OffenseThe Vikings offense so far has worked much more on play-action sets than in previous camps despite always having been a team known for heavy use of play action in their offense. While this could simply be part of their install schedule — they may reserve some of the more standard passing plays for later in camp — it looks unique given their history of mixing it up a bit more in previous years.
Kirk Cousins is
famously good at play-action passing and seems uniquely prepared to take advantage of an offense focusing on it, so one focusing on boot action and deep shots off of run fakes might be in the cards for the Vikings. That can’t be the entire offense, as the Vikings found out
against the Packers and
49ers two years ago. They’ll have to add other wrinkles.
That could come from something somewhat similar to play action, a play design that works on the same theme: misdirection. While end-arounds and receiver sweeps
have always been implemented to some degree in the Vikings offense, there has been a particular emphasis this year on finding ways to get receivers moving full speed in jet and fly motion to the edge, with or without the ball.
Linebackers and defensive linemen often have difficulty dealing with receivers in motion, sometimes because those players are simply moving too fast at the snap and other times because the movement can distract a defender from an otherwise simple play.
“It makes you need to play your cues,” Vikings defensive end
Stephen Weatherly said recently. “Be disciplined. Know your job, your role in the called defense, and execute it. And don’t do anything more than that. Because once you start to do your job and someone else’s job, that’s when a defense gets gashed. So more than anything, those misdirections, those flashes, those fake reverses — or maybe real reverses — it’s all to try to get one person to be not disciplined, and when they’re not, that’s when offenses have a big gain.”
The Vikings don’t have to hand the ball off to the receiver in motion to take advantage of his speed off the edge. He can turn that run into a wheel route and gain depth downfield for the quarterback to target him, or that movement can get a linebacker out of position on a downhill run.
Not only that, the Vikings might want to use
Adam Thielen’s arm, as they have in the past, on these types of plays.
Adding to that theme are other attempts at misdirection, including plays with multiple running backs on the field and the wildcat formation. The wildcat sees a runner, typically the running back, take a direct snap from the center and then choose to run the ball himself, hand it off to a different runner or even throw a pass. That last option is the least likely, which is why it can occasionally be effective.
But the bread and butter of the wildcat is the direct run from the player receiving the snap. On paper, the benefit is that there’s an extra blocker; instead of a quarterback handing off and then doing little else, the player receiving the snap can block directly after handing it off, keep the ball and benefit from the block of his fellow running back, or read an intentionally unblocked defender and “block” that player with his read.
The benefit beyond the X’s and O’s is that it can confuse a defense and force it to misalign. That’s what happened to the Vikings defense on Saturday night when
Dalvin Cook took a direct snap before reading
Danielle Hunter and handing it off to
Alexander Mattison, who broke out for a big gain.
Combining the wildcat with receiver motion is something Iowa did
extremely well last year, and the Vikings might be able to ask former Iowa receiver
Ihmir Smith-Marsette for tips on how they set up that combination.
Even without the wildcat — something they considered because of the possibility of a quarterback-less offense, which
became all too real at the Vikings’ night practice — two-running back sets could enable a player like
Ameer Abdullah or
Kene Nwangwu to move into and out of the slot and force defenses to account for players they don’t have traditional responses to.
One final note here might be the usage of tight formations. That’s not a radical football innovation, but it could be a sneaky way that the Vikings load up the defensive box to create room in the passing game without having to rely on fielding poor pass catchers to force the defense into run-defending personnel.
Heavy box counts have generally been good for the passing game, but they can be countered by personnel less suited for catching passes. Receivers are generally more efficient than tight ends, and the Vikings have been more effective at throwing and running the ball in three-receiver sets than two-receiver sets at every down and distance.
One way to create heavy box counts is to put receivers onto the field and condense the formation — something the
Rams do
to great effect. Condensed formations speed up crossing routes and give the offense more space on out-breaking routes while creating blocking angles that are difficult for defenses to recover from. It’s also, as
Patrick Peterson pointed out recently, difficult for cornerbacks to press against condensed formations.
There are negatives of course — a lot of traffic to fight through on in-breaking routes, shorter blitz paths, fewer double-teams in the zone-running game and so on — but the implementation by the Vikings early on in camp might tell us that they think those drawbacks are worth the benefits.
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