Rodgers’ cadence has foes confused
Empty stadiums looking like boon for Packers QB
Pete Dougherty
GREEN BAY – With the stands empty and his voice cutting through the fake crowd nose at U.S. Bank Stadium loud and clear Sunday, Aaron Rodgers drew the Minnesota Vikings offside three times. He also wasn’t sacked.
Compare that to the Green Bay Packers’ four previous visits, when that raucous stadium was filled with screaming fans and a blaring PA system. Rodgers and Brett Hundley induced only three offside penalties in the four games combined and were sacked 16 times.
Slowing the pass rush with the quarterback’s cadence at a road venue like that is big enough, but those three penalties Rodgers drew Sunday weren’t just any plays, either. Two were blown dead and converted third-and-4s into gimme first downs that kept scoring drives alive. The other was a vintage Rodgers free play on which he hit receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling on a 39-yard shot that set up a touchdown.
The COVID-19 pandemic is looking like a boon to Rodgers and the other quarterbacks in the NFL who excel at drawing antsy defenders offside. The home-field advantage is pretty much shot in this league as long as teams are playing in empty stadiums or in front of crowds too small to drown out quarterbacks’ voices.
“It was a huge advantage on the road,” said Brock Huard, a backup quarterback in the NFL for five years, including two for Peyton Manning, and analyst for Fox’s TV broadcast of the Packers’ opener at Minnesota. “… I think it will be worth tracking for these veteran
(quarterbacks) to be able to go into these places and totally manipulate it.”
Rodgers isn’t the only quarterback who will benefit. Russell Wilson did last week as well. Drew Brees and Tom Brady (as he adapts to his new team) will, too. Same for Matthew Stafford when the Detroit Lions travel to Lambeau Field this weekend.
But Rodgers just might benefit most. “I think (he takes it) further than anyone else in the league,” Huard said.
I’ve covered this league since 1993 and up to now really didn’t know how cadences work, so Huard provided a tutorial this week. Here it is in condensed form:
The cadence is the short words or phrases quarterbacks call out to get the ball snapped. They’re often a color and number. Huard used “red-88” as an example. The quarterback will call out “red-88, red-88, set-hut,” and if the snap is on the first cadence, the ball is snapped on set-hut. If in the huddle the quarterback calls the play and says “second cadence,” then his first run through “red-88, red-88, set-hut,” is a dummy call to draw the defense offside and try get it to come out of any disguises it’s using pre-snap.
The quarterback can call for the snap on the third cadence, or even the fourth, too. Rodgers had at least a couple of fourth-cadence snaps Sunday.
It’s all about making it harder for defensive linemen to time the snap. Rodgers, for instance, drew the first two penalties on his first cadence, and the last one on the second cadence. On his 10 other third downs, he snapped the ball six times on the first cadence (twice with the play clock at about two seconds), the second cadence three times, the third cadence once and the fourth cadence once.
“Honestly, the triple (cadence) thing, it’s neat,” Huard said, “but it’s more just the play-in, play-out, the double cadence, just everything he does is truly remarkable. It wasn’t just, ‘Oh my gosh, he got to a triple pike.’ The triple is not that extraordinary, but the single and the double, as often as they do it, to not even once flinch yourself."
That’s the biggest drawback to working the cadence as hard as Rodgers does. As Huard put it, it takes total commitment from the offensive coaching staff to make it work, and players with the concentration and discipline to remember the cadence call on top of the play call (or calls) and pre-snap reads. It also takes quarterbacks who have long experience at reading defenses, calling audibles and managing the play clock.
“I guarantee you there are QB coaches and coordinators around the league, and even college guys that watch (Rodgers) and go, ‘Why aren’t we doing more of it?’ ” Huard said. “Then they try to do it and screw themselves up and shoot themselves in the foot, and they say, ‘Let’s just scrap that, forget it, it’s too much.’ ”
Case in point, last season the Packers had 23 false-start penalties (one was on Rodgers), most in the NFL. Rodgers drew only eight combined offside and neutral-zone penalties.
The question is whether anything like last week’s 3-0 count in the Packers’ favor is repeatable week after week.
“I sure hope so,” Rodgers said this week. “We got them all out of the way last week in practice – I think we jumped offside a few too many times in practice. Sometimes that’s the gift of those practice reps, you can kind of learn from some of those things, practice cadences you want to use and go out and execute.
“I thought that was the beauty in doing so many cadences. I’m sure you guys heard ’em on the broadcast. There’s more cadence packages. It has a lot of depth to it. We’re going to keep trying to use it as a weapon.”
The quiet stadiums also will force the Packers to be vigilant about cadences and other calls at the line. Defenses will be mining video of the TV broadcasts to learn as much as they can about Rodgers’ cadences and audibles. Huard said that when he was with the Colts, Manning had a quality-control coach or practice-squad quarterback watch the TV video the next week and chart everything he said.
Also, don’t be surprised if teams like the Vikings lobby the NFL’s competition committee to change the rules on the fly in this strangest of seasons and allow their PA systems to play crowd noise louder than 70 decibels when their opponent has the ball. Even in the press box at U.S. Bank Stadium you could clearly hear Rodgers’ voice, though not specific words, when he was at the line of scrimmage.
The Packers’ next road game is in two weeks, at New Orleans, where the city last week denied the Saints permission to have fans at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome for at least the rest of September. The Packers are 0-3 there this century, by a combined score of 130-72. This time, though, Rodgers has a chance to neuter the Superdome.