Commanders Scheme Breakdown: The Bow Concept
Breaking down the Bow concept and how Eric Bieniemy could look to use it in Washington.
Earlier this week I broke down a staple concept of the west coast offense that Eric Bieniemy is bringing to Washington, the Arrow concept. Today, I thought I’d take a look at the partnering concept, known in most west coast offenses as the Bow concept. These two concepts are so commonly partnered together that the Andy Reid coaching tree often refers to the Arrow concept as “Tampa” and the Bow concept as “Bay”.
The Arrow concept consists of three receivers; one running a corner route, one running a flat route and the third spotting up in between them. The Bow concept takes the exact same concept and simply changes the corner route into a basic cross. This means the deepest route switches from breaking outside to breaking over the middle, which provides a different type of stress to the defense.
Here is a great example of the Bow concept. You can see it’s run from a very similar look to the Arrow concept in my previous article, with a tight end and wide receiver aligned tight to the formation and the running back working to the flat out of the backfield. The only thing that changes here from the Arrow concept is the tight end, who instead of breaking outside on a corner route, breaks inside on a basic cross.
It’s clear to see the way this stresses the underneath zone coverage of the defense. The flat defender is sprinting outside to try and match the running back while having to avoid the traffic created by the receiver spotting up inside. The receiver spotting up then grabs the attention of the next underneath defender, getting him to bite up and close on him. This leaves tight end Travis Kelce a huge area of space over the middle of the field as he wraps around the inside linebacker. Quarterback Patrick Mahomes finds him easily and the Chiefs pick up a first down before the safeties can close on Kelce from deep.
While the Arrow concept was looking to stress the outside zone defender, the Bow concept stresses inside zone defenders. We can see here how the linebacker felt the threat of the wide receiver and quickly jumped on that, vacating the middle of the field for Kelce to work into. However, if the linebacker sinks back to negate Kelce, then the receiver is left open.
On this play against the Colts, we see another example of the Bow concept. This time though, it plays out slightly differently. The running back gets the flat defender to chase him outside, like we saw previously. However, on this occasion, the linebacker inside decides to hold his position due to the threat of Kelce. With the linebacker sinking and holding his position, Mahomes fires it quickly to his receiver on the spot route for another first down.
In my article on the Arrow concept, I mentioned how the ball goes to the running back in the flat more often than not. With the Bow concept, it's much more evenly spread among all three routes, but the spot route is the one that most commonly sees the ball. Defenses are typically quick to sink underneath the basic cross and also have a defender working to the flat, which leaves a hole between those defenders for that spot route.
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