Explosive Plays: Week 16, 2023

One play, many ways is the theme this week. Two examples of the same play being run from a different presentation with both calls exploding!

We’re at the point in the off-season now where most of us are starting to think about scheme for next season, and this week in the NFL reminds us of Bruce Lee’s famous quote that can be so easily forgotten as we think about all the ways we can attack defenses next season: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Kevin O’Connell and Matt LaFleur gave us two great examples of how to run the same play a different way within a single gameplan, and it underscores the importance of this entire study of explosive plays. Explosive plays rarely happen by accident. Most often they include film study of seeing how we can get a defender misaligned, looking in the wrong place, or carrying the wrong route. We often have a saying along the lines of, “We’re only going to get one chance to run this play,” generally with the idea that the defense will recognize it a second time and cheat to stop it. This may be true for full-on trick plays, but does it have to be true for regular concepts that we think have a good chance of being successful, perhaps explosive for that game? KOC and MLF show us two different ways to be able to run the same play from a different presentation: one using motion to present the play differently and the other using a different formation entirely.