The shift towards the McVay doctrine was a league-wide answer to the cover-3/man-free defenses that had blossomed over the course of the last decade – you can read more about that here.
RUN N GUN OFFENSE FOOTBALL PRO
McVay and the Rams ran 94 (!) keepers last season, per Pro Football Focus, by far the fattest mark in the league. Last season, four of the top-six leaders in bootlegs played in the Divisional Round of the playoffs, per Sharp Football Stats – and all faced off against one another. When you’re not trying to hit a shot play, you best be doing something to set up the next one. In the passing era, that’s the entire ball game.
Hit as many as you can stop as many as you can. It’s the base around which all outside zone teams are trying to hit ‘explosives’.Īnd the NFL is a league of explosives. Sprinkling some pre-snap sugar onto tried-and-true designs – motions, shifts, and all-manner of at-the-snap fun-and-games – has turned the ‘keeper’ from a chain-mover into the shot-play design. McVay, Shanahan, and co, didn’t invent the tactic, but they’ve weaponized it to an unprecedented level – both riding fun-n-gun offenses all the way to Super Bowl until they ran into, surprise, Bill Belichick. The boot-action has become the go-to way for the league’s most prominent offenses to hit explosive plays. It’s no longer about moving the chains on third down, or bluffing on early down to steal ten yards. Yet the rebirth of the outside-zone-then-boot idea has led to one specific change: the boot-action is no longer a specific down-and-distance call. Whoever is on the other side of the ball finds a counter. Nothing in football is new, in the literal sense.
RUN N GUN OFFENSE FOOTBALL HOW TO
The thorniest questions that has faced DCs as the horizontal-stretch Svengalis have made their way through the league: How to defend the boot action?īootlegs are nothing new. All with the same goal: Get the defense to flow horizontally before you try to him them vertically for an explosive play. Over the past five or so years, those have been the staples of the modern pro-offense. Outside-zone, split flow, deep overs, intersecting crossing routes, jet motions, orbit motions, ghost motions, and oh so many play-fakes and boots. This is the era of the horizontal-stretch. The NFL is now the league of Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Kevin Stefanski, Matt LaFleur, and all of the branches that have fallen off those trees and drifted throughout the league. Say it with me: We’re living in a wide-zone world.
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