Executing the Spin-Dig

And a Look Back at Matthew Stafford's "No-Look" Pass in Super Bowl LVI

We’ve written before about how Sean McVay does a great job of finding ways to run the same route concepts out of different looks. This allows the offense to keep going back to the same plays they are great at executing regardless of the defense. Players being comfortable with a route concept and having an innate feel for it are critical to a given playcall’s execution, and that will certainly be a factor in this breakdown.

In the Rams’ Super Bowl LVI win over the Bengals, the biggest play of the game (Matthew Stafford’s “no-look” pass on the game-winning TD drive) came on a concept they had already run successfully earlier in the game out of a different look. That concept is the “Hook-Dig,” or “Spin-Dig,” or “Option-6,” or “Bulls” route combination (there are several other names for it).

The concept is a simple 2-receiver route combination. One receiver runs a hook and another runs a wrap-in behind him. On this first example from Super Bowl LVI, a 3rd down in the 2nd quarter, the Rams aligned in a 3x1 bunch formation. The #3 and #1 receivers would run the Spin-Dig combo (the red routes below) with the extra receiver running an in-breaker: