PHILADELPHIA — Saturday morning. Silence, for the first time all week, in the Nova Care Complex offices of the Super Bowl Bowl champion Eagles in this hungover city. Two days ago, the parade happened. “The noise,” offensive coordinator Frank Reich said, smiling at the memory. “From the start of the parade, way down here, to the steps of the art museum, more than two hours, it sounded like a big play just happened in our stadium. The decibel level was that high; it hurt your ears. So we can use a quiet day.”
Three men here were thankful for the serenity—coach Doug Pederson, Reich and wide receivers coach Mike Groh. Pederson particularly, sucking Halls cherry cough drops, looked like he couldn’t wait to disappear. (The Eagles are off this week.) On this morning, the three men gathered to surgically take apart one play, the play that six days earlier finished off the Patriots and gave the Eagles their first Super Bowl title in history.
There is so much about this play—the play that Philadelphians will see on replay and remember precisely where they were watching it, and with whom, forever—that also says so much about modern football:
• The research, involving Bruce Arians, Larry Fitzgerald, Mike Shula, Dan Quinn and, surprisingly, the stunning reach of the Pro Football Focus database;
• The spy vs. spy element of the mysterious Patriot undercover scout Ernie Adams versus a crew of little-known coaches, such as the Eagles’ receivers coach, Groh, the son of Al Groh, who succeeded Bill Belichick when he resigned as HC of the NYJ in 2000;
• The strategic mystery of the bunch/stack formations, with the legal pick plays that have become a quiet and defense-disrupting story in the NFL, and used by so many good offensive minds;
• And finally, the understanding that there is no limit to good football ideas. The Eagles used a strange motion on this play call Star motion, a Jet Sweep sort of motion behind the quarterback that they used only 12 previous times in 1,217 plays this season prior to the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. The Patriots did not handle Star motion well, leaving the middle of the field wide open (big mistake I) and causing two crucial Patriots to bump into each other like a couple of Keystone Kops (big mistake II).
The winning play highlighted so much of what made the Eagles hard to stop in 2017. Fourth quarter, 2:25 left, Philadelphia trailed 33-32. Eagles ball, third-and-seven at the New England 11.
“Nick!” Pederson said into quarterback Nick Foles’ helmet. “Wristband 145. Wristband 145!”
Foles wears a wristband with the Eagles’ play sheet for the day on it. In the Super Bowl, the wristband had 194 plays in tiny agate type. Pederson scanned all his possible third-down calls and found one he’d liked for weeks … number 145, a triple-bunch formation clustered to the right, a speedy back in Star motion, and tight end Zach Ertz alone at the left of the formation.
Foles looked at the wristband and found play 145. With the play clock running, Foles said to his huddle: “Gun trey left, open buster star motion … 383 X follow Y slant.”
They broke the huddle.
The strangest thing here is that the Patriots—the peerless Patriots, with the greatest coach of our day, and the research power of 10 teams combined in the beautiful mind of Adams—erred significantly on it. What did I learn from studying the winning Super Bowl play? It’s fine to put Bill Belichick on the Mount Rushmore of coaches in the 98-season history of the NFL, because he truly deserves it. But it does not mean that the great and powerful Oz doesn’t make mistakes. And Belichick and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia made a mistake here. You can hear it on NFL Films, from the wiring of the game: “Third-down here. We’re gonna have to double 86.”
Though the play started with a possible double-coverage plan for 86, who is tight end Zach Ertz, that was eliminated when the deep safety followed the Eagle back in motion. (Seen here.) So the Patriots did not double 86. How does Patricia’s communication not get to the field on the biggest play of the season—or how do the Patriots not account for the real possibility of the safety vacating his space to follow a motion man? That’s something the Patriots could be haunted by, the way they’ve haunted so many teams since the turn of the century.
One more plot-thickening thing about Play 145. When the Eagles got on the plane for Minneapolis seven days before Super Bowl, Pederson had his working play sheet that had been established for the week of practice back in Philadelphia. It was the most important sheet he’d use in his life, the sheet he’d mine to try to beat the great Belichick in Super Bowl 52.
But 383 X follow Y slant was nowhere to be seen. It was not in the game plan.
All season, every week, every offensive coach on the Eagles had an assignment: find a play or plays better than those on Pederson’s play sheet. So Groh, along with all the coaches, went to work. In a lonely room at the Radisson Blu Hotel at the Mall of America halfway across the country, Groh dove in one more time, on stacks-and-bunches plays and all others he thought might be valuable, to see if he could find one great third-down call that beat any of the third-down calls on Pederson’s play sheet.
For the 22nd straight Monday of the 2017 NFL season, Groh looked for a better way, a better play.
This week-after-the-Super Bowl column is always one of my favorite MMQBs of the season. Going back to Eli Manning dissecting the impossibly beautiful throw to Mario Manningham to help beat the Patriots six years ago, to Tom Brady’s play-by-play of the Super Bowl comeback last year, it’s the column of the season that usually allows me to dive deepest into the whys of what we’ve seen in the biggest game of the year.
After the Super Bowl, I kept thinking, even with the surprising Malcolm Butler benching, how amazing it was that this previously unheralded coaching staff, with the previously unheralded quarterback, sliced and diced a defense orchestrated by Belichick and Patricia that was on the stingiest run in football entering the championship game. Since its shaky 2-2 start, New England tightened up on defense, allowing a league-low 14.4 points per game (including playoffs) since Week 5, and going 13-1 since. This should have been Foles’ waterloo. Instead, the 41-33 shredding of the defending champion Patriots confirmed the coaching and play-calling chops of Pederson, the game-planning chops of Reich, and the ascension of Foles into the pantheon of Super Bowl heroes dating back to Max McGee.
My question, then: How’d this happen? Speaking to Pederson before the game and Reich after the game, I knew the lengths to which the Eagles had gone in this game plan, in no small part because of their immense respect for Belichick and the Patriots. Every one of those of 194 plays on the Foles wristband had to had been vetted once, twice, three times, and again, to be sure of its chance to succeed against the defensive mastermind of this generation. And not just with Pederson, but with Foles. Pederson always asks his quarterback the day before the game if there are plays in the game plan he doesn’t feel comfortable with, or would like not called in the game. Pederson was an NFL quarterback; he knows what it’s like to go to the line to execute a play you don’t believe. To Pederson’s delight, Foles is free with his vetoes.
“How many plays did Nick veto in the Super Bowl game plan?” I asked Pederson on Saturday.
“Zero,” Pederson said.
Pederson, Reich and Groh agreed to meet me in Pederson’s office Saturday morning to unravel the mystery of “Wristband 145.” With the Olympics muted on the TV next to Pederson’s desk (men’s snowboarding on NBC Sports Network), Reich took over.
“Why don't we run through this tape,” Reich said, taking the coach’s clicker in his hand and pointing to the big screen across from Pederson’s desk, “and Coach and Mike and anybody interject anytime they want. We just put together a tape of how this play happened. It’ll give you an idea of the process we use, and how the staff gets involved.”
A play from Week 2 came up. Eagles at Chiefs. Darren Sproles motioned from deep behind the left guard to his right, behind Carson Wentz. “So this is a unique motion in our offense that we don't use a ton. [Running backs coach] Duce Staley is the one who every week is on Coach and I, saying, 'We've got to get that motion in.’ Because it's a tough motion for defenses to handle,” Reich said.
“This is a motion you don’t see other teams do,” Pederson said. “That motion is a great way to get tells. The Patriots do it too, with different motions. Tom Brady wants to see [whether it’s] man or zone.”
The strength of setting the back in motion like this, the Eagles found out, was the quick tell to confirm whether the defense is playing man or zone. If a defender zeroed in on the back and sprinted toward him, the Eagles discovered this season the defense would always be man. If not, zone. On this play, Wentz saw Kansas City linebacker Ramik Wilson run at Sproles and knew it would be man coverage; at the shotgun snap, Wentz loved the matchup of Sproles on Wilson and quickly zinged a horizontal throw to Sproles, who beat Wilson up the sideline. Gain of 16.
“You know how when you set multiple alarms on your phone to wake up?” Reich said. “We'll set multiple alarms for the quarterback and give him multiple indicators just to be sure. Maybe he’ll see it’s man because it's corners-over coverage, but then, like Coach said, if we use this and the linebacker responds like that, it’s, ‘Oh now I'm 100 percent sure it’s man.’”
Another play versus the Chargers. Zone coverage. Bunch formation to the right. Wentz ignored the back and found Torrey Smith out of the bunch up the right seam; Smith dropped what would have been a significant gainer.
Another play versus the Chiefs. The back, Wendell Smallwood, motioned behind Wentz to the left. But no bunch. Ertz used a legal pick from Brent Celek to blur coverage and get free on a cross route. Easy pass for Wentz. Gain of 11.
Reich paused the Ertz completion. “So now we showed you this motion three different times,” Reich said. “One time it went to Sproles. One time it went to Torrey Smith up the seam versus zone, now it’s to Ertz on a crossing route. We hit three different areas of the field with the same motion. So every time we are using the motion for a different reason. And there’s a different pass concept with it every time.”
“The Patriots break down this motion and don’t see you do the same thing,” I said.
“Exactly,” Reich said. “The sample size is too small to figure out what the next move is.”
“The other thing,” Pederson said, “and this is sort of a philosophy that I've brought here a little bit. I like to create plays or unique formations and motions like this in multiples of three. You have a drop back pass, you might have a screen, you might have a run, off of the same shift in motion.”
“He's always preaching that,” Reich said.
Pederson: “Because those are unique things. Teams are too smart on defense. Coordinators are too smart on defense. So they always see that same formation, same motion, and they can scheme it up. Well, what we've been able to do, sort of collaboratively here, is to take those same unique formations, shifts and motions and try to do it in multiples of three. This is the off-balance thing we try to create.”
***The interesting thing to note here: Coaches can be smart and draw up bright plays. But if they don’t have a Wentz or Foles to pick the right option and deliver the ball accurately, and if they don’t have the speed back to win against linebackers and safeties, and if they don’t have the skilled receivers and tight ends to (sometimes) post up corners and safeties, none of this works. The Eagles have the coaching originality, and the players to execute these chess moves.
Research helps. Bruce Arians is a bunch devotee, with his deep receiving group. When preparing to face the Rams in December, Groh and Reich saw a bunch-right formation with Larry Fitzgerald benefiting from a legal pick out of the bunch on Rams cornerback Trumaine Johnson. Fitzgerald was wide open on a post route. Carson Palmer hit him for a gain of 17. Maybe, the Eagles thought, this could be an Alshon Jeffery option out of the bunch. Groh picked it out because the formation fit the Eagles to a T.
Said Reich: “One of the things we asked Mike at the beginning of the year was always look at stacks and bunches. We always feel like stacks and bunches is important to understand how things play out. He is our stacks and bunches guru. We use PFF [Pro Football Focus] to give us a folder of stacks and bunches every week.”
“How many per week?” I asked Groh.
“It varies,” Groh said. “Because sometimes PFF has plays in there that aren't what we’d call true stacks or bunches, so I fly by those. But it can be 250 plays. I'll go through that and I cut it up, and I go, ‘Hey, Frank, here’s some things that are interesting.’ Sometimes it's 10 a week, sometimes it's 50. Frank filters that out and goes to Coach and gives him a couple, and they kind of move up the flagpole [as possible game plan additions].”
On every one of the plays Reich shows, traffic happens. Legal picks happen. Receivers can block defenders, or legally pick them, within a yard of the line, but any other contact beyond that has to be deemed incidental or the receiver can be flagged.
“We’re trying to create legal traffic,” said Reich.
“It's the hardest play to defend and officiate,” said Pederson.
“So,” Reich said, “we use this formation a fair amount, so it makes sense to us, it fits our personnel, because now we put Ertz on the backside and we can free-release him. If they put a whole bunch of guys over here where the cluster is, we got Ertz one-on-one on the backside. Doug likes it, and so now we basically put this play in that week. We get to the Rams game and do you remember what happened in the Rams game? We went up and down the field and we scored a lot of points. We didn't run this play. We didn’t need it. So this one goes in the inventory. Doug and I will sometimes sit in here and bring up that cumulative list on his thing and it's on an excel spreadsheet so you can sort it by everything that has been called. It's just called the cumulative list. It's by section. Every section that Doug has on his call sheet, there is a cumulative list for that section. So, we can bring up that section and say, what haven't we run?”
Said Groh: “No idea gets left behind.”
“No good idea gets left behind,” said Reich.
Now on the screen: the divisional playoff game versus Atlanta. Big moment in the game. Eagles ball, third-and-seven, Atlanta 45, fourth quarter, Eagles up 12-10.
Here is the Super Bowl play, with one important difference: no motion.
Ertz wide left, singled by Falcons nickel back Brian Poole … a triangle-bunch to the right, close to the formation … a first-down conversion vital because the Eagles want at least a field goal to make the Falcons have to score a touchdown to win … and Pederson calls the play, for the first time this season—except without motion.
The Falcons dedicated four defenders to the bunch. Poole was alone on Ertz. Safety Ricardo Allen was the center-fielder, which is lucky: As Ertz cut and ran a quick inside slant, Poole slipped, and Ertz was wide open for an 11-yard gain. Allen saved a touchdown. The Eagles get their insurance field goal and won, 15-10.
“Isn't it interesting that on this play the corner slipped, the same way Devin McCourty slipped in the Super Bowl?” I asked Pederson.
“Certain things you remember,” Pederson said. “Eerily familiar. Is that the word—eerily?”
That’s the one, in retrospect.
Early in the season, Groh picked one bunch formation from a Panthers-Patriots game. On a third-and-nine play from the Carolina 43, the Panthers bunched three receivers to the left, and motioned Christian McCaffrey into the bunch—a smart personnel grouping by Carolina offensive coordinator Mike Shula. At the snap, Pats cornerback Stephon Gilmore, apparently confused, doubles a receiver doing a shallow cross, and leaves Kelvin Benjamin alone up the left seam. Cam Newton hit Benjamin. Gain of 43.
This institutional memory in Super Bowl week hit both Groh and Reich. “We're like, yeah, they could be having a problem here,” Reich said. “They could have a problem with a four-by-one cluster deal, so now, here's where all the elements come together for the game-winning play.”
Groh and Reich agreed that a bunch play would definitely be a smart inclusion—and all three men thought splitting out Ertz, as he had against Atlanta, would be smart, as well as the unique motion to the bunch side by the back. This would be a variation of the bunch they’d never run … and, of course, a variation the Patriots hadn’t seen. Groh mined the cluster-route concept, Reich added the running-back motion, Reich and Groh liked splitting out Ertz, Groh brought it to Pederson, and Pederson liked it all.
On Tuesday night, inside the Radisson Blu, the play was added to the game plan, and would be number 145 on Pederson’s Sunday play sheet and Foles’ wristband, the formation first, and the play second:
Gun trey left, open buster star motion … 383 X follow Y slant.
“This is exactly why we keep a databank of plays,” Pederson said. “We took the Kansas City motion with Sproles, we took the Arizona bunch play against the Rams, and then we came back against the Falcons and moved Ertz out and left the back in the backfield, and then we get to this game, we added the motion, and we just put it all together for this specific defense. This play is a result of what we did all season, and what the coaches researched, taking different things from different plays.”
One more pre-game point: “We're sitting here talking about this during the week,” said Reich, “and we say, if we shift [Corey Clement] out, and if they cover him in man coverage, and if we get Alshon [Jeffery], and Alshon comes out of the bunch like he’s supposed to, the guy who is covering that motion back might actually run into Alshon's man.”
A few years ago, doing a Bill Belichick profile for Sports Illustrated, I saw Belichick’s football library. At the time, the library was in Belichick’s Massachusetts home; now it’s housed in the library at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where Belichick grew up. One of the books, Sun Tsu’s “The Art of War,” seemed a curious inclusion. But Belichick was big on military metaphors. In this book, Sun Tsu wrote, “Every battle is won or lost before it’s ever fought.”
Those are the words I thought of watching Reich run the decisive play back and forth Saturday morning.
Said Groh: “Just like in basketball, right? When you isolate and put everybody on one side of the court and you send Kobe over to go do what he does. Same principle. We knew that they were going to overplay the bunch.”
Pederson, on why he picked this play: “I thought right away, down and distance, situation in the game, boom, that's the one. I know Ertz is matched up one on one, I know we got that motion. Reppin' it, and reppin’ it and reppin’ it, and knowing where it was at. And then you just pull the trigger in that situation and let our guys go execute.”
Groh to Reich. Reich and Pederson massaging the play. Play to the play sheet. Pederson to Foles. Foles to Ertz. How it played out:
New England 33, Philadelphia 32, 2:25 left, fourth quarter. Third-and-seven, Eagles’ 12. Foles in shotgun. Ertz up top, alone, on Devin McCourty, playing three yards off. Clement behind Foles, just to his left. Nelson Agholor at the top of a bunch to the right, tight end Trey Burton (Reich: “one of our best guys to create legal traffic”) just behind Agholor to the left, and Jeffery just behind Agholor to the right. Pre-snap, Clement sprinted behind Foles, and the lone center-fielding safety for New England, Duron Harmon, followed. At the snap, four Patriots rushed, and linebacker Kyle Van Noy stayed in sort of no man’s land at the 12, apparently to spy Foles. Five Patriots minded the four Philly receivers—including an open Clement—to the right.
Just as Ertz made his incut in front of McCourty, Harmon and Gilmore smashed into each other at the four-yard line.
Foles stared at Ertz from the start. He got single coverage.
McCourty slipped. Ertz had a clear half-step on him, running right across the formation.
Foles cocked to throw and, in what no one noticed, came down to about three-quarters delivery, seemingly in mid-motion, to evade the raised arms of Van Noy. “Look at this,” Reich said, running the tape back and forth, seeing Van Noy’s arms go up for the block. “Nick didn't make that decision when he was about to throw, he's making that as his arm is right here [with the ball nearly out of his hand], adjusting it at the last split second, to win the Super Bowl.”
The ball hit Ertz in stride. Ertz took one step, two, and got hit in the legs by McCourty and dove for the end zone. Touchdown. The play survived a replay review focusing on the Ertz bobble; he was a runner, ref Gene Steratore ruled, and thus only had to break the plane of the goal line with possession for the play to be a touchdown.
“Cover zero,” Reich said, watching it a few more times. “No one to save the day.”
Pause.
“How many times have you practiced this play, this way?” I wondered.
“Twice,” Reich said.
As for the Patriots’ part in this: Hard to blame McCourty, slip or not. He had to be sure he didn’t overplay the slant, because if McCourty overplayed the slant or incut, Ertz could have run a fade or corner and would have been open, with no help. During the game, as our Andy Benoit discovered after tape study, Patriots front-seven players had dropped into man coverage 10 times; clearly this play should have been the 11th. Rarely on plays like this do the Patriots leave a single defender without help. And with Patricia’s fateful words—“We’re gonna have to double 86 here”—someone blew the coverage or blew communication before the play.
Give credit to the Eagles, though. Even if the Patriots had dropped an extra front-seven player into coverage, Pederson thought it likely that Foles would have chosen Clement, with the Gilmore-Harmon collision, and very likely Clement would have made the seven yards if not the touchdown.
