The Mind of Daboll in Three Plays

Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll has built one of the NFL’s hottest offenses. We asked his former co-offensive coordinator at Alabama, Maryland head coach Mike Locksley, to break down two Bills plays and one Alabama TD in an attempt to understand Daboll’s beautiful mind a little better.

The Raiders are broken, and it’s Brian Daboll’s fault.

How else to explain what the Las Vegas Raiders saw back in Week 4 with 10:45 remaining in the first quarter? The Bills are lined up in a tight formation with all four of their available pass catchers bunched within five yards of the offensive tackles. Tight end Dawson Knox motions to the outside of the formation and then retreats to his original position, acting as an exploratory satellite for quarterback Josh Allen to identify Vegas’s defense (Raiders safety Erik Harris followed Knox outside and back instead of bumping down the line and sliding another defender out, indicating man coverage).

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At the snap, Buffalo runs hard play action with the offensive line crashing down and to the right on a zone slide. Gabriel Davis, the inside-most receiver on the left side, and Stefon Diggs, the outer-most receiver on the right side both run deep “wave” routes that cross paths with one another about seven yards past the line of scrimmage.

Their routes crossing together time perfectly with the hard, downhill run action on the handoff, which consequently forces the man defenders trailing both Diggs and Davis to look in Buffalo’s backfield for just a split second. This was more than enough time for each of the Bills’ receivers to take off and separate as their defenders adjusted their body positions. Diggs immediately raises his hand, alerting Allen to the vast desert of open space in his periphery. Davis turns his head back inside to look at Allen, who passes up Diggs (his primary read) seemingly for fun, floating a perfect ball in stride to the rookie wide receiver for the 26-yard score.

Mind you, this is against a professional NFL defense coordinated by Paul Gunther, who has held the position for a pair of teams each year dating back to 2014. As Allen cocks back his arm to throw, there are actually three available pass catchers (Davis, Diggs and running back T.J. Yeldon, who slipped out of the backfield after the run fake) who could have easily caught the ball for a touchdown.

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“That’s a classic pre-red zone shot for these guys,” Mike Locksley, the head coach at the University of Maryland and Daboll’s former co-offensive coordinator at Alabama, says. He’s joined us over Zoom to watch some plays and help explain what makes Daboll, Buffalo’s offensive coordinator, and by extension, Allen and the Bills, one of the most devastating attacks in football. (The play we just described is the first of three plays we run through in the video above).

“Once they read man coverage, they sold the run. We call that a run-action pass, low hats, it sells everyone on the run and then with the speed and the techniques of all the receivers versus man coverage, everyone created separation and you got three guys popping open.”

Three guys popping open. On one play. In an NFL game.

“Brian did a great job at Alabama and he’s doing a great job here. The way he’s utilized these guys, it’s hard to match and say ‘O.K. he’s their No. 1 wide receiver.’ Cole Beasley makes plays. Davis makes plays. And the beauty of what Brian is able to do, he can spread the ball around to each and every one of those playmakers … when you create the matchups you create with all of these guys on the field, that’s the beauty of what Brian does. Taking advantage of matchups.”

While the rest of the NFL views the Bills as longshot to take down the defending champion Chiefs and their maniacal offense this weekend, those who know the work of Daboll are more open-minded. Behind Daboll, Buffalo has built an offense that records more first downs than any team in the league, is second in percentage of drives ending in a score, second in total points scored and third in both passing yards and touchdowns. Allen, once destined to be another untamed stallion, is the second-most efficient quarterback in football this year, according to NFLFastR data, behind only Aaron Rodgers.

Here’s a small window into why it all works, and what it took to get the Bills back in the Super Bowl conversation for the first time in three decades.

* * *

Bills Vs. Steelers, Week 14. First-and-10 at the Buffalo 43-yard line, 9:07 left in the third quarter

Allen is standing at his own 48-yard line looking out at the best defense in football. Potential Defensive Player of the Year T.J. Watt is in a sprinter’s stance to the right and Alex Highsmith is on the opposite side, also primed to crash off the edge.

The Bills have two receivers in a tight split alignment to Allen’s blind side and Diggs lined up wide to Allen’s right. There’s a running back next to Allen in the shotgun, plus Knox, who is stationed like an H-back directly behind Buffalo’s right tackle.

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What is about to unfold is a subtle ballet. It is a tired and predictable platitude to compare football to chess, and yet there is nothing that more accurately describes the deployment of various pieces both as pawns and attackers, who both neutralize coming threats and pave a lane for their desired outcome. It might help to ultimately explain why on this particular evening, Allen had more time to throw than all but six quarterbacks in the league that day (2.9 seconds per drop back) despite facing the team that ended up leading football in sacks (56).

At the snap, one of the two receivers in the split formation, Beasley, simply stops and flashes like he’s going to catch a screen pass. That immediately freezes and occupies the Steelers cornerback assigned to guard him. The other receiver in the split formation, Davis, runs a “go” route that occupies both his man and the deep safety hanging over the top. Half the field is now neutralized and looking away from the ultimate direction of the ball.

On the other side of the line, Knox starts off the play by assisting Bills right tackle Daryl Williams with Watt, causing enough of a speed bump to stifle the pass rush before flashing out in the open field as an available wide receiver. Knox settles in a place that draws one of the Steelers’ linebackers, Ulysees Gilbert, toward the line of scrimmage to cover him. Zack Moss, the running back, does something similar, peeling out of the backfield and settling in front of the other non-occupied Steelers linebacker, Avery Williamson, closer to the line of scrimmage.

All of this, the three occupied defenders to the left, the two occupied defenders to the right and the neutralized, four-man pass rush create a massive void in the middle of the field and a landing strip’s worth of free space for Diggs to make quick work of his defender and emerge free. Allen hits him in the chest and Diggs motors forward for a 22-yard gain.

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“When you study Brian and how he likes to attack, he’s always going to eliminate their game plan wreckers,” Locksley said. “Here, they’re in a version of seven-man protection which takes the edge off of the pass rush. He then gets those guys out as late check down receivers, and those guys suck up the linebackers in zone.”

This is Daboll’s New England influence showing. Perhaps more than any offensive coordinator in the league this year, including Josh McDaniels and the Patriots themselves, he has mastered the ability to create these tiny manipulations at the line of scrimmage, willing an unwitting defense into moving exactly where he wants them to go. It was the defining offensive characteristic of Tom Brady’s tenure in New England. Now, Daboll is running an accelerated version with a quarterback the size of Ben Roethlisberger, who also happens to have a 40 time 0.2 seconds slower than Cam Newton and a howitzer cannon for a right arm. In the process, he’s not only accentuating role players throughout the offense, but featuring the roster’s best skill position player with regularity against a great defense.

“He’s getting his best players targets and opportunities,” Locksley said.

How many times have we seen a team trade for or draft a No. 1 wide receiver only to have that player buried in the box score, with opposing defenses rightfully rolling their coverage toward that player to shut him down?

How many fewer times have we seen a team trade for or draft a No. 1 wideout and that person end up first in receiving yards, first in targets, fifth in explosive plays and third in first downs created?

* * *

Alabama vs. Georgia, 2018 National Championship Game, first-and-goal, 8:52 remaining in the third quarter

A little more than a quarter from now, Daboll, then the offensive coordinator of the Crimson Tide, will call one of the most important plays in Alabama football history: Train Off Jill Seattle, the second-and-26 walk-off touchdown against the Bulldogs in overtime that jumpstarted the legend of Tua Tagovailoa. Terry Saban, Nick Saban’s wife, would later have the play design—a four vertical route concept out of a 3x1 alignment, which requires the quarterback to manipulate the boundary safety with his eyes to create room for the widest vertical receiver—marked up on a plaque and given to all the offensive coaches.

Daboll dialed up that play because it was on a short list in the corner of his call sheet reserved specifically for Tagovailoa’s favorites. It was a practice Daboll kept at Alabama and likely still keeps in Buffalo, where, in a pinch, he can conjure up something that stokes his quarterback’s confidence.

“It shows the preparation Dabes has putting him in that position and knowing how or what to go to,” Locksley said.

I wanted to ask Locksley about Tagovailoa’s first touchdown of the day, though, because, more than a corner of the playsheet reserved specifically for each of his quarterbacks’ comfort zones, it seemed to explain how deeply he understood his quarterbacks, what they did well and when to call what play in particular. This was just a few minutes into Tagovailoa’s tenure as the Crimson Tide starting quarterback (Saban made the call to bench Jalen Hurts at halftime), which forced Daboll and Locksley to convert from their power-running, play-action sets to more RPO-based calls, which were suited to Tagovailoa’s comfort.

On this play, which started at Georgia’s six-yard line, Tagovailoa is in the shotgun with a running back to his left and two receivers split out wide to the left. There is one tight end on the right side just behind line and a receiver split out wide right.

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This is called a stump concept in Alabama’s playbook; a hi-lo route concept out of a 2x1 formation that is similar to their hi-lo route concept they run out of a 3x1 formation that they called branch. Off the snap, Tagovailoa is looking at what Locksley calls “picket fence” zone coverage, which means defenders are evenly spaced across the goal line and it’s the quarterback’s job to find the dead spot where a ball can go.

Tagovailoa is looking to the right side from the get go, where tight end Irv Smith Jr. is running directly at his defender while the receiver out wide, Henry Ruggs, is sprinting to the back of the end zone and then rounding his way toward the goal post, looping off Smith’s route almost like a tetherball swinging off its pole on a tight radius.

Locksley explains that Tagovailoa has a “movement key” on the play, which ends up being Georgia’s interior safety lined up on Smith. If the safety had backed off Smith and drifted toward Ruggs in the back of the end zone, Tagovailoa has an easy shot at an open tight end. If the interior safety presses the tight end hard, the tight end can drift toward Ruggs, legally manipulating his defender into creating some legal traffic, which helps slow down the cornerback defending Ruggs.

So, in a high-pressure situation with an unknown commodity at quarterback, Daboll gives him a play concept that offers ample space—quite literally, the square footage of the second “G” in Georgia in the end zone was between Ruggs and the nearest defender when Tagovailoa cocked his arm to throw—and Tagovailoa can simply make a routine anticipatory throw into friendly waters for the easy touchdown.

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Locksley puts it best. This is Daboll’s “Albert Einstein” approach to designing an offense. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Maybe that’s the genius of it.

“It’s like taking the SAT,” Locksley said. “You get rid of the things you know aren’t the answers first. If A and E aren’t the answers, you work with B, C and D. Brian does a tremendous job with young quarterbacks by limiting their amount of choices, formationing things and then structuring concepts for them to have an exact point of where I start with my eyes and end with the ball.”