Breaking down a Commanders play call

Taking a closer look at a play called by Sam Howell in the first day of training camp

Earlier this offseason, I broke down an example of a playcall from the Chiefs to demonstrate the structure and style of a west coast offense playcall that Eric Bieniemy is bringing from the Chiefs to the Washington Commanders. One of the most important parts of training camp is getting the offense fully installed and having the quarterback being able to spit out the terminology and get everyone aligned properly to know exactly what they’re doing. 

Fortunately yesterday, during the first day of training camp for the Commanders, we were able to hear Sam Howell call a play. In this video tweeted by NBCSports/106.7 The Fan beat reporter JP Finlay, we can hear Howell calling a play out loud during a warm up drill to practice snapping the ball. 

https://twitter.com/jpfinlaynbcs/status/1684190342512353280?s=61&t=tNRbe9bmEPrJChOH0fYe-A

Note: Unfortunately Twitter no longer allows tweets to embed into Substack posts, so to view the tweet from JP Finlay and hear the audio of the call from Howell, you’ll have to click the link above which will take you directly to Twitter.

Now I can’t quite make out the exact full call from Howell in that clip, but I’ve pieced together most of it. What I definitely could hear made the call sound like:

Gun Trey Right Flex (?) Right 2 Jet Y Shallow Cross

The only part I couldn’t fully make out was the receiver tagged to go in motion before the snap. But from hearing the rest of the call, we can make a pretty strong educated guess on what that might be and how it might look when drawn up. So lets start with the formation. 

Gun Trey Right Flex is the formation. Gun tells the offense that the quarterback is aligning in the shotgun rather than under center. Trey Right is the core formation. Formations beginning with the letter T are typically three-by-one formations, or trips formations, which see three receivers align on one side of the formation with a single receiver aligning on the opposite side. 

This formation happens to be a three-by-one formation where the single isolated receiver on one side of the formation is the Y tight end, rather than a wide receiver. The Right tag tells the offense that the Y tight end is aligning to the right side of the formation, which means the other three receivers are to the left. 

Flex is a formation adjustment. It tells the tight end to adjust from being a traditional inline tight end that lines up just outside the right tackle, to standing a few yards outside the tackle in a receivers stance rather than crouched down with his hand in the dirt like he would on a run block.