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NFL defensive coaches are focused on stopping these trends this season
The NFL’s offensive masterminds continue to innovate and find new advantages, and the cyclical nature of scheme means defensive coaches will find a counter. It’s a chess match that continues every offseason.
For example, the popularity of outside schemes was met with more odd fronts with defensive linemen playing more patiently to cause indecision for runners. So last year, we began to see more old-school gap scheme runs from offenses. Defensive coaches are very good at what they do, so the new, shiny trends on offense typically lose their potency fast. What are those pesky defensive coaches thinking about heading into the 2024 season? I asked defensive coaches around the league what offensive trends, plays or concepts they’ve spent time coming up with answers for.
The Dolphins’ cheat motion
The most common answer I got was the “cheat” motion popularized by the Dolphins and Tyreek Hill. Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel unveiled it in Week 1, and it seems like every team has added it to their playbook. The motion is simple. A receiver with a tight split sprints outside to get a running start and the quarterback quickly snaps the ball as the receiver is still running, before the defense can properly react.
(Drew Jordan / The Athletic)
Cheat motion helps get receivers to full speed before the snap similar to how Canadian Football Players do, except NFL players have to do it moving horizontally. Cheat motion can be used to create rubs that are hard for the defense to adjust to because of how quickly the ball gets snapped.
Offensive coordinators got creative with their usage of cheat motion last season. They used it to get receivers both inside and outside, to get receivers open deep or open up space underneath, and combined it with run/pass options (RPOs). It’s been a pain to defend.
Week 3, 11:56 remaining in the second quarter, first-and-10
Rams coach Sean McVay was one of the best at using motion to create advantages in the passing game last year. Here, he called an inside variation of cheat motion to free up Tutu Atwell. Atwell initially was lined up outside against Bengals corner Chidobe Awuzie.
As Atwell motioned inside, nickel Mike Hilton had to switch onto him to avoid a possible rub.
However, because of the quick switch, Hilton played a step or two too far outside of Atwell, giving him too much space to work with inside. Hilton was supposed to have inside help, but the inside defenders were frozen by play action.
Hilton couldn’t recover and Atwell was open for an explosive pass play.
“A pro personnel executive for a team who was not authorized to speak publicly said that even his coaches, who did not face the Dolphins in 2023, put ‘cheat’ on their scout-team cards because they knew it would eventually come up from an opponent who was on their schedule,” The Athletic’s Jourdan Rodrigue wrote in her report on the motion.
Defenses will definitely be more prepared for the motion this season. They’ll have quick checks and adjustments they can get to that will help them deal with it better, using all offseason to work with them.
One coach I talked to wasn’t as worried about the motion. He feels it is already overexposed and is more about the player who gets put in motion. Not every receiver can run a diverse route tree off of the motion.
“You have to have guys running routes running out of this thing. How many guys can actually run routes that involve a downfield break off of a full-speed motion? And how often are those guys targeted? It’s not quite as high as you people would think,” the defensive coach said. “There’s probably 10 guys in the league that can really run that route fast enough, clean enough, time it with another receiver off of the motion.”
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Pace of motion
Cheat motion isn’t the only way teams are getting creative with motion. The pace of the motion and at which point they snap the ball also can be problematic.
If teams aren’t varying the pace of their motions and snap points, the plays they run off of motion can become predictable. The best motion teams are conscious of all of this and weaponize it to make life hard on defenses.
“When a guy jogs across the formation slow and then boom, the ball gets snapped and he takes off, that’s a son of a bitch to defend and there’s no way to chart those other than just watching all the plays,” an NFL defensive coach said. “Also, if you have a guy that sprints across the formation that forces a defensive check then he gets set and then the ball gets snapped. That’s like that’s a big-time problem because it’s just creating a healthy dose of pre-snap conflict where defenders in the second level are unsure.”
NFC divisional round, 8:31 remaining in the third quarter, second-and-5
Here, the Rams started with three eligible receivers to Matthew Stafford’s right. This side was the passing strength of the formation, so the Lions lined up their nickel Brian Branch there.
Cooper Kupp then sprinted to the other side and got set. Because of the pace of the motion, the defense bumped linebacker Alex Anzalone outside instead of having Branch follow Kupp across the formation. As Kupp got set, they had some time to possibly adjust but chose not to because the Rams could have snapped the ball at any time.
Instead of snapping the ball, the Rams had receiver Puka Nacua also motion across the formation. Still, the Lions kept Branch to the right even though the passing strength of the formation had completely flipped.
After the snap, Anzalone had to run with Nacua on a wheel route. Kupp also ran a route across the formation, holding the defenders on that side. No one was left in the flats to defend the running back screen, which was perfectly set up.
In the last five-plus seasons, coaches from the Kyle Shanahan/Sean McVay tree have effectively used motion to create advantages in the running game and to dress up their play-action concepts. Now they are getting extremely creative with using motion to create advantages in the passing game. Forward-thinking defensive coaches should have spent the offseason adding counters and tools to their playbooks for their secondary to use on the field against these different types of motions.
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Four-strong concepts
Overloading one side of the formation before the snap is difficult for a defense to handle. Especially with so many defenses playing more match coverages in which defenders look at receivers and try to match with them based on their route stems. Four-strong means the offense is either lining up four eligible receivers to one side or getting four receivers with their routes after the snap.
One concept mentioned a lot by the defensive coaches I talked to was popularized by Shanahan and the 49ers. They would flood one side of the field with four routes but have fullback Kyle Juszczyk lead block for the running back on a swing route.
Several teams have copied this concept, but the Packers’ Matt LaFleur has his own version that is particularly hard to stop. The 49ers run their four-strong concept out of 21 personnel (two backs, one tight end, two receivers) and they’ll run it out of 1-back. This is a little easier for the defense because all the eligible receivers are compressed initially.
LaFleur runs his variation out of faster personnel groupings. Also, he’ll combine the swing with an escort with a downfield concept.
NFC divisional round, 1:19 left in the first quarter, second-and-11
Here, the Packers are running their four-strong concept with an escort out of 12 personnel (one back, two tight ends, two receivers). Tight end Tucker Kraft is the escort (lead blocker) for the running back swing out of the backfield. Instead of shorter routes like the 49ers’ version, the Packers had a dagger concept called.
The 49ers defenders dropped deep to defend the downfield pass combination, leaving the swing open underneath.
Kraft took out the flat defender, giving the running back space to run down the sideline.
Counter
As defenses have moved to play more light boxes and odd fronts, offenses have swung back to using more gap scheme plays. The most popular gap scheme play is counter, in which the front side of the offensive line down blocks while two pullers come from the back side — usually a guard and either a tackle, tight end or fullback.
The popular Vic Fangio/Brandon Staley system deploys two deep safeties with a focus on stopping explosive pass plays while conceding the run, and the extra defender who has to come up to play the extra blockers created by counter comes from the secondary. That’s asking a lot of the safety.
Week 14, 14:13 remaining in the second quarter, second-and-11
On this play, the Giants ran counter as a run/pass option (RPO). They were in a spread formation and had a glance concept to the counter side (left). Quarterback Tommy DeVito was reading the safety.
The safety stepped down to defend the counter, leaving the glance wide-open behind him.
One defensive coach said he was thinking about ways to defend QB counter options, which he believes he sees more of in his division than traditional zone read. Even with an extra defender in the box, a QB counter is very difficult to stop if the quarterback is a legitimate running threat.
Week 14, 13:00 remaining in the second quarter, first-and-10
Here, the Giants ran QB counter with running back Saquon Barkley taking the snap. Barkley had two options: hand off to receiver Wan’Dale Robinson running left with a lead block or keep the ball and follow the counter blocking with two pulling offensive linemen to the right.
Barkley read the defensive end to the right. If he stayed outside, he would have kept the ball, but because he stepped inside, Barkley made the right read and handed the ball off.
If the end stayed outside, the Giants would have a numbers advantage and excellent blocking to the right for Barkley.
Counter is an old-school concept, but as coaches prioritize defending the pass, they’ll have to think of ways to limit physical runs like the counter with lighter boxes.
(Top photo of Tyreek Hill in motion: Miami Dolphins via Associated Press)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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