Acme Packing Company
When watching film, you’ll often see plays that you can see a future vision for. If you see the same play long enough, it’s not hard to see what it may be setting up. Are they running a play action bootleg a bunch of times? Brother, you can be sure you’re going to see a half-boot version of that with a deep route adjustment to try to catch the defense napping. Is the defense biting hard on quick slants? Get ready for the Sluggo (slant-and-go).
Sometimes it’s a little more subtle. The alignment of a wide receiver on a run. The break point of a receiver on a certain concept. The motion of a tight end. The initial release path of a guard.
Sometimes, however, they smack you right in the face. They smack you right in the face so hard that you assume that wrinkle will never actually pay off: it’s just something for the defense to spend just a couple of minutes thinking about when gameplanning. It’s like watching a movie where the reveal of the killer seems so obvious that it must be a misdirect…right?
Anyway, we’ve seen two of those so far this year and I wanted to talk about them before we get a potential payoff. Both of them start the same way: with a direct snap to rookie wide receiver Savion Williams [83].
Williams – a 3rd round pick in 2025 – missed a lot of time in the offseason with various injuries and hasn’t seen the field a ton this season. Through 3 games, he has been on the field for 20 snaps. As a wide receiver, he has run 8 routes (per NFL Pro), with only 3 of those being routes where he was lined up as a wide receiver on the play (4 came off jet motion and 1 was a vertical route from the fullback position).
He’s basically been a gadget guy, which was pretty much expected. He didn’t come in as the most polished receiver, so giving him the jet sweep/misdirect/run-fast-horizontally role always made the most sense for his early path to playing time (Williams eating that role allows wide receivers like Matthew Golden to focus on more of the true WR stuff).
The Packers have started rolling out a small package of plays with Williams as the QB. They’re not taking Jordan Love off the field on these, which is where this whole thing is going.
The Packers originally line up with Jordan Love in shotgun, but they shift pre-snap, with Williams motioning back to shotgun while Love lines up deep under a stack on the left.
At the snap, Williams takes the ball and runs to his left, while Love releases deep behind Williams to the right. Love puts his hands up for the ball and Williams gives a little fake pitch. Love carries out the fake briefly by holding his hands up...
