How I Gameplan Playcall Sequences, Pt. 4
It’s weird to hear from me this early in the week, but we have something coming that you don’t want to miss!
To this point, we have discussed creating gameplan sequences and fitting them together into a gameplan. The final stage comes when thinking about activating them correctly in the game. Based on my study, I believe this is a defining skill that separates someone who “calls plays” from somebody who “coordinates an offense.” Anybody can call plays going down the list. Why are they listed in the order they are? When do I need to break that order? If I break the order, can I get back to the list? If so, how?
Those are all questions a coach who calls plays may not know the answer to, but a true coordinator, an architect of offense, should. Specific answers vary heavily between coaches, and that’s okay. That’s where a coach’s experience and playcalling personality can shine through, and I believe there are also differences between levels of the game.
Professional players can watch so much film that they can see one motion from three weeks ago and defend it whereas a high school defense might not make an adjustment until after half. NFL offenses can go multiple drives not running a play from the same sequence and still move on to the next, and in high school, it’s difficult finding the line between never leaving a series outside of situations and bouncing around so much that a defense never starts to overplay anything.
To me, that answer lies in consistency in scheme and presentations week-to-week.
A few weeks into the season, what do I want that DC across the field to know he has to stop to be successful? If he doesn’t know what to expect because he has seen Wide Zone one week, Buck Sweep the next, and Duo the week after, then he’s probably pretty confident that whatever we come out in, we’re either going to be unsuccessful at it, I might not have the answers when he regroups his defense to stop what we put in that week, or both. When you’re playing the Rams, you have to be able to stop Mid Zone and Duo. When you’re playing the 49ers, you have to be able to stop Wide Zone and Counter.
I also think there needs to be some consistency with presentations. I have discussed formations a lot this off-season, but at the end of the day, I want to use formations that regulate the defense, meaning I know what I am going to see from them. This can really go one of two ways for me.
I have seen the defense line up to X formation on film and expect them to line up similarly against me
I may not have seen the defense line up, but the formation forces some kind of check (stack, bunch, trips, nub, two back, etc.), and since I haven’t seen it, they haven’t either, and they probably have one single way to play it entering our game. Once I see them line up the first time, I know what to likely expect until at least halftime, maybe the game.
If we are inconsistent with formations, our tendencies reset every game, and while tendencies are something to be aware of, they are not to be feared, if they are used correctly. One of the best ways to create explosive plays is to break a tendency. Catch the defense overplaying a tendency, break it until the defense goes back to base, then go back to our base, tendency-creating play.
Most tendencies are discovered through how we present a play - formations and motions. If we’re putting an entirely new slate of formations together every week, a defense has to spend time discovering new tendencies every week.
In one game this season, I gameplanned a lot of motioning a wing to a sniffer to run 12P Duo with no RPO. The next week, I ran the same motion to 11P Duo and attached an RPO. I knew because of the tendency I had set up, the OLB was going to be aggressive into the fit when he first saw it. On the second play of that game, I called the play, and tossed the Bubble for an 8 yard gain. That OLB wasn’t a problem for the rest of the game, and we went on to rush for over 300 yards as a result. That could not have been possible without consistency.
So moving between series’ starts with consistency. Now we are in the game. I script my first 10 plays. We can dive into theories on the opening script as we get closer to the season, but a large part of my opening script is my series starters. If they can’t stop my base play, I’ll keep running it. If they can, then I want to know early so I can get to the adjustments earlier.
In my opinion, the most difficult part is knowing when to advance a sequence vs when to move to another. Again, this can vary greatly between playcallers and levels of the game. Personally, I like to exhaust the opening script before getting very deep into sequences, at least the plays in the script that are series starters. If my opening script is primarily my series starters and my series starters are my top plays against their defense, why wouldn’t I want to make them stop those calls before getting into changeup calls? Changeup calls can also change things up for the offense too, so I want to run the plays we are most confident in as often as possible.
Let’s work through a scenario. They stopped static 11P 3x1 Wide Zone strong early, but we kept working through the script. Unless I catch lightning in a bottle such as a severe misalignment that leads to big explosives, I am not going to deviate from my opening script outside of situational playcalling (3rd/4th down, Red Zone, etc.). My opening scripts are designed to start a few series’, hopefully score, but mostly to gather information on alignments and reactions to motion. Once we have exhausted the script, we can analyze the information we were given. What series starters were successful? Perhaps more importantly, what starters weren’t successful, and what do we have to counter how they stopped it? This informs where we go after the opening script. Like I mentioned earlier in this article series, if the opening script is working, I’m not going to out-coach myself and totally get off of it. At that point, it becomes more about what presentation I want to give. If I want to get in the static 3x1 11P formation that Wide Zone was stopped in, I would call a play based on how it was stopped. If I want to run a formation that had a play that worked in the opening script, I’m extremely likely to call that play again.
I also might navigate to my next way to call the play. Maybe I had a weak-side Wide Zone pop in the opening script with a play-side Jet motion. When I revisit that playcall the next time, maybe we line up in the static look that matches the final formation from the original play from the script. Now I’m gathering more information. Did the original play only work because of the motion? Are any other plays in a series available?
Assuming this is a relatively close game, this process continues on for the majority of the first half for me - trying to gather as much information as possible for us to analyze at halftime. After half, they will have likely made some adjustments to what has been working for us, but what they won’t be talking about is what worked for them and changing it. Hopefully we have answers for what didn’t work for us in the first half that we can activate in addition to counters to what the defense does to try and stop what did work for us. If we can go into the second half with those answers, I feel good offensively about our chances.
In my opinion, the best way to reach that point is to have a consistent core that transcends weekly gameplans. We can add a few different wrinkles every week to keep an opponent off-guard and attack specific weaknesses we see on film, but by default, a wrinkle assumes there is already a larger sheet of paper in place, a foundation. The time is now to lock in your foundation for the coming season. Next week, I am offering a challenge to help you build a strong foundation that can be built on throughout the season. A house with no foundation won’t make it through many storms, and an offense is the same way. If you’re interested in taking the challenge, fill out the questions below to be added to the waiting list! See you there.