Top Priority of the Summer: Defending the Read Option

With the read option play exploding onto the scene during the 2012 NFL season, defending the play has become one of the hottest topics of the offseason.  Articles by Grantland contributor and football blogger extraordinaire Chris Brown, Bleacher Report's Matt Miller, Greg Bedard of Sports Illustrated and others have all taken a swing at the topic in recent months.  These articles each highlighted various tactics and techniques, yet none took the opportunity to explain how the bidirectional structure of the read option makes it fundamentally different from other option plays, and how this influences the tactical arms race between offense and defense.

Picking Poison

"Read option" is not a precisely defined term.  In general, the term usually refers to plays where the quarterback and halfback run in opposite directions, and a defender to the side of the quarterback's run path is left unblocked as the option key:

As with all option plays, the offense is making a bargain with the defense: the offense gets to leave a defender unblocked, letting the quarterback occupy a defender with an option read who would otherwise have to be blocked or occupied with a fake.  The flipside of this arrangement is that the defense can dictate who carries the ball.  To defend an option play, the defense designates at least one defender for each potential ballcarrier (note this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defending the play - many TV commentators suggest that the option can be stopped just by ensuring a defender is assigned to each of the dive, keep, and pitch, but there are still plenty of ways for an option play to succeed even if every defender knows his assignment, not least of which is that the defenders with those assignments might get blocked).  The defense also arranges these assignments to force the ball to the runner they perceive as least dangerous, and to funnel this runner to an area where they have more defenders, starting a cat and mouse game of adjustments and counter-adjustments between the two teams.

The One-Play Offense

Simplicity is a virtue in offensive football.  If the appearance of complexity can be maintained for the defense, a simple offense leaves more practice time to focus on core plays, fundamental skills, and other facets of the game.  Vince Lombardi often wrote about the value of a simple game plan, executed well.  Paul Johnson condenses his weekly list of available plays until it can be written on a Post-It note. Hal Mumme, when he metamorphosed the West Coast Offense into the Air Raid, so valued simplicity that he made his offense solely right-handed, shedding all strong-left formations like so much spent snakeskin.

An offense consisting of six plays, or even ten, would be extremely simple by modern standards, but the Holy Grail of offensive simplicity would be a system consisting of a single play.  When the aforementioned Mumme was coaching at Southeastern Louisiana University, I attended a clinic there where he mentioned just such an offense.  The (apocryphal?) story he told was of a High School coach in Kentucky (Mumme was previously head coach at the University of Kentucky) who had great talent on his team but no time to practice - all his best players prioritized their commitments to their school and club basketball teams, and played football when time allowed.  His response was a single-play offense, and the single play was the Air Raid "Mesh":

The Bears' Spread Offense, 1950 edition

Don Faurot's 1950 book on the Split-T formation¹ is a classic of offensive philosophy.  The offense he invented ("football's newest development") was both highly successful in its own right and led directly to the creation of the triple option, one of the major evolutionary moments in football history.  But the book is more than just the introduction of a new offense or the seeds of a future breakthrough.  In over 350 pages it also covers the kicking game, the leadership challenges of coaching and administration, football watching tips for novice fans, and defensive strategy for combating the popular offenses of the 1940's.  The defensive chapter in particular shows how wide open some of these older offenses were, and how much today's spread offenses owe to schemes developed before World War II, or earlier.

On page 273 he describes how to defend against the "Bears' Spread," which he attributes to legendary Chicago Bears player/coach/owner George Halas.  Here's the formation, and the defense he suggests:

Whoa.  Now that's a spread formation.  The tailback is ten yards deep, 3 or 4 yards deeper than a modern quarterback in the shotgun, but otherwise, this looks ready to use.  Faurot doesn't give much detail on the offense, other than to be prepared for a tailback sweep in either direction, a screen to the tight end on the left, and a pass to the snapper, who is eligible because he's also the right end.  To contain this attack, he suggests a 4-4 defense in a Cover 3 zone, putting two linemen over the main offensive line, one over the snapper, and one in the massive right A gap.  The defensive ends (we would call them outside linebackers) cover down on the widest receivers and take the flats in the zone.

From a modern perspective this defense looks comically soft.  The pass defense isn't even close to properly covering down on the three receivers to the right, a defensive guard is covering the snapper despite Faurot's warning, and the numbers on the screen to the left tight end still look pretty great.  Even for an era before the option, before pass routes were timed with the QB's drop, before the wide receiver screen or even the wide receiver as we know it, it's hard to see how this would be sound defense.  If you lined up in this formation this Friday night, here's one guess at what you might see instead:

Now there are six defenders for the six man offensive line, the snapper has a legitimate undercoverage defender on him, and each receiver has a defender in position to discourage the hot throw or quick screen.  The defense is slightly outflanked to the tight end side by a fraction of a man, since the Will LBer doesn't want to align too far to either side of the snapper, but it's reasonably sound given the challenges it's facing.  There are plenty of other fronts and coverages possible here, (Cover 0 comes immediately to mind), but the threats to the defense remain obvious: five immediate receivers (including a quads set), the QB sweep, and those wide open A gaps.  For a team that already uses the shotgun, this formation could be an easy addition that would drive opposing teams nuts.  Here are a few possible plays that seem like natural fits:

• QB sneak/sweep (blocked to both sides at once, QB chooses), with snapper pop pass
• Quick screens to the WRs or the left TE
• WR fly sweep, or read option, or inverted veer, to the left
• Quads passing game, e.g. flood route plus whip
• Slow screen to an ineligible lineman (must be a backward pass)

An hour or two of practice seems like enough to install this changeup formation with two or three plays, but the defense would likely spend several hours preparing for it, and opposing coaches many more hours thinking about it, instead of the base offense.  In a game, it could be deployed like any other changeup: right before halftime (to steal the other team's halftime adjustments) or right after (to steal their second half timeouts).  

If anyone dares to use this in a game, two reactions from fans and opponents are fairly predictable.  First, that anything so unusual is "not football" and that it is not sportsmanlike to create something new or use a tactic isn't already common on Saturdays or Sundays.  Second, that this is obviously just the next evolution of the modern game as it becomes ever more wide open and oriented toward skill and speed.  Either way, you can refer them to Don Faurot, creator of football's newest development of 1950.

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1 Faurot, Don. Football: Secrets of the "Split T" Formation. Prentice-Hall, 1950.^↩

Power blocking the read option

The redundantly named "read option" play caught on in the NFL last season with breakthrough performances from the likes of the 49ers' Colin Kaepernick and the Redskins' Robert Griffin III, after a decade of success in the major college ranks.  The play nearly always uses zone blocking, occasionally with a lead blocker, but there's no reason why it couldn't be run with power blocking instead.  In fact, for some teams power blocking the play may be a more efficient use of available talent.

Background

The term "read option" doesn't have a precise definition, but it normally refers to a family of related plays with two common characteristics:

1. the quarterback executes an option in which he and the other potential ballcarrier run to opposite sides of the formation, and
2. a defender to the side of the quarterback's run path is left unblocked as the option key.

Here is a basic diagram of the zone read play.  Extraneous receivers are left out of the diagrams for simplicity, but they would be stalk blocking or running their defenders deep depending on the defense.

In the basic zone read, the line executes an inside zone blocking scheme, here leading to combo blocks by the LG and C on the nose tackle, and by the RG and RT on the 3 technique.  These defenders are blocked horizontally along the line of scrimmage in the direction of their initial movement, with the offensive lineman away from this movement scraping off to the linebacker behind.  Q reads the unblocked DE and gives every time unless the DE chases down the line toward the F back.  F, if he gets the ball, runs to the heels of his linemen, reads their blocks, and cuts to the open lane.  

Hello, world

This is my blog.  There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I will post in this space my musings on American football strategy and tactics, for the coach or the fan.  Some of my posts may be applicable to the youth or major college level, but most of the time I will be thinking in the context of the High School varsity level.  What I write will have been researched to some varying degree, but it will be my opinion - you can keep the conversation going and let me know if I made a mistake or an omission in the comments.  I will read the comments, make corrections, and give credit where it's due.  Hopefully, this will be a space where everyone can learn, including me.  Thanks for reading.

Will