Improving tempo in the huddle
The Green Bay Packers are working to speed up their offense by simplifying play calls.
Counting to 40, it feels like more than enough time to spit out a sentence or four.
But in the NFL, the time it takes to unpile after a play, for a coach to process down-and-distance and defensive personnel, rotate in offensive personnel, get the play to the quarterback, have the quarterback repeat the play to teammates and still have enough seconds left to set and then reevaluate at the line … 40 seconds on a play clock can be much shorter than that.
All of this becomes more pressurized when the 25-second play clock is in effect.
A long play call can shave precious seconds off what is available for any presnap adjustments or potentially impede a quicker tempo on offense — and it's something the Green Bay Packers wrestled with from the very beginning of the 2019 season.
Tempo out of the huddle was discussed after the offense struggled in a 10-3 victory at Chicago in Week 1 and quarterback Aaron Rodgers donned a wristband with plays for the first time in his career beginning the next week.
As the season wore on, head coach Matt LaFleur said the lengthy verbiage of the offense would have to be addressed in the offseason — and it was already on his mind as early as Jan. 22, days after a blowout loss at San Francisco in the NFC championship game.
“We've just got to sit down in the room and think creatively in terms of how do we explain and articulate within a play call everybody's job but not make it a paragraph long,” LaFleur said then. “That has been, from the time I started coaching until now, that's always the magic question. How do you do that and
still have the versatility to have moving parts within a play?”
This is what LaFleur, offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and new passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach Luke Getsy dove into through the early part of 2020.
The consensus wasn't so much about changing the language per se — but how to more efficiently speak it. So when Rodgers and the Packers' quarterbacks are once again able to meet with the coaches and the playbooks could be distributed, the verbiage remained the same.
“It's more about our process, how we want to go about installing the no-huddle offense, the tempos, and we'll probably simplify that quite a bit,” LaFleur said recently.
Hackett said the beginning of the process has just been time already spent, the fact that Rodgers and the coaches now have a year's worth of understanding what each word of the offense means to draw upon.
“You can now start shortening things down, or making one word to mean more than one thing,” Hackett said. “So as we dive into this offseason and our discussions, it's OK how can we call this very extensive long play something a little bit more simple, maybe just one word Aaron can use to communicate to the guys and speed up all the processes. That's something we're diving into.
“There are some things that will still be always a little bit longer. But we're always looking, especially now that everybody understands the system a lot more, the ability to shorten verbiage.”
Rodgers said in mid-May the plays now have a snugger fit in some broader concepts or families of plays, but he'll continue to wear a wristband on the field. With that, along with a greater understanding of the offense for all involved, the head coach and quarterback theoretically will have a greater ability to create a quicker tempo when desired when the Packers are back on the field.
“I think it helps both sides,” Rodgers said of the wristband. “It helps Matt and it helps myself where just being able to him telling me a number and me read off a card is easier than 12 words from him to me and then 12 words at least once if not twice from me to the guys in the huddle. It allows us to get out of the huddle a little bit quicker and get to the line of scrimmage because this offense is a lot about checks at the line of scrimmage.
“It's run to run, pass to run, run to pass, and I think whatever can help us streamline that tempo is what works best for us.”