I’ve been reading Chris Brown’s excellent new book, The Art of Smart Football. One of the passages in Brown’s book about legendary head coach Sid Gillman stood out to me:

Realizing that a football field is nothing more than a 53⅓-yard-wide geometric plane, Gillman designed his pass patterns to stretch defenses past their breaking points. His favorite method was to divide the field into five passing lanes and then allocate five receivers horizontally in each one. Against most zones, at least one receiver would be open.

Below is an example of what Gillman was referring to: ^[1]While I couldn’t find the exact picture Chris used in the book, this one illustrates the same concept. you can see that, horizontally, one target will end up in each fifth of the field:

When it comes to pass patterns, the receivers are the players on the attack, and there’s a relatively wide variance in how effective a receiver can be (i.e., he can get open all the time, some of the, none of the time, etc.). But the players in pass coverage should be viewed in a different way: all they can do is mitigate the player in front of them. [continue reading…]