Breaking Down Scott Turner's Passing Game, Part 2
Part 2 of a series breaking down some of the core passing concepts in Scott Turner's system and how he likes to disguise them.
Yesterday I kicked off a series of posts breaking down some of the core concepts of Scott Turner’s passing game. In that first post of the series, I looked at his most commonly called concept, the Dagger concept. We learned how the base concept worked and then how Turner likes to dress it up with various personnel groups, formations and motions to keep teams from knowing what’s coming. Today, we’re moving onto another one of Turner’s most frequently used concepts, the Sail concept.
Sail
The fundamental thing to know about the Sail concept is that it’s a three-level flood to one side of the field. This means it requires three receivers to run, all working to the same side of the field, with one receiver running deep to stretch the defense vertically, one receiver working to the flat to give underneath defenders something to bite up to, and a third receiver breaking outside inbetween the other two receivers at an intermediate level. This concept works particularly well against a lot of zone coverages because they typically have just two defenders, a deep and a flat defender, leaving them outnumbered however they attempt to cover the concept.
Here is one basic way to run Sail. Washington works out of 12 personnel consisting of one running back, two tight ends and two receivers. The team aligns in a bunch set to the left before sending a tight end in motion, leaving just DeAndre Carter and Ricky Seals-Jones stacked to the left. Carter, as the faster receiver, runs the deep vertical route to try and vacate space underneath him. Seals-Jones runs the sail route, getting to about 10 yards of depth before breaking outside. The running back executes a play-action fake, checks for any potential protection assignments and then works out to the flat to complete the three-level flood. The Packers matchup man-to-man, which means they aren’t exposed to the flaws in zone coverage that Sail creates, but it does leave Seals-Jones one-on-one against a linebacker in coverage. He breaks outside sharply and is open for a potential first down. However, Taylor Heinicke gets pressured in the pocket and ends up scrambling for a big gain instead.
Like with the Dagger concept we looked at yesterday, Scott Turner has a lot of different ways to get to the Sail concept. As long as the key principles of having 3 receivers flood the three different levels of the field on the same side of the field are there, then there’s almost endless possibilities on how to get to that point.
This time we see a basic trips set to the right with the tight end detached from the offensive line. The outside receiver runs the deep post and the tight end again runs the sail route. But it's the slot receiver that works the flat this time, in quite a different way than we saw the running back last time. The slot receiver runs a little spot route, spotting up at about five yards of depth with the ability to break is route back outside to the sideline if he feels a defender inside. This time the Packers play off and soft in zone coverage. A linebacker still attaches to Seals-Jones on the sail route, but the slot corner is playing very soft and in position to take away the sail route. Heinicke smartly works the checkdown to the slot receiver in the flat before the slot corner has the chance to make up ground and Washington picks up a first down.
Playing around with formations and personnel groups really keeps the defense guessing what’s coming. We’ve now seen the Sail concept run out of 12 personnel and 11 personnel. But Scott Turner even ran it out of a 21 personnel set with both J.D. McKissic and Antonio Gibson on the field at the same time.
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