The game of football is in a constant state of adjustments and counter-adjustments. A concept or trend starts to work for one team, it begins to spread to other teams, and eventually the units on the other side of the football tweak what they are doing to respond. Then the original concept is tweaked to respond to the adjustments, and it gives those of us in the media space hours and hours of content.
Take, for example, the post/over route combination, often called the Yankee concept. As more and more offenses put that into their game scripts, defenses started relying on calls in the secondary to match that design. Offenses began to tweak that route combination, adjusting the routes in anticipation of the defensive adjustments.
In many of these instances, the way the cycle plays out on the NFL stage has its roots in Friday nights in small towns across the country, or in stadiums on campus during a fall Saturday.
One such cycle that has been playing out the past few seasons in the NFL begins on the defensive side of the football, as defenses are mugging the A-gaps with a pair of defenders in passing situations and forcing the offense to prepare for immediate pressure through those interior gaps, often a death-knell for passing plays. The response we are seeing more of each season from offenses indeed has its roots on Fridays and Saturdays.
