Browns Film Breakdown Morning Newsletter: 10/31/2024

In honor of Halloween we visit the world of deception through play-call sequencing.

(Photo - Cleveland Browns)

Happy Thursday, and more importantly, Happy Halloween! I don’t know how you feel about the holiday but I am not the biggest fan. In my power rankings of holidays throughout the calendar year, Halloween ranks near the bottom. It’s snuggled somewhere in front of Easter but firmly behind Independence Day. I haven’t really worked up anything official, but there’s no doubt I don’t dig the end of October. Not a fan of the horror genre, being scared, spiders, haunted…anything, or costumes. I know, I suck. But I have learned to like it for my kids. They really enjoy the spirit of the holiday so I have learned to embrace it. They will venture around the neighborhood as Optimus Prime and Bumblebee from Transformers One. I hope you and yours enjoy the evening as well.

Due to the holiday being in the middle of the week we didn’t get a chance to see many elite costumes across the NFL. Perhaps today we do but for the arrival of games last week the NFL’s best, and really only highlight, was Myles Garrett taking it up a notch as he’s known to do for the holiday. His Terminator look was about as planned and processed as any costume you will see throughout the holiday and it was Arnold approved.

Outside of Myles here was the best the NFL had to offer in case you missed it last weekend.

When picking a topic of study for today’s write up I thought about Halloween and its desire to deceive. You dress up as something other than yourself, try to make people think a place or person is safe, and then you’re deceived into fear. Well, in weird way offenses are trying to do the same thing to defenses and this is a good way to get into the world of play-call sequencing. How can you make the defense think one thing is coming, only to hit them with something entirely different and scare the hell out of them. Now, this is the stuff I love and is well worth our time. Deception is what we make the focus of today’s Halloween Newsletter.

Reminder on what we’re doing with these Newsletters each morning:

We will aim to do with this Morning Newsletter — give you something new to know. This Newsletter won’t be over-saturated with links to click on or anything useless but rather something small, concise, and meaningful that has to do with the Browns each morning. Topics will vary but normally it’ll be something I watched on film review, or something I noticed about the next opponent, or a college player I think you should know ahead of the off-season. Just a piece of information I think is worth your time and definitely won’t waste your time. That is what you can expect. And with a nice and direct link to your daily podcast as well.

So, let’s roll.

The Browns wanted to amplify their under-center play-action game with Jameis Winston and I found this layered concept to be effective all day. From 12-personnel (2 WRs, 2 TEs, 1RB) the Browns wanted to sell run game with a quick backfield only sell. The quarterback turns his back to the defense and flashes the ball, and the running back carries out his fake. The offensive line gets into their pass set quickly so it isn’t true run-action (everyone selling run) but the backfield look is enough. Here’s the playbook version of the concept.

The goal of the double curl concept is to get Cover-3, something that is usually an early-down tendency, and put stress of the curl/flat defenders. If they expand with the tight ends laterally then you can throw the curl to either side. If they sink with depth then simply drop it off to your tight end releasing to the flat. The Browns found both options in the two clips below.