Breakdown Sports

I love receivers releasing inside of the offensive EMOL. This can be done from the RB position after receiving a play fake. It can come from the FB or blocking back (sniffer), where it looks like he is executing a lead block. Or even from a TE aligned inside another TE. In this post, I'm going to explain why this fairly basic design (and not all together new design, but one that is coming back to light), is so effective. Example of the TE Throwback the Falcons ran in '16 season. 3 TEs in the game. Clear-out over the top. Sneak a guy back across the field. pic.twitter.com/xI6kM7WFHB — Matt Bowen (@MattBowen41) November 21, 2017

I’ve talked previously about the advantage of having good H-backs in an offensive system. Minnesota, coming off the Maxx Williams era, has continued to use TEs/H-Backs/FBs in a variety of ways to present match up issues through the use of formations/keys. Against Michigan – a team that primarily plays Cover 1 with a very deep center-field safety – they used the position of the H-Back to attack what is known as the “hole” of the defense. The hole – typically associated with Cover 2 teams – is the void in the defense in front of the safety level (typically directly between the two-high safeties) and behind the LB level. Let’s take a look at how Minnesota attacked this void through the air, and how it was set up with their formations.

In this post we will look at some of the standard route concepts run from a TE/Flanker alignment. Obviously, these can be paired with other routes (some I'll show including a RB), but this is to get the fundamental understanding of the routes. I'll try to explain the concept briefly, as well as provide names for what you'll hear the concept called elsewhere at times (these things get lots of names, some people use the same names but have different meanings too, so it can get confusing). If a number is visible near the end of a route, that is the nominal yardage the route will be run to. For more information on specific routes, we took a look at the route tree earlier .

This post is intended to look at the fundamental route trees for WRs, TEs, and RBs. These show and give a brief description for receivers in most every system. WR Route Tree