The Chip Wagon

Extra! Extra! Read All About It: Sweeping the Texans

On Sunday the Eagles continued to keep the running game going despite facing, in my opinion, the best player in the entire NFL. JJ Watt made a huge impact on this game early on but as the game went along the OL settled down and the tempo probably didn’t help the Texans stay fresh. More notably, the Eagles chose a heavy dose of sweep plays to the outside away from Watt. Breaking down the design of these sweep play just never gets old. 

One of the more exciting drives of the year came in the final minutes of the 3^rd quarter. The Eagles scored a TD on a 4-play scoring drive and all 4 plays were called running plays. Two of those calls were a play we’ve covered extensively on the blog over the last 13 months. The sweep read. It’s worth breaking down the design of this play. 

Extra! Extra! 'READ' All About It: Why the Read-Option is Still Working

That was a tough game to watch yesterday. Very frustrating to say the least and the inconsistent play of Nick Foles is really starting to wear this author down. Foles inconsistency will likely be the theme of the week leading up to Houston this week, so I'll settle on another topic for now. The Read-Option. Obviously we've written a ton about the read-option since Chip Kelly came to town and while the running game has not been nearly as dominant in 2014 as it was in 2013, one of the more interesting schematic developments of the offense in 2014 is to see how Chip is stretching the defense horiztonally on read-option plays without a mobile QB. 

Inside and Out-How Chip Out-Coached and Out-Schemed the Giants- Part 1

One of the great things about the Chip Kelly offense is the simplicity of it all. As we've repeated in this blog many times, Chip isn't really inventing anything new. He's taking a lot of old football concepts that have been used for years and packaging them together and dressing them up in different ways. A great example is of the Eagles bread and butter play, the inside zone. The Eagles run this play as well as any team in football right now, but sometimes the simplicity can make things predictable. One of the much talked about things about Chip Kelly's inside zone run game is that based on the formation, you are really telling the defense what you are going to do. This doesn't automatically make it easier to stop, good execution trumps all, but teams can get a bit more creative and try to focus on stopping the foundation of the Eagles offense. Perhaps no team in the NFL defended the Eagles run game last year better than the New York Giants, and they did so by attacking the Eagles inside zone scheme.

Using things like a "nut stunt" the Giants were able to really limit the effectiveness of our inside zone game. Sheil Kapadia did a great job of getting some excellent scoop from the players on the Giants strategy to thwart the inside zone scheme and did a really nice All-22 breakdown. Sheil also did a good job getting some insight from Eagles players prior to the Giants game last week that suggested that the Eagles had a few tricks up their sleeves:

"We've got a couple more things to really beat their scheme," said Molk. "It's a tough thing against the inside zone. It really hurts the play dramatically. So it's just all about understanding that they're gonna do it and adapting to it."

"We have certain calls for that, but the linebackers bump up too. But we have a lot of variations that we're gonna run this week, mix it up a little bit."

And boy did Chip have a plan. Over the course of the next two posts I'll dive into Chip's game plan of how to take advantage of the Giants attempting to cheat on our inside zone game. 

#3- A Little Bit of Old School Mixed with the New School

At #3 in the ChipWagon Top 25 I am highlighting my absolute favorite play because it's a great mix of old school and new school football. I wanted to make this #1 but decided to keep my own biases aside. 

Today we are going to focus on the Sweep Read play that we run which is an absolutely gorgeous play to watch especially if you are a fan of OL on the move. Here we will highlight several variations of the old Lombardi sweep and the pin and pull outside zone blocking concept. The newer wrinkle is how Chip Kelly often added a read-option and packaged play component to this old school staple running play:

 

Extra! Extra! 'READ' All About It: 2014 Preseason Game #1

Last season we tried to maintain a weekly feature where we highlighted the use of the read-option after every game to illustrate how much we use it, and it's impact on different defenses. If preseason game #1 showed us anything, it showed us that the read-option will continue to remain a key staple of the 2014 offense as all 4 quarterbacks used it in some fashion on Friday night. 

Quick refresher for new readers who haven't been regular readers of the blog. The term "read-option" does not solely refer to the simple play where the offensive line leaves an unblocked defender on the line, reads him, and chooses to keep the ball and run, or hand off to the running back in the other direction. Looking at our stable of QBs this year, and other than GJ Kinne, that's not a play that should regularly be featured in this offense. Instead, we refer to the read-option as a play that has several options built-in and the QB will read a key defender (or two) to make a decision on where the football should go. 

So let's have a look at some familiar looking concepts: