The Eagles are torching teams with a ‘college offense.’ Here’s what that means.

The trend toward spread offenses that overtook college football sometime in the last decade has been rearing its head for a while in the NFL, too. The Patriots have been using spread principles for years, as they’ve tried to stress defenses horizontally and force them into impossible decisions. They and the Falcons were both awfully spread-like during their Super Bowl runs last season, and this year has brought more spreads.

An embrace of college offenses has made the NFL a lot more fun this year. The poster children are the Chiefs, who’ve used all sorts of college misdirection and option plays to cause problems for defenses. Andy Reid’s idea is to toy with defenders’ minds:

And it’s working well. The Eagles entered the weekend averaging 29 points per game, fourth-most in the league. And that’s only going up now.

A quote from Broncos defensive back Chris Harris on Sunday, after the Eagles boat-raced Denver 51-23:

The run/pass option is a staple in college. It’s exactly what it sounds like, with two or even three reads often built into the same play. The quarterback holds the ball into the running back’s gut and reads a linebacker, maybe, to decide whether to hand it off or throw it. If the LB crashes for the run, he might throw to a tight end in the seam.

Here’s a very college touchdown the Eagles scored against Denver on Sunday:

Wentz reads an unblocked outside linebacker, Shane Ray, who takes a step toward running back LeGarrette Blount. Once Ray takes that step, Wentz runs outside the other way. Ray closes in on him, but now Wentz has another option: a deep shot to receiver Alshon Jeffery. He’s got a step on Aqib Talib, because the cornerback also stepped toward the run. That’s all it takes for Jeffery to gain an edge and score.

It’s really similar to a play Auburn used on Alabama in the 2013 Iron Bowl:

Here’s the Eagles running a different RPO against the Chargers in October, this one more focused on the middle of the field:

A linebacker crashes to stop Blount. That leaves the middle of the field open, and when Wentz sees that, he pulls the ball back from Blount and uncorks.

And a similar thing against the Panthers, which didn’t work but should’ve:

That’s why it started in college. Hal Mumme, one of the founders of what’s now called the air raid offense, stumbled into using RPOs at Kentucky in the 1990s, when his teams were at a drastic talent disadvantage. The solution? Create a numbers edge.

“We couldn’t block Jevon Kearse, and so we told Tim Couch to either throw a bubble screen or hand the ball off,” Mumme told me earlier this year. “It was so easy to do. I don’t know why we didn’t keep doing it. We probably should have.”

It took a while for the concept — often called “packaged plays” — to catch back on in college. But it eventually did, and sometime along the way, NFL teams figured out that forcing defenses into always-wrong decisions might work there, too.

RPOs don’t have a 100 percent success rate, because execution is variable in all sorts of ways. But the concept is sound and can work anywhere.

There are just football offenses, and they can be fun for everyone.