How Detroit's Route Combinations Break Down Coverage

We’ve already talked about how Lions Offensive Coordinator Ben Johnson breaks down defenses using formations, personnel, motion, and play-action. Today, I’m going to focus more on how his route combinations create open receivers.

The key theme with Johnson’s passing game is that he does a great job of using different releases and route concepts to cause confusion and make it difficult for defenses to identify where routes are coming from.

In particular, he loves to use 1x3 formations with a tight end to the single-receiver side and three wide receivers to the other. Not only does this often help identify the coverage pre-snap, but utilizing trips also provides a greater assortment of options for route combinations that can dissect any coverage.

This first example was a 3rd-and-4 against the Dolphins, a high probability man-coverage situation. There are many tactics for beating man coverage, but one great way is to make it so the defense cannot define their 1-on-1 matchups pre-snap. Force defenders to read the play post-snap and then muddy their reads (which is the same thing the defense is trying to do to the quarterback).

Here, the Lions did this by aligning in a trips bunch out of that 1x3 formation:

The Dolphins would match up in man coverage with three cornerbacks over the bunch. But instead of playing the receivers, they played their releases. First, the corner closest to the line of scrimmage (#25 Xavien Howard) would take Kalif Raymond’s shallow crossing route: