[Editor's note: This article is from Athlon Sports' 2025 NFL Preview Magazine.Order your copy today online or pick one up at retail racks and newsstands nationwide.]
Throughout the history of pro football, a schematic revolution on one side of the ball has forced a schematic revolution on the other. The T-formation on offense had defenses moving from seven- and six-man fronts to five-man fronts. Then, more complex passing games in the late 1940s and early ’50s (think of the Los Angeles Rams’ “Point-Per-Minute” offenses from 1949-53) fostered the development of the Umbrella defenses of the mid-1950s, which were the first defenses we could call truly modern. The even more advanced passing games of the early 1960s, especially in the American Football League, brought about zone defenses and the advent of nickel and dime coverages, with five and six defensive backs.
On and on it has gone. The West Coast offense had defensive coordinators putting forth new blitz packages like Buddy Ryan’s 46 with the Chicago Bears. The old two-back pro set formation went the way of the dinosaur as offenses wanted three and four receivers on the field more often, which led to far more variable fronts and coverages on the defensive side of the ball.
Now, there’s more schematic variance than ever before at all levels of football, and the NFL is obviously no exception. As we head into the 2025 campaign, here are six schematic trends to watch — concepts we’ve seen more and more over the past few seasons and the concepts we can expect to become staples until and unless someone on the other side of the ball can figure out ways to counter them.
Dolphins receiver Malik Washington shows pre-snap motion before a play
Dolphins receiver Malik Washington shows pre-snap motion before a play
Gregory Fisher-Imagn Images
Offense: Pre-snap motion
Pre-snap shifts — in which offensive players move from one spot to another before the snap and stay stationary until the snap — have been around nearly as long as football has existed. But pre-snap motion, in which a player moves from one spot to another and stays in motion at the snap, didn’t really come into the NFL until the 1980s.
Bill Walsh told the story of when he was the Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive coordinator in the mid-1970s, and tight end Bob Trumpy lined up on the wrong side of the formation by mistake during a game. Trumpy hurried over to the other side of the formation, and the Oakland Raiders, Cincinnati’s opponent that day, had no idea how to deal with it.
Walsh started putting Trumpy in motion, and by the time the legendary head coach had built the San Francisco 49ers’ offense into an all-time power a decade later, pre-snap motion was a fairly major part of his passing game.
Today, it’s the rare quarterback who doesn’t benefit from some kind of pre-snap motion. Early on, it was about giving the quarterback a coverage indicator. If a defender followed the man in motion across the field, it was likely man coverage. If the defense responded to the motion by keeping the defenders in their spots and bumping everyone over a bit, it was likely zone.
Motion is now used to define and disrupt. The best offensive minds will use pre-snap motion to target a specific defender or a particular area of coverage by introducing a target into that area late in the pre-snap process with the shift, and accentuating it with motion.
In 2024, quarterbacks without pre-snap motion completed 5,457 of 8,586 passes (63.6%) for 60,642 yards (7.06 yards per attempt), 373 touchdowns, 178 interceptions and a 90.32 passer rating.
With pre-snap motion, quarterbacks completed 6,680 of 9,995 passes (66.8%) for 72,414 yards (7.25 yards per attempt), 472 touchdowns, 227 interceptions and a 94.24 passer rating. And when quarterbacks had the eventual target in motion, they completed 1,985 of 2,644 passes (75.1%) for 18,165 yards (6.87 yards per attempt), 108 touchdowns, 43 interceptions and a 100.11 passer rating.
Defense: Shifting safeties
Defenses are starting to react to all this motion on offense with their own sleights of hand. More than ever, defensive coordinators are aligning their safeties in a certain pre-snap look and moving them post-snap to try to create offensive confusion — and therefore hesitation.
Brian Flores
Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores has been a mastermind at maneuvering his safeties.
Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
With shifting safeties, defenses can give quarterbacks middle of the field open (MOFO) or middle of the field closed (MOFC) pre-snap reads and then show the complete opposite look post-snap. That’s the most popular safety shift, where one of two safeties either comes down from the deep third to cover in the box of the slot, or vice versa.
There are also clockwise and counterclockwise shifts in which both safeties will stay in the deep third but one will stay in his pre-snap area and the other will drop deeper to give the quarterback uncertain looks on vertical routes and maintain the MOFO and MOFC reads. Also, those shifts can have one safety coming down in a hurry from the deep third to affect receivers at the first and second levels of the defense.
Press-float shifts will have one safety in the deep third and another coming down to affect a receiver with press-style coverage.
Brian Flores, the Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator, is perhaps the NFL’s most diabolical dispenser of safety switches. Flores’ shift distances are the NFL’s most drastic more often than not, and he’s not static before the first coverage look — Flores likes to present an offense with an additional level of chaos by forcing quarterbacks to wonder what the first coverage is before the second shift even begins.
Just as pre-snap motion often changes the pass strength and run strength of the defense, shifting safeties will alter how and where running backs run and quarterbacks throw. And in an NFL where milliseconds can seem like minutes, forcing hesitation on either side of the ball is so much of what the modern game is about.
Offense: Quick-game passing
Offensive coordinators are calling more quick-game passes than ever before. In the 2024 season, there were 4,755 dropbacks in which the quarterback threw the ball with either a zero- or one-step drop. If you go back five years before that to the 2019 season, there were only 3,940 such dropbacks.
A primary reason for this is the increased use of run-pass options, which really became a staple concept in the NFL when the Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl LII at the end of the 2017 season. Run-pass options had been a major part of collegiate passing games before, and as is the case with many schematic conceits, it wasn’t long before things moved their way up to the next level.
Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow (9) warms up before a game against the Tennessee Titans at Nissan Stadium.
Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow
© Steve Roberts-Imagn Images
Another reason for more quick game is simply that when you have quarterbacks and receivers aligned with quicker routes, you can get under coverage and increase your completion percentage. Last season, quarterbacks completed 70.8% of their passes with zero- or one-step drops — 3,111 completions on 4,394 attempts for 27,613 yards, 179 touchdowns, 85 interceptions and a 97.8 passer rating. A large percentage of those quick passes came in the red zone, which explains the high touchdown percentage, but there are NFL offenses that are building a large part of their passing games out of that concept.
Last season, Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals led the league with 246 dropbacks with zero or one step; he completed 74.2% of his attempts from those dropbacks with 17 touchdown passes and four interceptions.
How are modern defenses dealing with all this quick-game passing? By going back to the future with a coverage concept that is decidedly old-school.
Defense: Press coverage
Quick-game routes do not let you defend over the top without allowing easy completions, and your pass-rushers may not have time to get to the quarterback to even pressure him, much less sack him, before the ball is on its way. The best way to counter all that is to aggressively press the receivers at the line of scrimmage. Ideally, diverting receivers and upsetting the timing of those routes negates the advantages of the passing game, and NFL defensive coordinators are aligning with that theory.
Steve Spagnuolo of the Kansas City Chiefs has led the press coverage charge since he became the Chiefs’ defensive coordinator in 2019, and it’s no coincidence that the Chiefs have made five of the six Super Bowls in that time, winning three. In 2019, the Chiefs had at least one cornerback in press coverage on a league-high 86% of their snaps. Last season, Kansas City led the NFL once again with an 88% press rate. In 2024, 10 teams had two cornerbacks in press coverage at least 20% of the time, and 12 teams had three cornerbacks in press coverage at least 5% of the time — the Detroit Lions led that group at 12%.
Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo
Steve Spagnuolo
Orlando Ramirez - Imagn Images
As is the case with two-deep coverage (which we’ll discuss later), press coverage isn’t just basic press coverage anymore. There’s straight-up aggressive press coverage, where the cornerback disrupts the route and goes wherever the receiver goes. There’s press-bail coverage, where the cornerback starts in press and then moves to a hybrid off-coverage to keep an eye on the backfield. But the big deal now is press-match coverage, where the press part of the coverage isn’t quite as aggressive, and the cornerback moves to straight-up man coverage as soon as the receiver declares his route.
While you won’t see as much press coverage as you may have in the NFL of the 1960s and before, when zone coverage wasn’t yet a primary construct and it was all about the battle at the line of scrimmage, you can expect this particular press-match revolution against quick-game passes to keep on rolling.
Offense: Condensed formations
As NFL passing games become more complex with the intention of beating defenses with their own expanded concepts, and as NFL offensive minds look to approximate the advantages given to college quarterbacks with wider hashmarks (40 feet in the NCAA as opposed to 18 feet, six inches in the NFL), the use of condensed formations has increased. By “condensed,” we mean that all potential targets are aligned inside the numbers, as opposed to spreading the receivers out to the boundaries.
In the 2024 NFL season, 23 teams lined up in condensed formations at least 30% of the time, led by the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers, who each did it on 60% of their offensive snaps. Five years before, in 2019, the Rams led the NFL with a 53% condensed formation rate, and the 49ers did it 50% of the time; only three other teams (the Houston Texans, Las Vegas Raiders, and Cincinnati Bengals) went over 30%.
Cooper Kupp
Cooper Kupp
Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
Why the increase? First, when your formations are more condensed, your receivers have more room to move in coverage. Second, with cornerbacks tasked to play more aggressive press coverage (more on that in a minute), it’s more difficult to press receivers who are aligned closer to each other. Traffic becomes a problem. And third, having receivers come to the line of scrimmage closer to each other forces a blurring between the concept of outside and slot receivers.
When former Rams receiver Cooper Kupp signed with the Seattle Seahawks this offseason, he was asked how he would work with Jaxon Smith-Njigba, since both are characterized as slot receivers. Who’s the “outside guy?”
“In eight years with the Rams, I think it’s tagged with the slot, but I don’t know how you determine that when we’re in condensed formations,” Kupp says. “I’m outside, but I’m running a slot route. A lot of times I was outside, and I’m not sure if it was being tagged as a slot route or not. But the ability to move in an offense is being able to ‘formation’ guys to be anywhere. You’ve got to learn the whole thing because you could be in any one of these spots at any time.”
If you’ve got to learn the whole thing on offense, imagine how complex it gets for the defense.
Defense: Two-Deep Coverage
A decade ago, when 31 other NFL teams were desperately trying to find their own version of the Seattle Seahawks’ Legion of Boom defense, single-high coverage was all the rage. Especially Cover-3 — zone coverage with a single deep safety.
Eventually, though, 31 NFL teams found out that if you didn’t have Earl Thomas as your deep safety and Richard Sherman and Kam Chancellor as two of your other pass defenders, single-high coverage was fraught with issues. Especially as the NFL worked to more of a 3x1 league in receiver distribution, those four targets could beat single-high with too many vertical routes to cover credibly.
So, the wise decision was eventually made to go back to the two-high coverage that was the standard back in the 1990s and 2000s, when the defenses popularized by Tony Dungy and his acolytes were all the schematic rage.
Two-deep concepts have increased in the past half-decade, and it’s not just the old Cover-2 of Bud Carson’s Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s or the Tampa-2 stuff Dungy brought in.
Rod Rust, who coached in the NFL from 1978-96 and was a defensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs, New England Patriots, Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants, is widely considered to be the father of quarters coverage, in which four defensive backs (two cornerbacks, two safeties) each address one quarter of the field in coverage. Rust liked to say that with the basic, fundamental shell that quarters coverages gave you, you could morph into just about anything else from it. Which is where the aforementioned safety switches come in.
That’s become ever more true in the last decade, and Cover-6 — the offshoot in which defenses play man coverage on one side of the field and zone on the other — has become newly popular.
In the 2024 season, when facing single-high coverage (Cover-1 and Cover-3), quarterbacks completed 6,573 of 8,569 passes (78.5%) for 65,497 yards (7.83 yards per attempt), 304 touchdowns, 181 interceptions and a 100.91 passer rating.
When facing two-high coverage (Cover-2, 2-Man, Cover-4, Cover-6), quarterbacks completed 4,395 of 6,610 passes (66.5%) for 49,367 yards (7.47 yards per attempt), 165 touchdowns, 164 interceptions and an 86.59 passer rating.
The math involved here is simple, and the effects on enemy offenses are quite clear: Until someone comes up with a way to counter these new and more complicated strains of two-deep coverage, these trends will continue.
All advanced metrics are courtesy of Pro Football Focus and Sports Info Solutions.
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