Lamar Jackson made this old Mike Tomlin quote about the option look even sillier

The Steelers are out of the NFL playoffs, thanks in part to their own 2-4 finish and in part to Lamar Jackson’s Ravens finishing the year on a tear.

That it would be Jackson who played a critical role in locking the Steelers out of the playoffs is ironic, given this Tomlin quote about option football from the spring of 2013:

“I think the read-option is the flavor of the month,” the Pittsburgh Steelers coach said during a Tuesday breakfast media session for AFC coaches at the NFL owners’ meetings. “We’ll see whether it’s the flavor of the year. A few years ago, people were talking wildly about the Wildcat. It’s less of a discussion now.

”I think there are coaches in rooms preparing themselves to defend it, there are coaches in rooms also preparing to run it. I think it’s going to sort out on the grass.”

At the time Tomlin said that, a new wave of spread-option quarterbacks had been finding success in the pro game: Robert Griffin III in Washington, Russell Wilson in Seattle, and Colin Kaepernick in San Francisco chief among them. The zone read and other shotgun plays with give-or-keep reads for QBs were just starting to become en vogue.

The read option hasn’t gone away. It’s just been built out, with more and more teams attaching passes to many of their run plays. Wilson won a Super Bowl, Kaepernick almost did, and both of the teams in last year’s Super Bowl got there by running option stuff that used to be primarily found on college campuses. That famous Chiefs-Rams Monday night game earlier in 2018 had them all over the place.

Now, every team in football is an option team in some respect or another. To his credit, Tomlin’s Steelers teams have joined the revolution, even though they don’t have a QB for whom it makes sense to call a lot of designed runs. If there was ever a scheme war between the option staying in and going out, it’s now over. The option won.

I root for the Steelers and like Tomlin, and he’s been smart to join the tide. It’s hard to predict what scheme trends will take hold in a few weeks let alone a few years. But he had already became a cautionary tale about casting doubt on new, effective tactics.

Of course, the read option’s not that new. Rich Rodriguez stumbled onto the most popular version of it at a practice in the 1990s and took it to colleges over the following decade:

One afternoon (Glenville starting QB Jed) Drenning bobbled a snap on one of these zone-blocked running plays. Unable to get the hand-off delivered to the running back, Drenning tucked the ball himself and saw the backside defensive end crashing down the line of scrimmage to tackle the running back—who, in fact, did not have the ball but was behaving as if he did—from behind. On a broken play the quarterback customarily follows the running back into the assigned hole and tries to salvage yardage. But Drenning, seeing the end closing, instead ran wide into the area vacated by the end. “It was just an instantaneous reaction thing,” says Drenning.

After the whistle, Rodriguez casually asked Drenning, “Why did you do that?”

”Do what?” said Drenning.

”Why did you run that way?” Rodriguez said.

After the Steelers passed on Jackson near the end of the 2018 draft’s first round, the Ravens traded into place to pick him. He replaced a more conventional pro-style passer in Joe Flacco, and the Ravens won the AFC North while throwing between 19 and 26 passes in each of their final seven games as Jackson started. The NFL average for passing attempts per game is 35, but the Ravens opted for a spread running approach.

Central to a bunch of those running plays? Option reads. Here’s Jackson scoring a touchdown on one during the game that knocked the Steelers out:

Shoot, here’s Lamar doing it again:

The Wildcat was a fad, but it laid a foundation for spread running that’s persisted to now. Jackson’s success will only need to more option QBs getting professional chances.