By Mike Kuchar
Senior Research Manager/Co-Founder
X&O Labs
Twitter: @MikekKuchar

In order to meet the projected 95% rule in game planning, it’s important to define what efficiency is. According to Coach Longo, it’s something that should be pertinent to both the situation and play concept. This may not follow the conventional wisdom of taking the number of times a play is called and base it off the average number of yards it gained. That former belief is one that Coach Longo subscribed to back when he started coaching. But now he bases offensive efficiency off the two elements he game plans against defensive structure and defensive personnel.  “Basically, it’s the minimum amount of yardage we would accept on that route and still feel it’s efficient,” he said. “But if we were throwing a hitch on a corner that we feel we cannot gain four-plus yards on or against a coverage we should not be throwing it against than it’s not going to be efficient.”

What is Efficiency?

So, what is efficient? Coach Longo separates efficiency numbers in the run game and pass game. In the run game, four yards or less is efficient to him providing it’s a base down. If the offense in the four-minute mode, 3.5 yards can be quantified as efficient. “Of course, getting first downs take precedent,” he told us. “If there are three yards to get and we get a first down against a loaded box but still move the changes, that is efficient. The goal of the call is to get a first down. Or, if we are in goal-line situations a touchdown is efficient.” 

Pass Game Efficiency:

Since Coach Longo’s system is grounded in the Air Raid, his pass game is measured differently. It’s quantified more on the specific route that is built into the play concept. Each route has an efficiency number that doesn’t change from week to week. For example, drop back verticals have an 18-yard efficiency goal, whereas now verticals off press have a 12-yard efficiency goal. Digs have an efficiency goal of 8 yards while hitches have a goal of 5 yards. These are not general numbers that are arbitrary in nature. They are based on the route structure. “Let’s say the hitch by the wideout is open five out of five times and we throw the ball out there and complete it for five yards and he gets tackled,” said Coach Longo. “So why have a random efficiency number of 8 yards per play if the hitch is what the defense is giving up? That doesn’t tell you the play is efficient.”

These numbers are all tied into the concept being run. Take a generic levels concept as reference.

“The first look on the concept is the hitch,” said Coach Longo. “If it’s open and gets completed for five yards it’s considered efficient. The second read is the dig. If the dig is completed, at eight yards it’s efficient. All we want to do is complete it to the route for the yardage the defense would give us.”

Post-Season Efficiency Study:

The point of this method is for coaches to take each concept in their offense and design their own efficiency goal based on each individual concept. At the end of each season, Coach Longo will conduct an efficiency study based on each play concept. This information can be used to change or adjust efficiency models moving forward. “We will go back and look at the 11 Levels concepts that we ran and decide if the ball went to the proper place,” he said. “If the ball didn’t go to the proper place, it was an inefficient play. If we got lucky and threw into coverage and the ball got tipped but we caught it, we are not calling that an efficient play. If we throw a swing into coverage and the running back breaks a tackle and gets yardage, that is not efficient for us. We have to throw the ball to the right guy in the right progression. When we do, we should get the yardage prescribed. If we run 10 Levels concepts and the ball goes to the snag five times and he gets the yardage prescribed, that is five efficient plays. If the quarterback goes to the dig and overthrows it or we drop it and it’s incomplete it’s inefficient.”

His game plan is more about his players and not their players. This is why he builds in play concepts that can answer multiple defensive presentations. “A play has to be able to answer everything,” he said. “And 95% is everything to me. You need something you can answer most everything. When it’s not everything that means a defense needs to be extreme to beat us. So, we spend our time looking for the answer for the extreme. They have to do something extreme where we don’t have an answer. Our responsibility is to have that answer.”

In this course, we present our research on how Coach Longo applies the projected 95% method to game plan against defensive structures. We will also take readers in-depth into a work week of how Coach Longo and his offensive staff prepared against a particular opponent’s tendencies this past season in the SEC. But before we do, we wanted to make an important clarification: Coach Longo doesn’t spend a lot of time studying call patterns of opposing defensive coordinators. He’s more interested in studying the “defensive approach” structurally that these coordinators engage in. “To us, it’s all about the system,” he told us. “Like are they four-match teams or cover one man free teams? Or are they a big cloud team?”

Delegating Work Flow:

The process of preparing against potential opponents starts in the spring for Coach Longo. When spring ball ends, he’ll start organizing his thoughts to prepare against next fall’s opponents. The process gets culminated after the summer when he’ll have the base of his game plan thoughts together. By the time fall camp rolls around, he’ll have a “good feel” of how they may attack each opponent. We will elaborate upon the process he uses, the same one he used while as a high school coach in New Jersey. Sure, the process has changed somewhat as an FBS level offensive coordinator. “The biggest difference from each level is resources,” he said. “As you move up they spend more money on those staffs. I can focus on watching the film and getting to know the opponent which in my opinion is the most important thing I can do. I’m not distracted by the other things because my (former) graduate assistant (now offensive analyst) Josh Snow does a great job handling those duties.” Now he doesn’t make the cutups he uses during meetings. He leaves that to Coach Snow. “He emails me a script template. I write it and send it back to him. The majority of the time now I spend recruiting and coordinating the offense.”

By Mike Kuchar
Senior Research Manager/Co-Founder
X&O Labs
Twitter: @MikekKuchar

Coach Longo is a constant observer of people. He’s quick to notice one’s posture, one’s gait, vocabulary, and even habits. He’ll remember things you brought up in conversation several years prior. He’s done so with me. It’s something you rarely realize he’s doing. These same traits make him a successful offensive coordinator because he takes these habits with him on the sideline. While some coaches prefer watching the ball after they make their call, Coach Longo spends his time watching you, the defense react to it. To him, it is how defenders react that’s what important. He self-admittedly will continue to stretch corners on vertical routes just to set up throws underneath them. And that is just one particular example. He’ll do the same for almost every other position on the field.

In this course, we are going to present our research on how Coach Longo and his staff spend time dissecting the behavior patterns of defensive personnel to design game plans to exploit them. As noted in the previous course, attacking the scheme is already built into the offense. His players already know how to beat certain coverages. It’s how to beat human nature that Coach Longo spends the majority of his game plan. 

A Seasonal Plan to Manipulate the Human Element:

Just as in the previous course of this report, Coach Longo begins this process directly after spring ball which has just concluded in Durham. The staff will work through the entire personnel of upcoming opponents. Once coach will study the secondary structure and diagram the defense while another coach will be asked to break down the returning personnel. He’ll watch every game from the previous season in doing so, particularly studying the returners. “We will study these defenders all summer to see what they cover well and what they don’t,” he said. “That’s why we like to go through the entire season because we can pick up on the human tendency. It’s hard to hide these habits during the full length of a season.”

This is something that Coach Longo prides himself on. It’s a cathartic task he gets completely wrapped up in. Similar to a scientist dissecting elements in a Petri dish, Coach Longo combs through each game to examine cracks in behavior patterns of defenders. “You can coach against four teams in a row that all play cover two but all four corners may play it differently,” he said. “The playbook says you should be able to beat cover two with a corner route but you may not be able to complete a corner route against a corner that plays it a certain way. The right corner may be coached by the same defensive back coach but because one of them is longer, rangier and faster he is going to play it differently than this guy. We’re going to look at him and say he can’t cover the corner route. We know what their strengths and weaknesses are. We are going to attack the people, not the scheme every week.”

We felt it important to reference the fact that this process has been expedited with the use of Pro Football Focus which is a tool that analyzes every player and every play of every game to deliver player grades, stats, and rankings for the NFL, fantasy football, and NFL Draft. Using this service, Coach Longo is able to simply pull up an individual defender and watch every clip he was involved in the previous season. “I used to tell my GA’s to make cutups of the two corners and the two safeties so every play we can watch them,” he said. “Now we have plays broken down into targets. All I’m doing is studying one particular player. When you watch just one player, you can find a particular mismatch against one of our players.”

Common Principles When Exploiting Personnel:

This information gets translated into some general thought processes on how to manipulate specific defensive personnel. While we detail how this correlates to specific game planning, we wanted to provide a brief overview of how Coach Longo conceptualizes position groups in his game planning. There are some common mantra’s he will use below in his early preparation.

“Run at the Speeds; Not at the Bigs”

Among all position groupings, Coach Longo will spend the least amount of time watching the defensive line. But it’s not because they aren’t important. The offensive line coach will do that during game week. He will direct his attention specifically to defensive ends because, in his opinion, they can more quickly affect games. He will work to find out if there is a discrepancy between the two either in size or ability and design his run game around that facet. “We want to run at speed defensive ends,” he said. “We want to generate force at him so he can generate force back at me. We want him to continually take on a tight end on a drive block to wear him down. We’ll take the big heavy defensive end who doesn’t run as well and cut him off on the backside.  We don’t want to run power against a big physical kid. If teams play left and right, I’m going at the speed kid and not the size. If it’s a team that puts the speed to the weak side, we will run to the weak side.  If it’s a formation defense, we figure out when they are going to put the speed to the trips and we’re going to run it there. You find out what they do because they can’t do everything.”

The same principles apply to interior defenders who can be issues in gap schemes, Coach Longo will make decisions on which kinds of blocks to use against them. “If we have a big heavy 3-technique we will block back on him because even a stalemate is a win,” he said. “We’ll try to get a double team on that little fast kid and move him out of there.”

By Mike Kuchar
Senior Research Manager/Co-Founder
X&O Labs
Twitter: @MikekKuchar

Once the game planning design is in or the “hay is in the barn” the next phase of the 95% method is executing the game plan. Here, all of Coach Longo’s previous planning comes to fruition. He’s asked to make real-time decisions on which concepts to call and adjust to any changes in defensive structure or personnel. We were given full access this past season into Coach Longo’s game day operations procedure. We shadowed him as he prepared for an SEC opponent while at the University of Mississippi.

In this course, we present our research on the pre-game and game day activities he takes part in during the game week.

Pre-Game Operations

“Calling the Game” Simulation:

We found this activity to be instrumental for the in-game call procedure Coach Longo uses with his staff. It’s a 30-minute session once a week where he and his graduate assistant (now offensive analyst) Josh Snow will sit down and simulate calling the game in real time. Coach Longo will present cutups of how the next opponent defended particular formations during the course of the season. He’ll use his playlist and call a play concept while Coach Snow follows the protocol he uses during game day such as verbalizing the coverage and where the quarterback should go with the ball. It’s real-time dialogue, without a pause button, that gets fined tuned so there is no wasted verbiage on game day.

“I like to have my graduate assistant in here with me so he gets a feel of how I will call a game,” said Coach Longo. “The more we do that the more he sees things the way I do. I need him to do that so he can give feedback to me thinking about the game, the plan or the play calls the way in which I think about it. You have to know why I’m calling the game. You have to have a complete understanding of the offense to be a great spotter.”

According to Coach Snow, the process is immeasurable in helping him harmonize with Coach Longo on game day. “I get the reps just like the quarterback is getting the reps during the course of the week,” he said. “That’s really important to me. I hear all of Coach Longo’s coaching points. And the more times I can see the game at game speed the more it helps me in the booth.”

Applying the Read Sheet:

What Coach Snow is specifically looking at during these sessions is what Coach Longo calls the “read sheet.” It’s a play sheet that lists each play concept Coach Longo plans on using that week and next that concept is the most influential defender that can affect that play. It is Coach Snow’s responsibility in the booth to monitor that defender as the play unfolds.

While we can’t produce the actual read sheet for this report, we did notice the following:

• In zone schemes, the read defender will be the C gap defender
• In gap schemes, the read defender will be the backside linebacker.
• In bubble screens, the read defender might be the play side alley defender.
• In most dropbacks, the read defender might be the backside safety.

Once these defenders are identified, Coach Snow will monitor their post-snap actions. One example on the levels concept would be which route the Mike linebacker took. Or in the Shallow route, the defender that squeezed the dig would be the read defender.

Although Coach Snow has graduated from the read sheet- he’s been with Coach Longo for over five years- he says it’s helped train his eyes to interpret and discern information quickly. “It was awesome for me because it helped me learn the offense,” he said. “That is the easy way to understand how to help him.” While every concept has a read defender, sometimes those defenders will change on a weekly basis based on how a defense is deciding to take away particular schemes.

Coach Longo did make a point to say that those determinations are not always made after one rep of him doing it. It’s a pattern of behavior. “The defensive coordinator might be in a coverage where that safety needs to come downhill right now on one play,” said Coach Longo. “He may track harder in cover four than he would in cover two. We have answers for that.”

Coach Snow is also responsible for running the scout team defense where he will make the defensive scout sheet to fully immerse himself with the opponent’s defensive structure and personnel. “Many times, when we are devising personnel match-ups, I will put our match-up advantages in different color jerseys in practice so that we know who to exploit,” said Coach Snow.

Game Day Operations

The Walk-Through:

Even for home games, the University of Mississippi football team travels to stay in a hotel more than 45 minutes away from Oxford. It is at this location where the club will have its pre-game walk-through nearly three hours before game time. In the parking lot of the hotel, Coach Longo and his offensive staff recount every possible scenario that may present itself during the game. It’s a thorough, 30-minute session where Coach Longo will rattle off his entire play menu and signal in the tempo and formation in which these concepts planned to be used. The offense walks through their responsibilities in regimented fashion against a makeshift defense.

By Mike Kuchar
Senior Research Manager/Co-Founder
X&O Labs
Twitter: @MikekKuchar

Editor’s Note: In order to provide background context on how Coach Longo implements his projected 95% efficiency method in game planning, we felt it necessary to give a brief overview of his offensive system in this course.

If you’re looking for a more in-depth look at Coach Longo’s system, more research can be found here.

Efficiency: it’s the basis of Coach Longo’s offensive system. We will not use “simple,” even though simple does come with a positive connotation among football coaches. It’s efficient. We all want our systems to be simple for our players to absorb but the challenge becomes making the presentation complex to the defense. Over the last thirty plus years as an offensive coordinator at all levels of football, Coach Longo has found a way to balance those two priorities in producing a top ten offense nationally six times in his coaching career. This includes being in the top five the last four consecutive seasons at Sam Houston State (TX) and University of Mississippi respectively. Now as he prepares for his first season calling the shots at the University of North Carolina, he continues to hone his system around new personnel and new opponents.

It was this past season while he was in Oxford (MS) when we had an opportunity to mirror how this system is translated into his game week preparation and game day protocols. We started with the premise of shadowing an FBS offensive coordinator to explore the procedures he and his staff use during game week. What we initially found was that the process isn’t that much different than at your high school or mine. Sure, the resources are greater, but his process hasn’t changed much. And as we continued to dig deeper into his process, we found one common threat in our research: he is exceptional at trimming the fat in his game planning. He doesn’t carry a lot of formations or concepts. He only carries the great ones, or as he calls the 95 percenters into game day. This is the process behind how he crafts, selects and calls those plays on game day. It’s a procedure that has yielded one of the country’s most efficient offenses- finishing in the top 10 nationally in yards per play the last two seasons.

Model of Efficiency:

After studying Coach Longo’s system twice, it’s clear that his success has a good deal in part with the “simplicity” of his system. Coaches all talk about cutting things down, but Coach Longo and his staff strive to abide by it. A streamlined system makes things easier to operate on game day. The fewer things you do on offense, the quicker it is to make corrections. “A defense can only do a certain number of things and we would like to think we have a good feel for anticipating what those things are,” he told us.  The top game day coaches know how to adjust in real time and what smoother way to make these adjustments than to have the answers before they are presented on the field?

Coach Longo’s system has some of these answers. They are developed through a process that is repeated over and over again each game week. As he told us, the offense stays 80% the same regardless of the week it’s just the opponent that changes. Sure, he may add a couple of weekly tweaks but the philosophy remains steadfast: take space where you can get it. This means there are really no “call it and run it” scenarios in this offense. The quarterback is given choices and is expected to make those choices based on where space presents itself.

This space is generated in two distinct ways: defensive structure and defensive personnel. Coach Longo spends more time understanding common principles of defenses than focusing on who the defensive coordinator is. Coach Longo attacks defenses by classifications, such as cover four match teams, cover one team or pressure teams, etc. which is revealed more in Course 2.  How the defender’s individual personality reacts to the concepts he presents is even of greater interest to him.  As he told us, “a cover two corner may play cover two an entirely separate way than the corner on the other side of the field. How he reacts to things dictate my play calls.” 

50/50 Balance is Not a Priority:

His approach differs from other coordinators who try to stress having run/pass balance. Yes, he is an Air Raid coach by nature, but it’s more important to take what defenses give him. He’d rather throw an eight-yard bubble route than pound the ball into loaded boxes. On game day, he doesn’t calculate touches for his top players- even though he’s had a receiver in the top ten nationally in receptions the last two seasons. The system is about building in options within the play call that are best for that particular situation. “We want to give the ball wherever you’re going to give up space,” he told us. And that alone produces ball distribution. “Even if the number four receiver is not as good as the number three receiver, he can still catch the ball and hurt the defense. When you distribute the ball to all the players, the defense needs to defend all the players. And when a defense overplays one from a human nature standpoint or scheme, you are giving up grass somewhere else and all those guys are taught to attack the open grass.”

In this course, we wanted to present a general overview of Coach Longo’s offense. We thought it was important to understand how the system is built in order to understand how he game plans or makes his adjustments on game day. His offense can be categorized into the following:

• 3 base formations
• 3 motions
• 5 formation tags
• 5 backfield sets

By Mike Kuchar
Senior Research Manager/Co-Founder
X&O Labs
Twitter: @MikekKuchar

After working with Coach Longo on this project, I felt compelled to provide a translation for high school coaches on how to take some of these same principles and gear them to their own game planning method. As an offensive coordinator myself, it opened up my eyes to new ways of game planning. I thought back to this season, how many times I called might have called a bad play, particularly in big spots. It still haunts me six months later.

So, my plan was to take the same model that Coach Longo used and apply it to the high school coach. Many of us don’t have the same resources he does, like the use of two graduate assistants and Pro Football Focus, but I found there are ways to adapt some of these principles for game planning around our systems. There is an extensive amount of information in the previous courses of this study so I segmented our research into seven key tenets that can be adapted into any game planning process.

In order to gauge how coaches were conducting game planning, we conducted some pre-research by sending out a survey to all of the offensive coordinators in our network. Over 500 coaches responded and the results were what we figured – coaches are spending too much time changing their systems from one week to the next in preparing for their opponents.

Tenet 1—Less is Always More: Streamline Your Play Menu

We found that 60% of coaches still choose to carry over 20 or more concepts into their offensive game week preparations. Consider this: according to HUDL, the average number of high school offensive plays per game is 72. This means that each play can barely be run four times during the course of a game if you’re going to use all of the concepts on your play menu that week. If the argument is in most cases offensive coordinators will not use all of the plays in the menu, our simple rebuttal would be: then why include them in the menu?

Sounds simple enough, right? But this may be a struggle for some offensive coordinators like myself. We love everything. We see it, we take it, we implement it and off we go. I get it and so does Coach Longo. But Coach Longo is hell-bent on having no more than twenty concepts in his playlist that week and self-admits using “repeaters” between 8-10 times a game. As coaches we all know that the less you do, the better you get at it. Yet, it’s a constant struggle to keep your play menu limited.

How many times have you seen the quarterback get to the line of scrimmage only to realize that you’re in the wrong play call? While I realize that many coaches are giving their QB’s “outs” by building relief throws into concepts, the difference with Coach Longo’s system is that he builds universal concepts into his play call. He has concepts that can be effective against any coverage. We all can do this by breaking down our game planning by packaging concepts based in thirds: the right perimeter, run box and left the perimeter.

Tenet 2—What Is Your 95%? Defining Efficiency

61% of coaches still use yardage to define a play’s efficiency. But there are so many factors… down and distance, field position, etc. that go into why a play was efficient and why it may not be efficient. As Coach Longo told us, to tag an arbitrary number (based on an average of total plays and yards gained) doesn’t correctly measure whether a play was efficient for those particular circumstances. Yet why are so many coaches still relying on yards gained to determine if a play was effective or not?

Coach Longo talked in great length about designing his game plan around concepts that have a projected 95% efficiency rating. But how do you measure efficiency? For years, I’ve heard coaches use four yards per play as the gold standard for a play’s efficiency. Do the math and it’s a simple solution to gain first downs. Yet, according to HUDL’s 2019 performance report, the average yards per play gains 6.01 yards nationally. So, what measures efficiency in your program? While Coach Longo adheres to the four yards per play declaration in the run game, pass game efficiency is completely reliant on the individual pass routes in the concept. A dig is 8 yards, a drop back vertical is 12 yards, etc. It’s all based on where the ball is being thrown.

While there are numerous factors that tie into efficiency- all of which we explain in the report- I think it’s important for coaches to generate an efficiency plan before the season for each of their play concepts. Not only does it provide for realistic expectations for players and coaches but can also serve as the basis for eliminating or keeping plays during the offseason review.