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Texas WR/TE Passing Offense Talk


LTtxfan

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I don't know about a TD (safety would definitely have a chance to run him out of bounds), but certainly a very nice gain. I do think we have some issues with situational football. Early on, take that shot. But at that point in the game we really just needed the first down and it was there on a platter. It'd be nice if our offense would take the easy yards more often, particularly when it would result in a 1st on 3rd down. 

Yep. On this one there’s a chance Whittington get just as many yards if Worthy gets a block. But 95% conversion of the first versus 60% or whatever I take the higher.
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1 hour ago, Dahobbs said:

I don't know about a TD (safety would definitely have a chance to run him out of bounds), but certainly a very nice gain. I do think we have some issues with situational football. Early on, take that shot. But at that point in the game we really just needed the first down and it was there on a platter. It'd be nice if our offense would take the easy yards more often, particularly when it would result in a 1st on 3rd down. 

Agree, but that is just Sark. He changed Worthy’s route on that concept, so you know he was hunting the big play. You can bet your mortgage Worthy was the first read there. Texas ran 11 plays in the 3Q, if you include this one , it was 3 shot plays. People are talking about turtling, but his 3Q play calling was overly aggressive in my opinion. 

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23 hours ago, HtownHorn said:

If that 1st screen was a fake screen and go, Worthy would have walked into the EZ.

 

On the 2nd throw, I think Ewers made the decision to throw to Worthy too soon, and missed a wide-open Whittington. Who could have picked up 30+ yards down the sideline.

Worthy actually isn't even an eligible receiver there. That could be why their guy pounced on it so quickly.

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I’ve been watching a lot of highlight packages of portal additions, notably Bolden and Niblack. 
 

While the highlights are fun it would be nice, and far more telling, for someone to put together a player’s 20-30 worst snaps. If their worst plays are “average” then great. But if Niblack is getting blown up trying to block a couple times a game and Bolden misses a lot of easy catches, that would be good to know too. 

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Since a new innovative offensive trend discussed here, adding to this thread...

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By:  Andrew Beaton     Updated Feb. 5, 2024 

Quote

Once quarterback Brock Purdy breaks the San Francisco 49ers’ huddle, opposing defenders face an endless set of problems. Running back Christian McCaffrey could blow past them in any direction. Wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk has the speed to torch them deep downfield. Tight end George Kittle can catch a pass on the sideline and steamroll his way toward a touchdown. 

Every blade of grass, from the line of scrimmage to the back of the end zone, presents imminent danger. 

But what makes the way the 49ers attack the entire field so menacing is something as simple as it is counterintuitive. When they snap the ball in the Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs, they’ll be bunched up closer together than any other team in the league. 

For the last quarter-century, the trend in football has been to do the complete opposite. Spread offenses have trickled their way upward, from high school fields in Texas through the college game and into the NFL. The name explains the concept: receivers split out farther from the quarterback and even the offensive linemen space themselves out more, spreading the field and stretching the defense before the center even hikes the ball. 

But ever since Kyle Shanahan became San Francisco’s coach in 2017, his team has been at the forefront of football’s latest schematic evolution. The spread is out. The squeeze is in. 

Shanahan’s condensed formations, which are beginning to proliferate through the NFL, take the same principles as the spread—and completely invert them. The goal of any offense is to create and exploit space. Spread schemes do that by forcing defenders to line up from sideline to sideline. The 49ers achieve the same goal in an unexpected way: by forcing defensive backs to worry about the enormous empty patches of turf on the outside, it actually opens up the middle of the field to attack.

That surprising insight has made San Francisco’s offense the envy of the rest of the league. It’s why McCaffrey always seems to have cavernous holes to run through, and Purdy regularly has receivers who are yards away from the closest defender. It’s the reason the league is now littered with Shanahan’s acolytes—and why NFL offenses are shrinking. 

Kyle is one of the most creative guys in the league,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said.

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Not long ago, the only record of the strategic trends shaping the NFL was anecdotal. New plays and formation wrinkles were fodder for discussion at coaching clinics. When they were documented at all, it was by sleepless analysts charting them by hand. But Keegan Abdoo, who works for NFL Next Gen Stats, had a different idea. He wanted to objectively quantify them with the billions of data points that are now flooding football. 

These days, an unfathomable amount of information is tracked on every single play, from a player’s speed at any given moment to how much separation a wide receiver gets from the defender assigned to cover him. Inspired by the tight splits he saw emerging across the league, Abdoo applied that same tracking technology to players when they’re completely stationary.  What he discovered is that the one of the most powerful X’s and O’s innovations of the past decade boiled down to something incredibly simple: Where the 11 players on offense line up before the snap.

For the last three years, the 49ers have lined up in condensed formations—ones fewer than 23 yards wide—more often than any other team in the league. In each of the last eight seasons, dating back to his time with the Falcons, Shanahan’s offenses have been in the top three of the league in this measure.

“The widest two players,” Abdoo explains, “the distance between them overall is a measure of how much you’re spreading out the defense—and how much of the field pre-snap you’re making the defense account for.” 

This season, Shanahan lined up his offense in tight formations more than ever before: San Francisco has run 63.9% of its total plays in this style. What that means is that when the offense lines up, the average width of the formation is just 19.9 yards, according to Next Gen Stats, or nearly 5 yards narrower than the NFL average of 24.6. 

Just a few years ago, playing this way directly contravened everything that was in vogue at the time. Back in 2016, spread formations—ones with at least 30 yards between the two widest offensive players—accounted for 46.1% of snaps, while condensed splits made up just 11% of plays. Spread offenses were indisputably king. 

But in each season since then, those trends have gone in reverse. Spread formations have receded and condensed ones have increased. Last year, for the first time since Next Gen Stats began comprehensively logging this data, tight splits actually overtook the spread. Over the same time span, the width of the average formation has shrunk dramatically, from 28.3 yards to 24.6. 

“Just looking at how the league-average tendencies have changed over the last eight years of our data is pretty fascinating,” Abdoo says. “It’s interesting comparing it to college football right now…it’s the exact opposite.” 

What’s so incredible about this transformation is how it can be traced back to one person, and it’s not actually Kyle Shanahan. It’s his dad.

Mike Shanahan, the coach who won two Super Bowls in charge of the Denver Broncos, assembled a staff of wunderkinds when he was coaching in Washington in the early 2010s. And all five offenses that led the NFL in condensed play percentage this season were part of it: His son Kyle, Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay (58%), Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel (54.2%), Houston Texans offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik (47.3%) and Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur (42.7%). Since 2016, the 10 offenses with the narrowest formation width in a season all belong to Kyle Shanahan, McVay or McDaniel. 

After McVay and Shanahan were both hired in 2017, they were so successful that they produced sprawling coaching trees of their own, which have driven this shift. McDaniel and Slowik were on San Francisco’s staff. LaFleur also worked for McVay in Los Angeles. 

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The success of lining up in a formation that looks like the offense has barely broken the huddle has never been clearer. All six of the teams that led the NFL in condensed formation rate, including the Detroit Lions, reached the divisional round of the playoffs. 

The advantages to lining up like this are numerous. For one, defenses have a pretty good idea of what’s coming out of spread formations: 79% of those plays end up in a pass, yielding just 6.7 yards per attempt. Condensed formations, though, are nearly even, resulting in passes 49% of the time. While that’s a low number in a pass-happy league, offenses are rewarded by gaining 7.7 yards per pass—a full yard more. That’s aided by teams being able to credibly threaten to run the ball, allowing them to use play action 44% of the time, while that’s used on just 7% of spread passes. 

“It’s all about being unpredictable,” says Mike Band, a senior manager with Next Gen Stats. “When you’re in a formation that the defense doesn’t know if you’re going to run or pass, that in itself is invaluable.”

The irony is that by squeezing together in the center of the field, condensed formations actually make the middle of the field more vulnerable to attack. Because there’s so much space to the outside, guarding against that has to be a defensive back’s top priority. That’s exactly what Shanahan’s offense exploits, using in-breaking routes that prey upon the defense’s urge to protect the huge expanse of grass on the outside.

For six straight years, Next Gen Stats has found that the 49ers have targeted in-breaking routes more frequently than any other team in the NFL. 

Those passes explain Purdy’s incredible efficiency this season, when he led the league with 9.6 yards per pass attempt. In condensed formations, in-breaking routes average 9.2 yards per attempt with a 69.4% completion rate. Those numbers drop to 7.9 yards and 63.9% from spread formations. 

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Not all of the NFL’s best offenses use these tactics. No team ran a lower percentage of condensed sets than the Buffalo Bills and Philadelphia Eagles, both of whom made the playoffs. The Baltimore Ravens’ offense that took Lamar Jackson to another MVP-caliber season also ranked near the bottom of the league. 

The Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes aren’t wedded to either style. They’re near the bottom of the league in spread plays and toward the middle of the pack in condensed ones. Which means when they line up, they’re not particularly bunched up or scattered apart. 

The true test will be for Kansas City’s defense, which was one of the top ranked units in the league and just held the Ravens to a measly 10 points in the AFC Championship Game. 

The Chiefs will discover that San Francisco’s offense presents an entirely different challenge. That’s because the 49ers squeezed their way to the Super Bowl. 

 

https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/kyle-shanahan-offense-49ers-brock-purdy-christian-mccaffrey-1776f02e?st=hqn7hg67tstr5wn&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink

 

Edited by LTtxfan
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