The other day, we talked at length about Tiger Ellison’s Lonesome Polecat and how that ultimately fed into the creation of his run-and-shoot offense. Today we’re talking about the next evolution of that offense, and how it helped to inform the modern NFL passing game.
In his book Run and Shoot Footall: Offense of the Future, Tiger Ellison ends his introduction this way: “I have changed. The revolution came. This book is the story of that revolution.” A bit dramatic? Sure, but Ellison was an English teacher with the ability to make poetry come to life for his students, so dramatic fits him. It was also correct.
In 1965, Darrel “Mouse” Davis was doing a series of coaching clinics and someone handed him a copy of Ellison’s book, which had only come out earlier that year. At the time, Davis was running basic I-formation football, with an eye on trying to use the smaller guys in his offense. “Little pissants” he called him. Standing 5’6”, Davis considered himself a little pissant as well. Through his own high school playing days, Davis discovered that if “you take the little guys and put them out in space, they’re pretty good. You put ‘em in a slug-it-out kind of game, they’re pretty average.” So Davis tried to put them in space.
Ellison’s book immediately struck a chord with Davis. He took the formations and ideas from Ellison and used them to push his own ideas forward. At its core, Davis’ philosophy was no different from Sid Gillman. Gillman famously stated “The field is one hundred yards long and fifty-three yards wide. We’re going to use every damn inch of it and force the other guy to defend it all.” Davis slightly-less-famously stated “If I play a pissant, you’ve probably got to cover me with a pissant. And the more field that you use, the cleaner your reads.”
The same idea, with one maybe a little more eloquently spoken, although I’ll let you be the judge of who did it better.
Davis never really stuck in any one place for long, but wherever he went his offenses consistently put up big numbers. He was the OC of the USFL’s Houston Gamblers in 1984, where he coached Jim Kelly. In 1984, Kelly completed 63% of his passes, threw for 5,219 yards and 44 TDs. And it was all based out of a formation that should look familiar if you read the Ellison piece.
Kelly would leave the USFL after 1985 and have great success in Buffalo, using a modified version of the run-and-shoot offense.
The core ideas of Mouse Davis’ run-and-shoot would eventually form the idea behind Hal Mumme & Mike Leach’s Air Raid system; a system with concepts that you will see in one form or another in pretty much every NFL game you watch. Without getting too deep into it, the system was born out of an idea of using a pass-heavy offense with average-to-below-average talent and still find success. The playbook was a handful of plays with simple terminology, and they would practice those same plays over and over again.
They would take simple passing concepts, attach options to the routes depending on how the defense dropped and tell the receiver and quarterback to “read grass”. As with all things, it’s slightly more complicated than that, but maybe not by much. They could call the same play 10 times in a row and it might look completely different. The play we’re looking at today is the one that most people probably link to Air Raid more than any other concept: Four Verticals.
As you can see from the play card, Mumme & Leach simply called this play “6”, because that’s the amount of points they expected to score every time they called it. Again, on its face, it’s a simple concept: run 4 receivers vertically up the field and release a back as a checkdown option. The trick is how those routes can change based on the look the defense gives them. The quarterback may end up having the option of a back-shoulder throw up the right seam or a post from the left slot. The defense can know the call and still be wrong.
And now, after all that, we finally come to a play. The Packers line up in an empty, 3x2 look, with Robert Tonyan and Marcedes Lewis as the tight, in-line tight ends on the left. The Cardinals are showing a single-high look pre-snap, and they stay with that look post-snap.
At the snap, four Packers receivers run vertical. On the left side, Lewis releases straight up the field while Tonyan has a wide release to create more space between the routes. It’s Four Verts, but Tonyan’s vertical route will take him directly into the path of the defender. Rodgers reads the green and throws back-shoulder to Tonyan.
Four Verts can be lethal, but everyone on the offense needs to be on the same page, and that just didn’t happen here. Rodgers throws back-shoulder, but Tonyan continues pushing up the field. Instead of a back-shoulder completion, it almost ends in an interception.
Boy. That was a really long walk to get to an incompletion, huh?