This game featured a bevy of missed kicks and drama and Davante Adams going supernova, but we're not here to talk about any of that. No, today - like all days - we're looking at some passing concepts from this past weekend. We'll be rolling through 7 plays, including the 16 yard pass to Randall Cobb to set up the merciful game-winning field goal. Let's get to it.

Play 1: 1st & 10, 1:15 remaining in the 1st quarter

We're kicking things off by visiting an old friend of ours: Slant/Flat. If it helps you make peace with the concept, you can refer to it as Dragon. If you can't find yourself excited about something called Dragon, congrats: you're already dead.

Dragon is an old West Coast staple. In Green Bay, we saw more than our fair share of it in the Mike McCarthy era. And that would have been fine, if he didn't insist on always forcing Richard Rodgers to run the flat route. (Richard Rodgers is a perfectly fine player but if you want someone to catch a ball in the flat and turn upfield to gain yardage, he's not your man.) It can be an incredibly useful concept against man or zone coverage. By my count, the Packers ran Dragon 5 times this past weekend, making it tied for their most heavily used passing concept of the week (the other being PA Boot). And it did well. On the concept, Aaron Rodgers [12] was 4/5 for 37 yards (7.4 YPA) and a touchdown.

Davante Adams [17] is on the outside running a slant, with AJ Dillon [28] on the flat route from the backfield. Marcedes Lewis [89] is running a sit route in the middle of the field. Bengals bring a defender up before the snap, aligning outside of Dillon. At the snap, Dillon flares to the flat while Lewis runs to the middle and sits. The Bengals are in man coverage, meaning Adams is man-to-man on the outside against his defender. Rodgers reads it, waits for the flat defender to clear the window and fires a strike to Adams on the slant.

Adams is able to bend up the field and over the underneath coverage to find more room to run and picks up 17 yards. Nice and clean.

Play 2: 2nd & 10, 12:00 remaining in the 2nd quarter

We're going to leapfrog a play to get to another instance of Dragon; this one down in the once-cozy confines of the Gold Zone. The Packers ruled this land last season, scoring touchdowns on a league high 76.8% of their trips. This season? Not so much. They're scoring touchdowns on 55% of their trips, 27th in the league. There they are, sandwiched between the Titans and the Jets in red zone TD scoring percentage. It would be nice to see that tick back up, but red zone scoring can be fickle from year to year. I have faith that they'll increase their scoring %, but they had another rough outing against the Bengals. 

But on this play? They were heroes, just for one play. (I'm very sorry.) 

Same thing as the previous play, but the names have changed. Allen Lazard [13] is running a slant from the outside while Robert Tonyan [85] is running a sit route from his in-line position. Dillon is still the man running the flat from the backfield.

There appears to be a miscommunication somewhere, as the slot defender breaks inside and no one breaks outside. The slant/sit are covered up, but the flat? Wide open, buddy.

Rodgers gets the ball out to Dillon on the edge, who tiptoes the sideline for the first receiving touchdown of his career. Rumble, young man. Rumble.

Play 3: 3rd & 12, 14:18 remining in the 2nd quarter

Bengals are in a pinched two-high look, showing a Quarters shell. The Packers counter with a Scissors concept paired with a deep crosser, which can be a nice way to attack this coverage. The two outside receivers push vertically up the field, then split 15-20 yards down the field, typically with a post/corner combination (though the Packers go with a dig from the outside in this case). The inside man to the trips side pushes vertically to the middle of the field, making sure to run across the face of the deep defenders pinched in the middle. 

Let's take a step back. What are they doing with all of this? The post/corner combination puts the boundary defender in a bind, because there are two men pushing directly at him. He splits the difference, but he can't stay with both once they split, so he needs help to pick them up. The deep route to the middle occupies another deep safety. The late split on the post/corner makes it hard for a safety to drive on the in-cutting route, and the deep route to the middle makes it impossible for the other safety to drive on it without getting beat deep.

Any time you're working with concepts to stress the rules of a defense, the defense needs good communication to pass it all off. If they don't do it well, you can get a wide open man. Which is what happens here.

Adams and Lazard push vertically from the boundary, while Randall Cobb [18] runs the vertical route. Once Adams gets to 15 yards of depth, the boundary defender passes off the routes to another safety and a deep-dropping cornerback who started at the line. Both defenders follow Lazard on the post, leaving Adams open in the middle. 

With Tonyan and Dillon releasing to the flat, the shallow/mid defenders are pulled out of the middle, leaving a nice, clean lane for Rodgers to hit Adams in the middle of the field.

Adams plucks the ball out of the air and picks up 34 yards. 

Play 4: 1st & 10, 9:44 remaining in the 2nd quarter

So many of these concepts have movement/releases that can allow me to put them into several buckets, depending on what I'm seeing at any given moment. My first feeling on this play was that it was an All Go offshoot, with the running back releasing through the line instead of up the seam. After all, the two routes on the outside have that diverging feeling; as if they're splitting at an angle in order to open the seam. Yes. Yes it is All Go.

But no. Usually on All Go, the outside receiver continues vertically up the sideline. He's running a dig here, following the action of the slot route. No, this isn't All Go. It's Dagger. I'm certain of it.

But no. No, that's not Dagger. Not really. That slot route bends too deep and across the face of the rotating, single-high safety. That's not Dagger. How could I be so blind?! The vertical route on the other side. The deep crossing route with a dig behind it. The running back releasing under the vertical route. It might as well have smacked me in the face. That's Y Cross. As I live and breathe, that's Y Cross.

My main point here - besides rambling for no apparenty reason - is that a lot of concepts can look like other concepts. Pieces are adopted and molded to attack the defenses in different ways. Concepts don't always fit nicely into one specific, unique box. Finding the true core concept can sometimes be tricky, but there's another important point to remember: not a lot of people care.

Y Cross is an old Air Raid concept (with roots in BYU's West Coast system), run to perfection by the mad genius combination of Hal Mumme and Mike Leach. As you can see in the above image, the crosser can alter his route in a number of different ways depending on the defensive look. But the above image doesn't quite do this justice. In the creation of Y Cross, the only route that was the same every single time was the flat route from F. Everyone else? In true Air Raid fashion, every other receiver had a number of options on their routes, depending on defensive leverage, movement, etc. "Read Grass," they say. It could really look something more out of Tiger Ellison's spread offense than anything.

Tiger Ellison was a lunatic. pic.twitter.com/qyL3ZD9Pqo

— Dusty, but Spookier (@DustyEvely) March 29, 2021

We're way off track here, man. Let's get back to it. As drawn up - at its most basic - Y Cross has a vertical route to one side, a deep crossing route from the opposite slot, a dig behind the crosser and some flat releases. That's it. You can't get me running down the Tiger Ellison rabbit hole. No sir.

The Packers run this using motion we've seen a lot of: a WR screen look to Davante Adams on the right. The idea is that it's a release the Packers do a lot of, so they're trying to trigger the defense to crash it then run past it. The Bengals play it well here, so those routes don't immediately spring open.

The crosser runs across the face of the rotating single-high safety, taking an underneath linebacker with it. The dig works in behind it, but the second level of the defense is dropping deep; the linebacker who had just carried the crossing route falls under the dig.

You are lost. Hope is gone. But you must go on. And do the next right thing.

What is the next right thing? With the defense dropping under the deep routes, that's means there's room underneath. So Rodgers dumps it to Dillon.

Dillon catches the ball and finds a single linebacker convering on his location. Dillon angles to the middle of the field and finds wide open fields.

By the time Dillon is taken down, the Packers have picked up 13 yards.

Play 5: 3rd & 6, 4:42 remaining in the 2nd quarter

Now we'll look at a play that looks very close to Y Cross, but it seems to fit more the mold of Middle Read Dagger to me. Sometimes the difference of those concepts is six of one, half dozen of the other, but we're here all the same. The main difference between them is how the slot route attacks. Against two-high coverage, the route will bend on a post route to split the safeties. Against single-high, it will round off and hit a bit more shallow; more of a dig than a post. The idea is to make the deep coverage wrong. The route from the outside is a dig, following the slot receiver and hoping to find a cleared-out middle of the field.

The Bengals show single-high before the snap, with the only difference post-snap being who is playing the single-high safety. The shallow defender drops off to pick up Cobb on the flat while the deep boundary defender picks up Adams on the vertical pushing route. Because that defender is fading back, he's not in a position to drive on the cut from Adams.

The route from Lazard drags a defender away from the middle while pushing the safety back, leaving a nice space in the middle of the field for Adams.

Rodgers hits Adams for 15 yards.

Play 6: 2nd & 10, 4:10 remaining in overtime

We saw an Amari Rodgers jet wheel last week, and this week we're getting an Allen Lazard jet wheel. What a time to be alive. I mentioned this last week, but, if he doesn't get the ball on the hand-off/pitch, the jet motion man will typically just kind of hang out in the flat after completing the motion, working as a late checkdown and basking in the knowledge of a job well done. It seems like they're starting to put an emphasis on bending that route up the sideline in an attempt to catch the defense flat-footed.

The release of the wheel and the vertical route from Tonyan looks like the All Go release (but, once again, without the RB seam route portion). The defense reacts, backing up and protecting against the deep shot. With all that space opened, the Packers instead run a TE screen to Marcedes Lewis [89], who releases after selling an initial block.

Lewis releases with plenty of space, jukes a grown man into the grave, then finishes strong on the sideline for a gain of 20.

And the Packers sideline erupts.

Tail end of this TE screen. Absolutely love watching the sideline converge on Marcedes Lewis. That entire team loves him. pic.twitter.com/PhtMYqEmBo

— Dusty, but Spookier (@DustyEvely) October 12, 2021

Play 7: 3rd & 16, 2:09 remaining in overtime

That Lewis play put the Packers on the Bengals 41 yard line. With time winding down, the Packers needed a few more yards to feel even decently okay with a field goal attempt. In their next 2 plays they lost 6 yards. They now sat at the Bengals 47 yard line facing 3rd & 16. They needed as many yards as possible, so what did they dial up? Give me Dagger, with Adams on the opposite side of the field.

The Bengals are showing two-high safeties pre-snap, but they spin to single-high at the snap, with one safety dropping down to double-team Adams. That clears the left boundary.

Allen Lazard runs a deep crosser from the right slot, taking him across the face of the single-high safety. The vertical push causes the safety to flip, and Lazard carries a defender with him. That clears the middle

Cobb runs a dig route behind the route of Lazard. Cobb gets inside position on his man off the line and creates additional space on the cut. With the shallow flat routes drawing defenders out of the middle, there's a nice lane for Rodgers to throw.

A defender peels off Adams and converges on Cobb, but he can't quite get there in time.

Trey Hendrickson gets pressure on Rodgers and hits his arm on the follow-through, but it's not enough. It's never. Never. Never enough.

Absolutely no margin for error on this sucker. pic.twitter.com/WHzHxWPOTr

— Dusty, but Spookier (@DustyEvely) October 12, 2021

Cobb comes up 1 yard short of the sticks, but it sets up Mason Crosby for a 49 yard game winner. Which he nails. 3rd time is a charm, right?

Albums listened to: Tool - Lateralus; The Beatles - Revolver; Pixies - Bossanova; Phosphorescent - Muchacho; Escondido - The Ghost of Escondido; Chevelle - Wonder What's Next ; Nada Surf - The Weight Is a Gift; Joseph Bishara - Malignant Soundtrack; John Carpenter - Halloween Soundtrack (2018); Goblin - Suspira Soundtrack