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The Scheme War Is Over

The most famous play from the most recent Super Bowl originated in high school and trickled up to college before making it to the pros. The no. 1 pick in the 2018 draft was a spread quarterback. And the Chiefs have taken the NFL by storm by embracing concepts from Texas Tech. The football world is now flat.

By Kevin ClarkSept. 25, 2018, 10:00 am UTC • 14 min

In the second half of Super Bowl LII, one viewer at home was surprised by the familiarity of what he saw. The Patriots and Eagles were putting on an unprecedented display of passing, and the 1,151 combined offensive yards were the most of any game in league history. Of course, the NFL had never seen anything like this before. But for at least one person, this was all normal.

“The whole feel of the style, the overall offensive attack felt familiar,” he said.

Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley watched the Super Bowl, and he saw a Big 12 football game.

It is tempting to view the 2018 NFL as the endgame of a trend: peak college offense. Every Patrick Mahomes II touchdown, Eagles RPO, or Baker Mayfield dart is evidence that the spread is here. But it’s not the endgame at all; it’s just the beginning of something significant: the great merging of all levels of football.

NFL offense is on such a record-setting pace that the mark for the most touchdowns through three weeks was set with plenty of time to spare during this past Sunday’s afternoon games. Nine quarterbacks have a quarterback rating of more than 100 through the third Sunday of the season. Only one qualified quarterback in history, Aaron Rodgers, has a career rating over 100. In an era that was already the most offensively minded in league history, this year is unprecedented.

It is not just about a new offense or new quarterbacks; it is about a new way of thinking in a league that probably hasn’t done enough thinking. It is about a new world in which plays can immediately rise up from the high school or college ranks thanks to technology and a new group of coaches who are ready to run them. A conservative institution is finally allowing the excitement from other levels to come in. This is the town from Footloose finally allowing dancing.

“The availability of all this information and game tape has brought football together. It really has,” said Vikings offensive coordinator John DeFilippo, who was the Eagles quarterbacks coach last season. “College guys are getting our tape, we are getting their tape, and there is a lot of cross-referencing going on right now. That’s why you’re seeing the two mesh together.”

Every year coaches tell me that the league’s innovation cycle is getting faster, that schemes change quicker in a year than they did in previous decades. The rule changes we are seeing more of—e.g., more restrictions on roughing the passer—have helped this along, but they serve as only a partial explanation. You can help offensive play along, but you cannot fabricate it. Everything in the league is speeding up. The scheme world is flat.

“The thing about even five years ago is that it was harder to do this—your access was limited,” said Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy. “Now you can see big plays from junior high. Your access to creativity at the lower levels is so much higher than it was a decade ago. That is a real benefit.”

The scheme war that began earlier this decade is already over, and progress has won. Former Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians once said that spread quarterbacks “ain’t playing quarterback” and questioned their leadership abilities, a sentiment echoed by other influential pro voices. Former Raiders head coach and longtime NFL offensive line coach Tom Cable said the spread was a “huge disservice” to college players. This was a common refrain throughout the NFL: College quarterbacks, not NFL coaches, were the clueless ones.

The newfound source of offense is welcome news for a league that has had a quarterback problem. The NFL hopelessly bumbled around with a generation of quarterbacks over the past decade. Part of the reason that so few of the league’s best quarterbacks are in their late 20s is that NFL teams had no idea what to do with spread quarterbacks.

Instead of realizing their signal-callers could throw darts, excel in shotgun, and make plays, teams mostly tried to turn them into NFL quarterbacks, an overly broad and misguided label that roughly translates to “like Peyton Manning.” But those kinds of quarterbacks—meticulous masters of every minute facet of an offense—aren’t being produced anymore due to changes at the youth, high school, and college level. Those teams have begun to favor simpler offenses that “spread” the field horizontally. These plays are easier to run and to learn. The shortfalls, according to NFL teams, include a lack of protection for the quarterback, not enough play under center, and not enough reading of the play by quarterbacks.

The conservative thinkers were wrong about the ability for the spread to translate. This was clear during last year’s Super Bowl, during the first few weeks of the season, or—really, if you were paying attention—at dozens of points in the past decade. “Somebody had to do it first. Somebody had to risk being laughed at, risk being the one to get fired—guys like Doug [Pederson], Chip Kelly, Josh McDaniels,” Riley said.

Chiefs general manager Brett Veach, who is a far cry from the spread panickers of years past, told me his team didn’t even consider what type of offense Mahomes was playing in at Texas Tech before they traded up to draft him with the 10th overall pick in 2017. Rather, they just evaluated the player’s skills.

There’s no clearer sign that the battle is over and the spread has won than the selection of Baker Mayfield as the first overall pick in this year’s draft. In an electrifying display in relief of Tyrod Taylor last Thursday, Mayfield led his Browns to their first win since the 2016 season. He is not the prototypical height for a quarterback, he certainly did not play in a “pro-style” offense, and none of it mattered, because, well, he is very good at football. “He has such a good eye down the field, he’s accurate, and the freaking ball gets out of there,” Browns general manager John Dorsey told me. “These quarterbacks have played the spread option from Pop Warner and then all the way up to college. That’s what they are used to. The quarterback position is geared to the spread now.”  

Riley said Mayfield’s selection by Cleveland is a testament to his skill set and how he competes, but also that “there’s some more openness. He came at a much more open time because people have had success with the [spread].”  

It turns out that Mayfield, Mahomes, and everyone else are real quarterbacks too.

The first conversation I ever had with a general manager about the spread offense was with then–Cleveland GM Ray Farmer in 2015, back when Marcus Mariota’s role in the Oregon offense was being dissected over and over again. Farmer said something that piqued my interest at his pre-draft press conference. “You have to figure out either how to make the adjustment, or everybody is going to start running the spread in the National Football League,” he said. More prophetically, he continued: “I think the teams that figure it out the fastest or change the fastest will reap the benefits of what’s out there. That’s what it comes down to.” Farmer, of course, was right.

It is probably not a coincidence that two of the first coaches to actively study the college game won big. Bill Belichick sent offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels to meet Dan Mullen to study the offense that he and Urban Meyer created at the University of Florida. The 2007 Patriots created the first offense in NFL history to run a majority of their plays in shotgun and then meshed that scheme together with the talents of Randy Moss, Wes Welker, and Tom Brady to quite literally change football. Andy Reid has been espousing the benefits of the spread for years, and now his quarterback is tearing up the record books with each passing weekend. And Reid’s disciple, Doug Pederson, won the Super Bowl with a steady dose of run-pass options seven months ago.  

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in the 1960s, “When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.” These anxieties were especially pronounced in football’s scheme wars. It was partly out of job protection. If spread offenses became en vogue, then the vast majority of NFL coaches—who, as luck would have it, knew very little about spread offenses—would be in trouble. So coaches dismissed spread concepts openly. It was only two years ago that the Cowboys put Connor Cook ahead of Dak Prescott on their draft board specifically because Cook played in a “pro-style” offense. Cook is now on the Carolina Panthers practice squad.

“There was a time we thought we were having a hard time evaluating quarterbacks and receivers because they handed the ball off a lot from the I-formation and threw 20 times a game,” Bengals offensive coordinator Bill Lazor said with a laugh. “Then we complained if they throw it 50 times a game but too many of them are hitches and bubble screens. It’s like [NFL coaches] want exactly what we want to be able to evaluate.”  

Riley said that the main difference today is not that some teams are going all in on the spread. After all, Chip Kelly was doing that five years ago in Philadelphia, and the read-option trend of 2011 and 2012 certainly became a focal point for some teams. No, Riley said, the difference now is that every team is using at least some college concepts.

The teams that were early adopters still maintain an advantage, though. Now Reid delays and disguises vertical routes in the same way Texas Tech did with Mahomes or runs a double handoff that would be run in Lubbock shortly after. The Patriots are running swing screens as if they were in a College Football Playoff game. If you watch your team every Sunday and haven’t noticed the modern college game’s influence, you either missed it or you are watching a bad team.

Mark Colyer, a New Jersey high school coach who runs spreadoffense.com, a resource for coaches, pointed to jet motion as the play that has worked its way into the NFL from lower levels the most. Popularized in high school and by star spread coaches like Chip Kelly, it’s a simple play in which an in-motion player heads toward the quarterback during the snap. Its use in the NFL was up 36 percent from the 2016 to 2017 season. The Los Angeles Rams, in their first year under spread-fluent head coach Sean McVay, were specialists at it. Colyer said that some of the Chiefs’ plays with Mahomes look like Tim Tebow–era Florida Gators plays. They’re just slightly tweaked: On some of the designed runs, like the double handoff, Kareem Hunt—not the quarterback—plays the Tebow run role and Tyreek Hill plays the Percy Harvin speed role.

This is a far cry from years past, when essentially all NFL offenses could be boiled down to three styles: the West Coast, the Erhardt-Perkins system, and the Air Coryell. Every hire that was made typically ran an offense similar to the one that came before them, further hindering innovation. The NFL was essentially a closed loop.

None of the philosophical changes happen without technology. Aside from younger coaches breaking into the ranks, technology is likely the driving force in flattening the scheme world. That is evidenced by the journey of one particular play.

There was another viewer shocked last February. “The Eagles are running ‘Detroit’! No way,” Chad Morris yelled. You don’t know what “Detroit” means because it is now famously known as the “Philly Special.” There’s even a statue commemorating it. Morris is the head coach at Arkansas and the former Clemson offensive coordinator, and he helped introduce the play to the masses.

Detroit/Philly Special came to the NFL in the 2016 season, when current Miami Dolphins offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains, then with the Chicago Bears, ran the play against the Minnesota Vikings. He’d seen a similar play in an email sent to him by a friend. “Wow this is a cool play,” the friend told Loggains. It was from Westlake High School in Texas, and Loggains did not yet know that it had originated at Clemson. He took notes. He showed it to Kyle Shanahan when they worked together in Cleveland in 2014 and then he finally ran it in Chicago at the beginning of 2017. “Before the last three or four years, colleges were trying to get pro tape all the time. For the first time, it’s the reverse. NFL is taking from college; college is taking from high school,” he said. “Even the coaches—pro coaches are going to college; college coaches are going to high school.”

Loggains made another crucial point: “I think a lot of coaches who coached for 25 or 30 years are getting toward the twilight of their career.” The coaches who definitely did not grow up with many of the modern offensive concepts are now aging out of the sport. Loggains said he had a few tense moments on the sidelines when trying to incorporate some trick plays into his Bears offense with then–head coach John Fox. “I remember we ran another trick play against the Vikings,” he said. “And Coach Fox says, ‘Is this the reverse thing? This better work. I don’t know about this,’ and I had to say, ‘It’s gonna work!’” It worked:

Younger coaches and more technology led us to where we are today. Riley told me that he and his coaches have their phones out when watching any football games. “We’ll just send a video of a play in a group message, and we can start working on it. It’s a matter of seconds. There are no delays.” The first play he remembers discussing with his coaches like this was a trick-play touchdown eventually unveiled in the first quarter of a game against Iowa State in 2015.

Riley said the speed in which you can get game film has changed everything. Greg Camarillo, the former Dolphins wide receiver, told me that when the Dolphins wanted to learn the wildcat, they had to roll in a separate TV with a VHS machine to show the players. Now, you can just go on YouTube.

It’s now widely known that the Eagles put assistant coach Press Taylor in charge of mining the world for potential new plays, but nearly every team has a coach like that.

“We look at college plays, high school plays,” Marty Mornhinweg, the Ravens offensive coordinator, told me. On the day we spoke, the Ravens were hosting elementary-school-age football players, so he joked: “We’ll look at plays these young men have run.” The Ravens have Matt Weiss, a wide receivers coach and “football strategy coordinator,” in charge of finding new plays. Mornhinweg said he’s most impressed with the some of the creativity at the lesser-known schools like North Dakota State, South Dakota, or Montana.

“I know coaches scour YouTube,” said Mike Kuchar, who runs X&O Labs, a website for coaches. “It’s no longer ‘get on a plane, spend money, find a connection who knows somebody who knows somebody.’” Kuchar mentioned Hudl, a video service widely used as a key source for information sharing among coaches. The use of tablets, ubiquitous at the NFL level for most of this decade, allows plays and concepts to quickly be sent to players, even when they aren’t in the building, which speeds up the process to install it. If a team wants to introduce a play to the world quickly, it now can.

Loggains considers it an advantage to be from Texas, where there’s a massive football community at every level. The Abilene native has many friends in the Texas high school world who send him plays often. “It is one of the greatest resources, my friends in coaching in Texas who are seeing plays, then we talk about them,” Loggains said. “The creative juices are really flowing.”

High school coaches are now influencing the NFL.

“The modern version of the spread as it’s being termed involves a bit of the RPO and zone-read stuff. That’s a big part of college football, and [those players] are a representation of high school football to be honest,” Cowboys offensive coordinator Scott Linehan said. Falcons coach Dan Quinn raved about the former high school coach he had on staff last year, Jess Simpson, who constantly consulted Quinn on concepts—from every level—before departing to the University of Miami to coach their defensive line.

Although Loggains got it from a high school team, Morris’s Detroit play started when a different high school offensive coordinator, Hunter Spivey, wrote it down for the then–Clemson offensive coordinator: “He said, ‘You won’t run it,’ and I said, ‘I promise you we will run it.’” Morris, a former coach at Elysian Fields High School in Texas, said that he picks the brains of high school coaches often. Riley and his staff ran a quarterback throwback play with Mayfield against Georgia in the Rose Bowl, but he told me that they created it on their own.

Where the concepts specifically originate isn’t that important; what is important is that all levels can borrow from each other now. After all, Mayfield ran a quarterback throwback on Thursday night in his sterling debut.

There’s another coach who was in high school as recently as 2008 who played a major role in the offensive evolution in the NFL: Pederson, the former head coach at Calvary Baptist Academy. He told me that his years at that level helped shape him, particularly when it comes to simplifying the playbook.

“In high school, it’s a very simplistic style of coaching because it has to be simple for those players. I’ve carried that philosophy into this job. I don’t need to make it harder than it needs to be,” Pederson said. “Our game is complicated, and you are scheming against the best defensive minds in the world, but you can play simple and fast. I learned that in high school, a simplistic attitude.”

Doing things simply has always been an overlooked trait in the pro game. One of the disconnects between college and the pros is that the NFL did not realize that colleges adjusted to simpler offenses in part due to the limited practice time. Yet when the NFL dramatically limited practice time after the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, NFL teams did not immediately move to simpler offenses.  

With the Eagles, Carson Wentz has, by design, run many plays he also ran at North Dakota State. Last October, he threw a 9-yard touchdown pass to Corey Clement based on an NDSU play. Pederson told me he runs RPOs because he first studied them while coaching high school, then discussed them more with Alex Smith in Kansas City, who ran them in San Francisco with Jim Harbaugh. And then when Pederson arrived in Philadelphia, he picked the brains of the assistants left over from Chip Kelly. Another Kelly idea, the mesh concept, was used to convert a fourth down in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl when the Eagles trailed by one.

In football, it is now accepted that good ideas come from everywhere—high school, college, and the pros. You’d be surprised by how often NFL coaches refused to accept that.

Kevin Clark