ass from a go-route on one side, nobody of consequence on the other, and some NFL types trying to stoke something out of it anyway.

Despite said efforts what controversy came of it quickly petered out, not because the sides came together, but because the disagreement was ultimately too wonky for the kinds of audiences an apparent Harbaugh-former player beef would attract. As soon as Kevin Gilbride’s name came up, knee-depth football fans gave up and left it for the deep geeks to figure out.

So… Hi. [Hit THE JUMP why dontchya.]

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* I readily admit I don’t, so I’ve leaned heavily on the resources compiled here by Chris Brown.

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First the nonsense:

Everybody runs slants into Cover 2:

It’s one of the most common route combos in football versus the most common coverage in football. Seriously EVERYBODY runs slants into Cover 2:

Suggesting otherwise is so insane Jacobs deserves the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t mean that. My best guess is he probably meant “cover 2 safeties” as in the type of safety an NFL team will have if they’re a base Cover 2 or Quarters defense. Cover 2 safeties are thicker, meatier. They have easier coverage jobs, covering half the field, but are more involved in the edge of the run game. Former Ohio State safety Malik Hooker is a Cover 1 safety; Iowa's safeties are Cover 2 safeties.

I think what Jacobs is saying is when the defense has an Iowa-like safety out there—a dude who can come up and hit you but might not be able to cover your slot receiver down the field, you shouldn't be trying to run slants under him. OTOH: Odell Beckham doesn’t seem to mind.

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WHAT IS THE RUN AND SHOOT?

This:

…they don’t have route conversions into certain coverages

is the run n shoot talking. Fundamentally, R&S is about receivers adjusting their routes on the fly based on what their defenders are doing. As a reader mentioned in the thread about this some weeks back, Jacobs’ offensive coordinator with the Giants was Kevin Gilbride, the same guy who ran the Oilers’ pure R&S offense with Warren Moon in the early ’90s. Gilbride’s offenses weren’t full shoot in East Rutherford, but he used a lot of those concepts in his offense.

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WHAT IS THE FULL SHOOT?

The Shoot, like its younger cousin the Air Raid, is based on backyard football, i.e. “get open and I’ll throw it to you,” which is formalized for upper level football into a vast tree of in-play route decisions. They go 4-wide almost by rule in order to ensure they’re getting 1-on-1 matchups in space, and then it’s option routes on option routes.

The premise here is the receiver is reading the defender, with different ways he can cut off or extend his route based on what the defenders do with him. The quarterback is reading this too and knows some of the receiver’s breaks are there for him to throw it while others are there to run a guy off and open up the next read tree.

Here’s its originator, Mouse Davis, explaining one of the routes trees and progressions against different looks:

It’s going to take you 2 hours to watch the whole thing. It takes an NFL team all its practice time to get this down. For that reason, and because you need four receivers to run the whole thing, teams that did commit to it had rather pedestrian running attacks. You can probably get a gist though by watching the first 20 minutes, which covers their trips look versus Cover 3, Cover 2 and Cover 1 looks. I drew up those route trees against Cov 3:

look, but you’re free to stop before you’re bewildered.

The motion of the slot receiver was part of Mouse’s offense to get the defense to show what they’re doing but you’ll note that’s largely gone away today as defenses are too good at hiding it. In his R&S heyday with Hawaii June Jones would just line up 4-wide with two receivers on each side.

You’re welcome to stare at that as long as you want to. The numbered circles are the reads and the various colors are the options to take those routes.  You’re also welcome to count the number of times Mouse Davis begins a sentence with the word “If.” It’s complicated, man. It’s also designed with the QB rolling out every play.

Key to our Brandon Jacobs discussion is these are called “Route conversions.” In essense, it’s not just the receivers running their own little routes, but the receivers as a group changing the play based on the coverage. The routes and trees work off each other, with multiple guys often reading the same defender to attack him. For example in the above play the right slot receiver and the X receiver might both be reading the free safety to decide if they should run their skinny posts or take it outside.

OKAY WHAT ARE SOME CONCEPTS IF I DON’T WANT TO LEARN ALL OF THAT?

The main one is Option routes. Above I’ve shown a few common trees but it’s important to note that those are not all one play but diferent types of option routes that a lot of teams use. The thing with option routes is you might have one or two guys running them but the rest of your receivers are running static routes. This isn’t as effective but it’s way easier to install, since you only need one receiver who knows all the route trees and gives your quarterback simpler reads: watch the guy over the guy running the option routes, and wait till he gets open.

Every team that passes the ball today falls somewhere on a spectrum of R&S—it’s mostly about how much you use option routes. On the most West Coast extreme you’ve got Al Borges, who might deign to let Drew Dileo choose his spots on 3rd and short. On the other you have the stuff the spread NFL teams run nowadays, where the routes are West Coast in origin but have options upon options built into them to counter anything the coverage throws at them.

The real R&S influences in college today are in those modern spreads. Tom Herman when he arrived at Ohio State used the H receiver more like Wes Welker than Percy Harvin, basing a lot of his passing offense on the slot concepts from the R&S. That year Corey “Philly” Brown had literally twice as many receptions as any other Buckeye, but just three TDs. But he was the only guy usually running those; Devin Smith and the rest of the receivers usually just went long or ran simple posts to clear space, while the devastating running game ensured the defense couldn’t afford anyone to bracket little ol’ Philly.

The last few years Michigan ran a bunch of option routes with Jake Butt, using their formations and motions to get him singled up against some poor linebacker and doing whatever the poor sod didn’t. You probably noticed that Butt became a bigger factor later in the season in both 2015 and 2016—that was his quarterbacks getting on the same page and learning to anticipate his reads. Notably, in the NFL Harbaugh always had look-back points for his receivers in case the corners were playing them too soft. Nussmeier also has those in his offense.

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LET’S SEE IT

The outside cut-off routes are likely to make their way back to Ohio State this year, since new OC Kevin Wilson used them a lot at Indiana. The rules there were simple: if the cornerback is playing up, go long, and if he’s playing off, cut off your route at 7 yards. It’s a strategy that Ohio State could have used last year against Michigan State and Penn State, who played their corners off the receivers so they could be safe deep while letting their safeties control the edges of OSU’s run game. Those outside cut-off option routes can punish that strategy since the corners have zero help over the top and have to respect this:

Unbelievably, Clark got the OPI call on that. This rarely happens.

If the corner is playing off, the receiver will look to cut off the route at 7 yards. If the corner stays off the receiver, he will turn and look for the ball:

Note that the cut-off is the only option here. These are option routes but not route conversions, else the Cover 3 umbrella Michigan is showing would have one of these outside receivers convert to a dig (neither CB is 5+ yards off at the conversion point) while the other runs a skinny post.

There’s another read here though: if the CB comes down hard after playing off, the receiver converts to a fade and looks for the ball in the “hole” (Mouse Davis’s term which conflicts with a defensive term that means something else). This is a quick read the QB can make to catch a cornerback who thinks he’s figured out what the offense is doing to him and make him wrong:

Please note the nature of option routes is you don’t get to see what the other option was. I’m guessing these were option routes because of Indiana’s tendencies, but they could as well be planned routes. All I can say is that IF they were option routes they would look like the above.

One way to kind of tell if you’re watching R&S football are what look like bad passes to open ground that the receiver just barely gets to. That’s because the quarterback is throwing these before or on the receiver’s break, at the open ground, but the nature of those breaks is receivers don’t always get out of them cleanly.

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QUESTIONS

I remember they used running QBs.

In its time the Run and Shoot was called the “spread offense” despite pre-dating the zone read option that rekindled mainstream running QB offenses in college ball. But yes they did like to have athletic quarterbacks, and this was because the offense’s great weakness is the QB has shit protection. Tight ends and fullbacks barely existed in the Run and Shoot. Some teams did incorporate TEs but if they weren’t running routes it nerfed the whole thing considerably since all four reads are necessary to create the spacing and outlets. So it’s usually just your OL in protection.

Mouse’s answer was to use athletic QBs who would roll out in the direction of the primary read, often throwing to him on the run. If that read wasn’t there, often the QB would have to dodge a blocker and move around in the backfield to stay alive and get through his progressions, quick as they were. Donovan McNabb came out too late but he would been the ideal R&S quarterback. As it was, R&S teams drafted guys like Andre Ware (who won the Heisman running the R&S at Houston), and Warren Moon.

What about the Run in the Run and Shoot?

It was a pass-first offense assuredly. It was also an under-center offense that was happy to charge into gaps and get your LBs in space versus a talented ballcarrier. Before Rich Rod you couldn’t stay in a shotgun all day or else your run game was limited to delayed handoffs.

The R&S was indeed so committed to passing that one of the big knocks on it from other coaches was they didn’t know how to use it to sustain clock-killing drives when nursing a lead. They also tended to bog down in the redzone as the vertical spacing was compressed and those defenders could react more quickly.

The running game was mostly a threat to keep the middle linebackers tied down in the box. That was no idle threat, especially since the safeties and corners were so preoccupied with stopping the pass. Wayne Fontes (who hired Mouse Davis as his OC in 1989 with June Jones along as QB/WRs coach) wasn’t going to NOT use Barry Sanders!

Is this the same thing as the Air Raid?

No. There are similarities: the Air Raid uses quick passing and option routes galore, but every coach to run either agrees they’re separate things. At most Air Raid is philosophical offshoot, kind of like how Urban Meyer’s spread offense uses concepts from and is philosophically rooted in Woody’s three-yards and a cloud of dust, but isn’t derivitive of it.

That said it can work within the Air Raid or within a West Coast offense. Take Brian Kelly’s spread-to-pass offense. Notre Dame gave Will Fuller an outside stop-or-go option route off his slot receiver’s skinny post, and it worked with Mouse-like efficiency:

The rest of that play is Air Raid (note the receivers running Mesh underneath and not challenging the backside deep) but a principle from the Run and Shoot made this play—given the option to cut off his route underneath Countess’s coverage they can take advantage of Michigan’s curl-flat defender, Delonte Hollowell, going way out of his zone to double the slot receiver’s skinny post.

By the way I really can’t tell you for sure that Brian Kelly was running option routes, but I assume they were given how good Fuller is at them in the NFL, and by the way they picked on Michgian’s zone and didn’t have other receivers running corner/flag routes on top of Fuller so if the opportunity presented itself he could do this:

On the other hand what looks like a bubble/option combo from the R&S playbook  was probably just a called high-low (a West Coast route combination) on the curl-flat defender against Michigan’s soft coverage:

Telling the difference is hard. Charlie Weiss, by the way, is from the Run and Shoot tree: his “decided schematic advantage” was to use a lot of Mouse Davis’s complicated trees without fully committing to it. Turns out none of his ND quarterbacks were Tom Brady, though it did lead to one funny moment in 2010 [correction: 2009] when they wound up trying to pass over Michigan’s head on a potentially game-ending third down, saving Denard Forcier enough time to do his Denard Forcier things. xoxoxoxo miss you big guy.

What is the difference between Air Raid and Run & Shoot then?

The biggest difference is when the reads are made. The Air Raid is about calling the plays at the line that will defeat what the defense is showing, while the Run and Shoot can stay in the same playcall all game and just run different route trees against whatever the defense does after the snap.

Both require smart quarterbacks who can make accurate throws and reads, but a QB trained in the R&S is going to be a newborn babe if throwin into an Air Raid system because he won’t know the pre-snap checks. Air Raid is all about racing to the line of scrimmage, catching the defense in some sort of base that they can get into quickly, and running the plays that beat it. For this reason Air Raid teams will run “Mesh” (a subject of a future What Is for sure) a ton! because Mesh is a good Cover 1 beater (really a good everything-beater) and Cover 1 is a good defense to use if the offense is racing to the line of scrimmage and you don’t have time to call anything else.

Besides tempo, the Air Raid incorporates other modern principles that weren’t around when the R&S had its heyday. Both rely on quick reads and throws, but the Air Raid made use of really wide offensive line splits to give the quarterback a little bit more time for his quick throws, but that’s an adjustment the Run and Shoot could make too. The Run and Shoot liked to move the quarterback toward his primary target while the Air Raid starts from the gun or pistol and spreads the ball around more.

How is it different from the West Coast?

The West Coast isn’t meant to have a lot of decision trees. It’s meant to create easy reads and put receivers where the quarterback knows they’ll be when he spots the hole in the coverage. When you have the receivers running all kinds of different routes they’re not going to appear where they’re expected.

If NFL teams all use some Run and Shoot is it fair to criticize Harbaugh for not teaching it at San Francisco?

Harbaugh’s strategy with Alex Smith and Colin Kaepernick was to make the passing game very simple. Kaepernick came out of Nevada’s pistol offense where he saw a few option routes, but most of that passing game was based on West Coast principles. Smith was an Urban Meyer QB and as such did not spend much time at Utah training himself to read and react to subtle differences in individual defenders’ coverage methods. Harbaugh kept the receivers’ routes simple by design, especially with Smith, because Alex Smith simply isn’t built to make complicated post-snap reads. Part of the reason Kaep won the job in Year 2 is Smith had hit his ceiling, but they didn’t really work the R&S into the offense until Year 3; by then Jacobs was back in New York.

This isn’t a knock on Smith, nor Meyer: simple reads and simple throws are a luxury any football team would take, and it’s a credit to Meyer that his offenses can consistently win those for his quarterbacks. It doesn’t, hwoever, prepare them to run super-complicated stuff in the pros, and finding a guy who’s capable of that isn’t something that’s emphasized in recruiting (one reason Meyer quarterbacks rarely last in the League).

Jacobs’s experience in New York was the opposite extreme: the Manning gene pool is one of the best repositories in America of the kind of QB brain it takes to run R&S principles. When the Giants drafted Eli, it was to replicate some of what his brother Peyton could do. The kind of guy who can see all the throws AND make them is rare, but can make a dynasty.

Alluding to the previous question, Harbaugh has some Air Raid in his mostly West Coast passing game—he likes his quarterbacks to make pre-snap reads and call one of three plays he sends in based on what the defense shows. That way the QB doesn’t have to do a lot of thinking after the snap. An R&S QB doesn’t function that way: he’ll check the safeties’ alignment and try to tell zone from man before the snap, but he’s doing a ton of thinking after the snap, as he reads the defenders and tries to make the same guess on how his receivers will break off of that as the receivers.

Harbaugh QBs tend to be very book smart because he asks them to use a lot of cognitive power to think through the coverage before the play. After the snap however he doesn’t want that QB overthinking things because it softens the instincts. An R&S QB doesn’t have to be able to ken Plato but if he walked into Men in Black training he’d kick ass at the alien-shooting gallery.

So Jacobs Should Shut Up?

Really what this is about is Jacobs played in a very different system in New York and never truly downloaded what they were running in San Francisco. I imagine he was brought in because he’s huge and played into their strategy of a heavy power running game that made the whole thing go. He could have advanced in Harbaugh’s West Coast offense, which can get very complicated once you start having guys sit on their routes and perfect their timing to come open at just the right second. He apparently did, however, download a lot of the route conversions in New York’s offenses during his two stints there, and since he didn’t play elsewhere before his career ended he probably believes the G-Men way is the superior/only way.

Plus the dude’s criticism got us all into a wonky conversation about competing pass philosophies. I like him for that.

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DEFENDING IT

Option A: Read your keys/execute your assignment. As with most read-you-till-you’re-wrong offensive strategies, you can beat this by making the reads very difficult. The above play by Indiana is a good example of several weaknesses, and they’re all pretty visible at that key moment when the receivers hit the 7-yard mark.

On the bottom of the screen is a typical R&S combo, with the inside receiver given the option of a corner route or pushing upfield, and the outside receiver either running a dig (go up and cross) route or if the coverage backs off to cover the slot receiver he can sit down and come back into all that space beneath him. On the other side they’re running Air Raid stuff, trying to get the running back open in the endzone on a wheel route while to receivers run a mesh. This is a standard play from the Wilson offense.

But there are some things going on here:

1. The mesh is well covered by the man defense, even though the playcall (with a LB taking the wheel) gave SS Delano Hill no help in the middle. Note especially the coverage on the bottom of the screen: Clark (bottom) did not give up inside leverage so he can stay with his receiver on the dig, and is fast enough to stay with him ater that. Meanwhile Peppers is picking out pennies and dryer lint from the slot receiver’s pockets.
2. With just a five-man protection on a 3rd and long the pocket is collapsing under the weight of hell-for-leather pass rushers.

This play ended with a sack because Willie Henry and Royce Jenkins-Stone penetrated, and Sudfeld is not the kind of athlete who can stay upright when someone knocks him off balance.

Such was the reason the Run and Shoot faded from the NFL and is now relegated to a few outposts of its old practitioners (e.g. SMU). Remember this takes a ton of practice time to install and get it right, but a defense can play this straight up all day and win with equal talent running a safe Cover 1. A good pass rush, especially one not worried about the run, can take away any route that needs 3 seconds to come open, while a good secondary can set up in bump-and-run coverage to force the receivers into their deeper routes, then just stay on top of those routes.

Option B: Solve your problems with aggression

But what if you don’t trust your secondary so much? There are games you can play. You saw above where Michigan had Channing Stribling start off high then try to jump the route, giving up an annoying first down from the shadow of the Hoosiers’ goal post. The QB and receiver made the correct read on him but if he timed that correctly it’s a pick-six. If you’re old enough to remember the Wayne Fontes Lions you probably remember them eating a ton of those.

Corners are by nature crafty little bastards—I’ve met more of them than any other position and have started to come to the opinion that they’re all cut from this same cloth. The more they get used to your reads, the more they’ll trick you into being wrong. I showed some ugly stuff happening to Countess above when he was a boundary CB getting picked on by Will Fuller so here he is as a curl-flat zone defender who convinced Tommy Rees the other guy’s dig option was going to come open before drifting right into it:

Special thanks to ND’s receiver for not making the same read.

Option C: Kick Ass

We’ve covered this. The faster your pass rush hits the sooner that one QB in a million is on the ground and on the sideline. Meanwhile options routes are useless against a team that can play man-press and still beat you down the sideline every time:

Man I’m gonna miss that guy. Please be JD clones, oh JD clones.