The Opening Drive 8/16: KC Concepcion Touchdown Scheme Should Excite You

These are the types of modern wrinkles the Browns offense has badly missed in recent memory and they have the perfect weapon to run them.

The Browns lost 34-10 in Chicago on Saturday, and by the fourth quarter the box score looked like man preseason games across the league as different teams have different priorities with their reps. But today we’re going to revisit one particular scheme that stood out to me and it came within a sequence worth rewinding as it gave Browns fans an actual tangible flash of what the future is going to look like for the offense. KC Concepcion is going to be good.

Concepcion opened the game with a 31-yard punt return that flipped field position for an early field goal. Two possessions later, he ran a rail route in the red zone on third down for one of his two catches on the scoring drive, then took the handoff on the very next snap. Three touches, three different roles — returner, route-runner, ball-carrier — inside of one half. Averaged 12.0 yards on those touches. Concepcion is such a pure football player that just getting him the ball in whatever variety is all that matters.

In the second quarter, the first-round rookie took a motion handoff on a fly sweep — essentially the type of sweep action this newsletter flagged as a solid part of his NFL fit back in the pre-draft profile — and turned 14 yards of horizontal width into six points, diving for the pylon and getting it confirmed on review. It was the Browns only touchdown of the day. However, lost in that outcome can be the scheme that achieved it. Let’s dig into that scheme, how it works, and why you should be excited about seeing it.

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(Matt Starkey / Cleveland Browns)

This website has been explicit about Todd Monken’s propensity to use quick-hitting concepts and his desire to get second level defenders to have split-second decisions. What he loves to do even more is toy with his food a bit. He loves those influence traps and read option concepts with players moving opposite the lineman in front of them. All of this is to say Monken loves to bake in deception as often as he can and this concept had just that.