About how many unique plays from their playbook does an average NFL team use in any particular game? (Offense and defense).
Figure you get around 60-70 offensive plays in a game. I’m going to say at least 50 are unique, closer to 60 if you count different personnel packages running the same play as a different play. Also consider running the exact same play with the exact same personnel but flipped. It’s kind of different, but kind of not.
Routes are a different matter. There’s only so many different routes any given receiver can run. It’s the combinations that differentiate the plays. Similar situation with the blocking schemes on running plays.
And depending on the the defense show, a given play may end up quite differently. Blocking assignments and routes will reflect what the defense is doing in the moment. Any given play may roll out quite differently if called twice in one game.
Three. Run, pass, and kick. But every one of those will be different.
I recall one game, about twenty years ago, where the Giants were about to play the Cowboys, and it was mentioned that the Giants were planning to cut back their playbook to simplify their approach against Dallas - but this still meant they would be taking about 200 plays to Dallas.
So while they might use only 40-70 unique plays in a game, they probably come with 200-400 plays prepared in their head to use as need be.
This article on NFL.com was written by Pat Kirwan, a former NFL assistant coach and front-office guy, who has done analysis for SI, NFL.com, and SiriusXM, and has written a book on how to understand what’s going on while watching an NFL game.
Kirwan says that, while teams may have 1000 or more plays in their playbooks, for a given week/game, they will choose a small subset of those for their game plan and preparation. Coaches (on each side of the ball) might select 100 or so plays from that playbook which they feel would work well against the team they’re about to face, but they only have time during the week to install and practice roughly 30 to 40 of those plays with their players.
He then qualifies it, particularly on offense, by noting that many coaches will consider the same play, run out of different formations, as being separate plays, and thus, they would say that they have more than 30 or 40 plays for a week. But, as far as the plays themselves, he seems to be saying it’s 30 to 35 different plays that have been prepared, on each side of the ball, for a given game.
I’d also guess that many times, teams will wind up not using even that many, as the appropriate game situations may not come up for some of those 35 or so plays. And, if the team is facing a short week of preparation (i.e., they’re playing on Thursday, or Saturday), it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they have time to prepare even fewer plays.
Also, sometimes 2 plays are really the same thing, just flipped.
The Chiefs scored 2 touchdowns against the Eagles in the Super Bowl that were basically identical. The only difference is that the first time, the receiver ran to the right, the second time, to the left, but the idea (fool the defender by moving in first, then out later) and pre-snap movement, etc. was the same.
Also, the number of plays that an NFL team has in its playbook has dramatically increased over the decades.
Having grown up as a Packer fan in Green Bay, I read a lot of books about the Vince Lombardi Packers. I remember reading a book that had been written by one of his players (I think it might have been Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay, but it might have been Bill Curry in George Plimpton’s book One More July), in which the player described one of his first meetings with Lombardi. The coach took out a legal pad, and drew up their entire offensive “playbook” on just a handful of sheets of paper.
I suspect if you asked various coaches the question, you’d probably get wildly divergent answers about the same playbook. What is a “play” is so subjective that it’s losing some meaning. And most playbooks today use a complex scheme of numbers and keywords that describe concepts which can be arbitrarily assembled on the fly. Blocking schemes can often be swapped within the same pass scheme exponentially increasing the permutations possible. Alignments and personnel packages can be interchanged freely.
Think of a super basic passing play with 4 players running go routes, i.e. four guys running straight lines upfield. You can run that play with 4 WRs and 0 TEs. You can put your 4 WRs in a 3-1, 2-2, and 1-3 arrangement on each side of the line. You then can do the exact same thing with 3 WRs and 1 TE. Then 2 WRs and 2 TEs. And 2 WRs, 1 TE and 1 RB. And so on. How many plays is that? It’s in the eye of the beholder.