College-style spread offenses are now entrenched in NFL
The NFL is a different sport compared to the last time the Super Bowl was in South Florida. Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid brought the spread to the league, and now he brings it to Super Bowl 54.
Chad Henne had a certain understanding of playing quarterback when he arrived in the NFL as a second-round pick by the Miami Dolphins in the 2008 NFL Draft. He had played in the ground-andpound Big Ten Conference, running a so-called pro-style offense for the Michigan Wolverines, so, of course, NFL teams had their eyes on the 6-foot-3, old-school prospect.
Now a backup quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, Henne took over as the Dolphins’ starting quarterback in 2009, and Miami only took 311 snaps out of shotgun — just 24.5 percent of its offensive plays, according to NFLsavant.com. The Dolphins were more traditional than the average team, but there were still five teams which took more than 1,000 snaps from under center in the final year of last decade.
“A lot of us old guys are playaction, hard [seven-step drop] — stuff like that,” Henne said Monday at Super Bowl Opening Night at Marlins Park. “We had those rhythms down.”
Now, those numbers would be unheard of. Ten years later, the Minnesota Vikings ran the fewest plays out of shotgun in the NFL and they still ran out of the gun 25.4 percent of the time. The San Francisco 49ers, who ran the second-fewest plays out of shotgun and will play in Super Bowl 54 on Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium, worked out of shotgun 37.5