5 ways the Rams embrace college offense, explained with Jared Goff’s Cal coach

The NFL and college football have gotten much closer together on Xs and Os in recent years, to the point that a bunch of college-ish concepts fueled the Eagles’ Super Bowl run after 2017, a spread-option QB won the AFC North in 2018, and the air raid coach Texas Tech fired in November caught on as the Cardinals’ head coach by January.

If the Rams beat the Patriots in Super Bowl 53, it’ll be another triumph for “college offense,” though the Patriots themselves draw on some old-school college concepts, too.

These are some of the plays 33-year-old former Miami (Ohio) receiver Sean McVay’s drawn up for L.A. this season, and how they connect to strategies that spawned from college.

Sonny Dykes, Jared Goff’s head coach at Cal, first saw jet sweeps regularly at the junior college level in 2000, when he was an assistant under Mike Leach at Texas Tech. What’s notable about the Rams’ deployment, he says, is “how much is built around it.”

“They run some of the jet sweep stuff, which can be hard to defend if you don’t have an edge player,” he says. “Then they’ll have a play action off the jet sweep, then they’ll have a reverse off the jet sweep. They just do a good job of building plays around what they do and a way to counter it. ‘OK, they’re gonna adjust to this, then we adjust to that.’”

Often, they’re just eye candy to distract the defense on a handoff:

Other times, they let a playmaker like Brandin Cooks get a head of steam before taking off into the flat:

The Rams also use them to clear out a specific spot on the field. A McVay favorite is to jet away from where a screen pass is going:

They can be a distraction for something besides a handoff. The Rams love lining up a tight end as an H-back, almost hiding him behind their offensive line. They use the jet sweep to create chaos at the snap, and if a safety gets confused, the big guy (or someone else) will be open.

The RPO is a college creation, having appeared at various points as early as the 1990s and come into vogue around 2011. It’s now popular in the NFL, too.

The Rams run a play sometimes that looks a lot like an RPO, in that it’s not quite play action and features run-blocking and a quick throw. Here’s one example, where Goff takes an open slant route to Robert Woods:

Here’s a similar play, this time with Woods lined up in the slot:

These plays looked, to me, like pre-snap run/pass options. But a former NFL QB says they’re passes all the way, with the run action functioning similarly to how it would in an RPO:

Still, the Rams love using play action from under center.

“Under center always, to me, affects the linebackers and safeties more than the shotgun does,” Dykes says. “Because when you’re under center and the quarterback takes the snap and he’s showing ball right now, whether it’s gonna be a bootleg, an RPO, whatever it is, that allows that safety to trigger faster, or the linebacker to trigger faster.”

That naturally leads to ...

You’ve seen one kind of screen to Gurley. Here’s one to a receiver:

The most collegiate thing here is the pairing of outside run-blocking to create flow one way with the screen to a way-split-out receiver on the other side of the field. It’s an extremely wide field, designed to create as many horizontal holes as possible. Think of it as a screen game that’s designed to go through you, not over you, like the old-school NFL screens where a few offensive linemen form a convoy.

New Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury called a similar concept, using counter run blocking instead of a fake pitch:

If anything, the Rams are even bolder than the typical college team in how much they try to expand the field with their screens. In both cases, there might only be one or two blockers for the eventual ball-carrier.

The Rams running this type of screen from under center carries added benefits.

“There’s no center snap where the ball’s in the air,” Dykes says. “The quarterback doesn’t have to catch the ball. He doesn’t have to get settled. He can funnel that ball directly from the center into his throwing hand really quickly. That changes a wide receiver screen, because the ball gets out on perimeter screens really fast. It’s a little bit more downhill run, which fits what they’re doing in terms of running the zone the way they run it.”

Stacked receiver setups are hard to defend, especially if a defense has safeties sitting back to play deeper passes. Like RPOs, they’ve become more popular in the NFL.

“Some of this bunch stuff, I saw a lot of it in high school before I saw it in the NFL,” Dykes says. “And you could go back to the Dan Marino days, when he was with the Dolphins. Those guys ran a lot of bunch sets and stuff then. So it’s been around, but it’s like everything else. It was kind of en vogue, and then it wasn’t en vogue, and now it seems like it’s getting back en vogue.”

College teams (like Georgia, Tennessee, and Michigan) like to line up receivers directly on top of each other. Sometimes, that’s just two receivers, maybe to create a high/low read for a QB to one side of the field.

Sometimes, it just makes for a simple screen:

The Rams use receiver bunches brilliantly, often to set up their misdirection run game. They fuse that alignment with their beloved jet sweeps:

They also use bunches to be sneaky in the vertical pass game.

Here, they have Woods (the inside receiver) block the guy covering Josh Reynolds (the outside receiver) at the snap. Play action clears out the middle of the field. The safety who might’ve thought he’d be guarding the seam suddenly has to cover Reynolds toward the middle.

Goff played in Dykes’ air raid at Cal. The air raid is somewhat misunderstood, widely taken to mean “an offense that throws a lot and moves fast.” It does tend to be pass-heavy. But some of the biggest parts have nothing to do with play allocation.

The air raid gives QBs wide freedom to adjust calls based on a defense’s alignment. Reading, reacting, and not needing to stop for long to think are some its most important parts.

“The biggest misconception on the air raid is that there’s some magic plays,” Dykes says. “The air raid, in my estimation, is a way to practice. It’s about drills. It’s about fundamentals. It’s about technique. It’s about simplicity. And so it’s more of a philosophy than it is an offense, I believe.”

The Rams aren’t often lined up with four receivers and sending them all directly up the field, as the most famous air raid play calls for. They don’t rush to get the ball out of Goff’s hands immediately. (He averages 2.94 seconds before he throws the ball, among the slowest QBs in the league.) They don’t throw that much, coming in near the bottom of the league in pass-to-run ratio.

Every now and again, the Rams run the classic air raid play four verticals ...

... but that’s not normal for them. However, Goff has the latitude to change plays on the fly, while staying in the no-huddle more than half the time. If you take the air raid as more of a lifestyle than a set of plays, you can find remnants of it.

“I think they practice probably more like a college team than they used to,” Dykes said. “I think the emphasis on simplicity. When you watch the Rams, what really surprised me and what sticks out is just how simple they are. Their run game is very simplistic. They clearly do a great job. They’re a zone football team, and they’re great at running the zone.

“And then it’s a very simple offense. They do some things that really force the defense to make decisions. They’re constantly playing with their wide receiver sets, you know. A lot of bunch sets. Not allowing the defense to do what’s comfortable to them.”

Arkansas was the first major team to use that mostly short-lived formation. That was in 2007, a year before the Dolphins brought it to the big leagues.

Gurley was an occasional lefty thrower at Georgia ...

... and in 2016, when Jeff Fisher was still in charge, Gurley broke it out again:

Just saying: If the Rams are looking for a wrinkle that’s gotten New England before, there’s one.