Shapes? What is that?
Maybe you heard John Gruden a few years ago call one unique formation ‘Star Wars’. Here is a link to that Bengals game where he described it as such.
Gruden described it as being kind of crazy? But is it? Is there something legitimate to it? I am going to call the grouping of new formations like these ‘Shapes’ because it makes it pretty easy to describe. In the above video we see a ‘Line’ with two players to the top/right of the formation and a ‘Triangle’ to the bottom/left with four players.
The above formation could be called “Line, Triangle” by calling the right-hand side first and the left-hand side second. If any of these formations catch on I am sure there will be lots of creative formation names created.
Thanks to @bruceeien for sharing with me how others have called these formations ‘Ninja’. Here are a couple of links I found. 1) Aggies Watch out for Ninja attack. 2) Ninja Attack
There are some similar type concepts in this highlight film of 2017 too. Remember the keyboard shortcuts for viewing videos.
We could also see shapes like a ‘Point’, ‘Diamond’, ‘Square’, ‘Rectangle’ and even ‘Pentagon’ if we get creative enough.
This could be ‘Point, Rectangle’…
You could even move your guards out too if you wanted…. This could be ‘Triangle, Triangle.’
In all the above formations we can pretty quickly see that the numbers advantage is to the left. Simply swing the ball out there and you have lots of Grass to work with and great Numbers. Some of the blocking schemes could even start using interior line concepts. We could run our bubble screen to the left with ‘Belly’ blocking in front of it!
Finally, ‘Point, Pentagon’ anyone?
Why in the world would anybody do this?
Answer 1: As an offense if you could choose to have less players on the field or more, what would you choose? You would choose fewer right? We all hear that 9, 7 or 6 man football produces more scoring because there is more space on the field. So what if we could separate the field into three parts of the left, middle and right and cause the defense to spread out even more than it already is with traditions formations like Twins, Trips and Quads with five lineman? If we throw the ball to one side of the field in one of the above ‘Shape’ formations, those defensive players have to run all the way across the field to get involved in the play. Even think of Hockey… What do they do in overtime to increase the chances of scoring? They start to play 4 on 4 instead of 5 on 5.
Answer 2: There will be fewer rushers on the quarterback. Right now we typically see 4 or 5 rushers on the quarterback. What if we could decrease the number of rushers to 3 simply by changing our formation to have fewer offensive lineman? How many fewer sacks would that cause? You could not rush 5 players against the ‘Shape’ formations above as a simple throw out to the ‘Triangle’ or ‘Rectangle’ side would cause a huge advantage in Numbers.
Answer 3: There are fewer defenders to stop the run in the middle of the field. Right now we see a lot of 5 lineman, 1 QB and 1 Running back on offense for a total of 7 players against some type of 4×2 box with 6 defenders.
If we only keep 3 lineman in the game with a QB and Running Back for a total of 5 offensive players and the defense only keeps 4 defenders in the box there are very few defenders to stop the zone read type plays right up the middle of the field. These formations make the concept of ‘Numbers’ very important because the QB will need to do counting of the defenders to determine where to deliver the ball.
Modern Day Example
I actually saw the ‘Line, Triangle’ formation when I was watching my alma mater, Central College from Pella, IA in the Division III playoffs in the fall of 2021 when they made a nice run in the DIII playoffs.. They ran a hurry up offense and these ‘Shape’ formations produced some very big plays. They simply widened out the tackles as shown above in the video by the Bengels and the defense did not widen enough. So they simply threw the ball into the short side, ran up the sideline and had big plays. Sounds so simple. And it is so simple.
Are there drawbacks?
Some drawbacks could be…
- These formations might dictate the development of other types of athletes to take these blocking / wide positions of the offensive lineman. At the pro level there is a limited roster so it might be hard to justify athletes like these.
- The edges of the pocket for some of the edge defensive rushers would be closer to the quarterback. We have all seen concepts of calling for greater line splits when possible to simply make it farther for the edge rushers to get to the quarterback. This would be working against that concept.
- This might limit the number of plays and blocking angles that an inside running team might like to use as they run the ball behind this limited number of offensive lineman.
- Sometimes we use tight formations to draw all of the defenders in so we can create Grass/Space on the edges to run to. This could still be done with these concepts though by placing one group of 6 players on a hash and 5 players to the same short side and leaving the rest of the field with no offensive players.
These types of formations could not have existed with the quarterback being under center. The edges of the interior offensive line are so close that it would be very hard to throw the ball out to these other groupings of players. But with the game today almost fully in shot-gun mode, now throwing out to these edges for these bubble type screens many times has a 90%+ completion percentage.
I could see some of these formations starting to creep into the college game simply to make the game more complex for the defense and something extra to prepare for. If you are simply going to throw bubble screens to the receivers and run a zone/read in the middle there is not much cost to install some of these things.
I could also see some high schools mixing this in for multiple reasons. There are many schools that simply do not have many offensive lineman. You always need to put your best athletes on the field. Why not remove two offensive lineman and replace them with two quick receivers who do not have great hands to do blocking on the edges? For larger high schools with tons of players who do full platoon, why not give a couple of these types of receivers / tight ends with not the best hands some lineman numbers and give them a chance to play?
In the end, the implementation of something new like ‘Shapes’ must answer the fundamental question of whether the cost of the new formation and/or play is worth the time it will take away from other formations and plays. I agree with the theory that it is better to run fewer concepts and to run them more consistently.
The thing that is so intriguing to me about ‘Shapes’ is that it fundamentally may give the offense an edge in various facets of Numbers, Angles and Grass. That edge may lead to enough explosive plays and points, where the ‘choice’ of whether to do something new and potentially better like ‘Shapes’ is no longer a ‘choice’.
I have been watching ESPN’s segments on the history of college football and it is amazing the watch the transformation over the decades as we went transitioned through no passing / wedge football, T football, Wishbone football, Wing-T football, Vertical passing game, Run and Shoot, West Coach Offense, to today. And there are so many systems I did not mention, but the point is that the game will always evolve. There is just too much at stake and too many people thinking about it for it to not change. Could a college wishbone team of 1972 imagine running RPOs and hitting slants behind the LBs stepping up? Yes, they could have imagined it, but until everything moved to the gun and there were enough talented throwing QBs to be spread across college football the transition could not fully happen.
Change will happen again, even while fundamentals will remain consistent. People will look back in 20 to 30 years at some of the things we are doing today in football and simply scratch their heads. They will say: Couldn’t they simply see if they did A and B and C that their offenses could be so much more explosive?
Well, somebody over the next few years is going to try A, then add on B and then someone else will put A+B+C and voila… A few more points, then a few more wins, then somebody will notice, then another coach will copy, then somebody will do a clinic, then somebody will do a blog post, and…. change will happen.
The game will change. Will ‘Shapes’ be part of it?
It will be up to all of us who love this game to find out. 🙂
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