two of the most misused and misunderstood terms in today’s football.
Spread: refers to alignment of eligible receivers. Many think that it refers to an offensive philosophy but it’s really not. It’s best understood when used in conjunction with the word “box” that you will hear a lot on broadcasts. When the offense is lined up, imagine you are looking from a satellite view straight overhead. If you were to draw two lines from end zone to end zone that are on the outside shoulder of where the Tight End would normally line up, and then draw two lines from sideline to sideline 10 yards from the line of scrimmage, the inside area of those lines is what is considered the “box”. Then you count the number of offensive players inside that box or directly offset like Utah likes to do with their TE’s. If it is 7 or less you are in a Spread, if it’s 8 or more you are in a Tight formation. Under Ludwig, Utah ran out of Tight roughly 3/4 of the time. Under Taylor, it was Spread at about the same %. And the only thing keeping those %’s under 90 is situations like 3rd and 1 or 3rd and Long where you will run a specific package other than your base offense.
RPO: is a play where the QB has the option to handoff, run himself or Pass. When run correctly, you should not be able to tell the difference between a straight run call, run option, play action pass or an RPO. The only true indicator of whether the play was called to be a run or a pass is the release of the OLine since they cannot go more than 3 yards downfield before the ball is thrown. The exception would be if the ball is thrown behind the Line of Scrimmage (Screen pass).
Without knowing the actual play call most of us go with catchall’s like Spread and RPO for what we are seeing / just saw. But it’s kind of like the neighborhood call at 2nd base. You just have to get close to get credit.
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