Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I managed to pass enough classes to secure a couple of undergraduate degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. (From time to time, I wonder whether it was a clerical error.) And so it was with a significant degree of delight that I received an email on Wednesday from CMU that wasn’t asking for, you know, money.
We receive many pitches regarding different studies and trends and other things that ultimately don’t come close to meeting the threshold for sharing here. This one caught my eye, mainly because it confirms one of the things I’ve said consistently about the key to being successful in football.
Unpredictability. In all things. (Most recently, we focused on the importance of unpredictability as to whether a team will, or won’t, go for it on fourth down.)
The folks at Carnegie Mellon have engaged in a study that focuses on the unpredictability of the timing before the snap, specifically as it relates to pre-snap motion.
Ron Yurko, an assistant professor of statistics and data science, used advanced statistical modeling with more than two thousand NFL plays and player-tracking data. The study, performed with Ph.D. student Quang Nguyen and recently published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, found that quarterbacks who vary the timing between pre-snap motion and the snap face have greater overall success.
“Quarterbacks who vary the time between a receiver’s pre-snap motion and the ball snap face less defensive pressure or ‘havoc,’ like sacks or interceptions,” Yurko said. “This is because predictability allows defenses to anticipate the snap and disrupt the play.”
The study found that Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady are the best at engineering this extra layer of unpredictability.
It’s a subtle yet important wrinkle in the operation of an offense. Most develop a rhythm that makes it easier to instinctively anticipate the timing of the snap. When watching a game, that pattern often emerges. And if it can be senses on the screen, it can be sensed on the field. And if the defense trusts that the snap is coming, it erases the inherent edge the offense enjoys from knowing when the play will start.
Perhaps teams have been studying this factor privately. This is the first effort to publicly quantify the trait and to characterize it as a skill.
It definitely is a skill. It keeps defenses on their heels. It keeps them guessing. It prevents them from developing a sense as to when it’s time to go.
Unpredictability. The more a defense knows what’s coming and when it’s coming, the easier it is to stop the offense. The less the defense knows, the more that guesswork is required.
One bad guess can blow a play open. Which can blow a game open. Which can be the difference between making it to the playoffs, or advancing deep into the postseason.
Much about the operation of an NFL offense is complicated. This is simple. Within the storm of everything a quarterback processes before a play starts, varying the timing of the snap in relation to the pre-snap movement of players can add to the overall success of everything that happens once the quarterback has the ball in his hands.
