Stealing Signals, Week 4, Part 2

Motion is the future, plus recapping Week 4

At the end of the intro to Part 2 last week, I quickly shared this chart from a Seth Walder tweet:

To clarify, this is the same chart as last week, meaning the data it represents is a week old. And if you listened to Sunday night’s Stealing Bananas, you’ll know I mentioned it again in a wide-ranging soliloquy at the end of that show, which started discussing Christian McCaffrey’s impact on San Francisco.

This chart has been eating at me. My big takeaway last week was how many teams aren’t utilizing motion as much as the teams that are (and whose offenses are obviously successful to start 2023). I’ve talked a lot about macro stuff, including the ways defenses have attacked the past couple years, and then what counterpunch the offenses might have. In Week 1, I know some of you were telling me the “exit motion” was a potential counterpunch, and I kind of waved it away, because that seemed like a pretty simple change. But I’ve sort of been forced to reconsider.

I can’t understand this chart. The more and more I think about it, the more and more it makes no sense. I feel like we’ve been talking about the value of motion for years. It was a logical extension of misdirection and play-action talk, and people have definitely been researching the value play-action adds for years. I remember Josh Hermsmeyer, I think, initially being the one to show you didn’t need an effective run game for play-action to still have a positive impact on passing efficiency. That was years ago. As that progressed and he got more advanced player tracking data to dig into, he showed how linebackers had to suck up to respect the fake even when teams had a bad running game.

Motion isn’t new, obviously. Tecmo Super Bowl is an all-time football video game, a very basic NES game that was nonetheless insanely fun to play, which came out in 1991. Each team had exactly eight plays in their playbook. There were plays with motion in them in that game.

But on a shorter timeline, the jet motion tip pass stuff became a hot move a few years back. We had a shift to more shotgun formations and more passing years earlier, and with that we got more formational versatility — stacked receivers, bunches, the 2-by-2 bunched formations, etc. Those variations have naturally been more conducive to motion, at least I have to think.

One of the things I mentioned in my Sunday night podcast commentary is I was watching my Washington Huskies Saturday, and a stat came on screen that the top-10 offenses in motion rate in FBS were a combined 36-4 at that point, with 9 of the 10 teams averaging 30+ points per game. I’ve felt blessed my Huskies hired a new coaching staff at the start of last year that have employed so many of the concepts I’ve felt like were cheat codes — they are in that top 10 of motion rate, but they also pass with intent on early downs, utilize play action a good amount (they motion plus play action on a lot of snaps), and definitely make great use of misdirection.

One of my favorite play designs I’ve seen from them a couple different ways has essentially been a double misdirection to a TE leak route up the seam. It took me like 10 minutes — mostly because I remembered it going for a touchdown, but it only went for a big gain down inside the 5-yard line — but I actually found one of the first examples of this I could remember from early last year that was so cool as a fan, and obviously stuck with me, because it marked the moment I realized our new coaching staff was legit (the unfortunate reality is they’ve been so legit into 2023 that the head coach/offensive coordinator duo of Kalen DeBoer and Ryan Grubb won’t both be there for long, and if one or both is not in the NFL in a few years, that’s an NFL issue, not a measure of those guys’ talent as coaches). This link should bring you right to that play, but if it doesn’t bring you right there, it’s at the 3:13 mark in the video as the first play of the second quarter.

If you didn’t go watch it, it has a motion man moving one way, then back the other way to the left side of the formation as the ball is snapped, then a play-action fake to the running back headed right, with the QB bootlegging back to the left and a quick look to the flat where the motion man has wound up, which draws multiple defenders — that are sure that after the play-action, that’s where the play is actually going — except that’s also a decoy and you have defenders flowing to both boundaries as the TE leaks up the middle of the field, completely wide open. That sounds incredibly complicated, but it’s not when it all happens quickly. It’s motion, play-action, misdirection, all together, all in just a couple of seconds, designed to get the flow of the defense going places where the ball is not going to go. It’s like a ballet.

One of the other reasons I’m praising the UW Huskies’ coaching stuff so much is their constant iterating — it feels like they are always slightly tweaking things, and you watch them and see different formations almost every play. One great example of this is they have already used exit motion here in 2023, the week after it was the huge storyline at the NFL level. Football is a copycat sport, right?

Except to get back to my initial point, what the hell are all the other NFL teams doing? If a college team, with practice limitations on their student-athletes, can implement exit motion in-season, at least to show the look (and I haven’t seen UW do it extensively, maybe just the one time, and the motion on that one just went into the flat — not as a “cheat” to get upfield like how the Dolphins use Tyreek Hill — so I do think UW was just showing the look more that really implementing it), then I’m quite certain NFL coaches should be able to get this stuff added to their playbooks in-season, for professionals who work to be the best at their craft every day. To be fair, Kyle Shanahan did say this week basically every team has shown this look, as he detailed everyone implementing it from Miami, starting in Week 2. But my point is all of these offenses should be doing it a lot more, and I don’t buy the idea that in-season changes are a major limitation. In-season stubbornness, maybe.

And the thing is, the bar isn’t even that they would need to be able to implement it in-season. There are obvious reasons why that might be difficult. But the bar is to have included more motion, and misdirection, and play-action, and combinations of all three, into your offense all offseason. Why hasn’t this happened? That was obvious as a cheat code when the 49ers were creating all sorts of problems for defenses with their movement before Mike McDaniel even left for Miami.

That Kalen DeBoer’s staff could build an offensive system at the college level that is fluid, and shows all sorts of different formations, and pre-snap movement, and post-snap misdirection, and can incorporate new motion he wants to copy from the NFL level on a week’s notice — that’s a compliment to him and his staff, but it’s also proof positive that this isn’t as fucking hard as everyone in the league wants to make you believe. Every time nerds like me argue this stuff, you get meatheads running from behind some egg avatar to argue I just don’t know ball and it isn’t that easy. But that chart at the top of this introduction, and the stat I referenced about the top college offenses in motion rate — those things are clear. And these NFL coaches have had years to figure this out. This wasn’t the big new innovative counterpunch from Miami in Week 1. (The ways Miami is doing it are very innovative, to be clear; I’m not downplaying that, I’m just refusing to let the stagnant coaches off the hook here.)

This is very easy. Understand that defenses are gameplanning for you. Force them to declare and/or change their assignments before the snap. And then do it again after the snap! Show a ton of different looks so they have to prepare for everything (I didn’t really emphasize this earlier, but this is what’s great about UW showing all those different formations and play iterations, is it’s harder for defenses to find patterns on film, gameplan for things, and ultimately recognize plays when they look different).

Offensive coordinators — coordinate this shit. It’s literally in your job title. Why do we give these guys passes and act like it’s rocket science because these dinosaurs want to keep running the same offense they came up learning in the 1990s? You can’t just line up in a “pro style” offense and win in an evolving sport. Your offense has to be multiple — that’s what that concept means. You have to have seven different directions you can go with everything. Defenses have learned too damn much at this point.