Stampede Blue
It’s always important to remember that preseason is just preseason. There’s no gameplans, there’s no starters, and there’s no real takeaways to be made based strictly off of outcomes.
But there is still a lot to learn from and talk about.
Anthony Richardson unfortunately got sacked early in his debut vs. the Ravens—which resulted in a dislocated pinkie that ended his night.
Let’s breakdown what happened here.
When you design any football play you have to decide how many people are going to be out on a route. The more people you have running routes, the more vulnerable you are to a blitz. The less people you have running routes, the more people you have blocking, so you’re less vulnerable to a blitz.
The Colts here are running a Scat passing concept. Scat refers to the RB, who is free releasing on the play into the flat. He’s running a route from the backfield with zero blocking responsibility. That means the Colts have only have the 5 offensive lineman in to protect.
When you have 5 offensive lineman protecting you are typically going to run a half-slide scheme or Scat protection.
In Scat protection you’ll have a slide side and a man side. Imagine a line drawn down the middle of the center’s helmet that splits the defense in half. Three of the offensive lineman will “slide” to the defenders to one side of that line. They will take the 3 most dangerous guys to that side. The other side will be man on man with the two down lineman on the other side.
The QB is responsible for any player that blitzes that the OL can’t account for. If the defense sends enough guys that the OL can’t block, the QB becomes “hot”. When a QB is hot, it’s his job to get the ball to his hot read which is designed to replace the space a blitzer is coming from.
In the diagram above, you can see on the slide side, it takes two unknown rushers (the Nickel and Mike) for the QB to be hot. That’s because the OL is going three-for-two with the known rushers on that side. If none of the rushers come? Great we can get a double team. If only one comes on a blitz? Also great, because we should be able to pick it up. But if both of them come on a blitz, well now it’s the QBs responsibility.
To the man side it only takes one extra unknown rusher to blitz since the guard and tackle are occupied. The Guard will always be man-to-man with that defensive tackle, while the offensive tackle on that side has a “big dual”. A big dual just means that tackle has the most dangerous of the defensive end or Sam linebacker. Teams have different rules for sorting that out, but most of the time that tackle will “squeeze” so that the guy furthest from the QB is the free...
