McVay largely uses the same personnel grouping, 3WR 1TE 1RB. And he still creates mismatches, all the time.
The NFL is about mismatches. It really is like a chess match. I'll never understand people that watch it for decades and still have no desire to learn the strategy, it's the best part.
To really play the game, you have to study tendencies, like the Vikings in the article. Once you can see what the tendencies are, if you want to succeed in the NFL in 2018, you have to attack the weaknesses in the tendencies. This is straight up personnel alignment, route design, using motion, whatever you can use to take advantage.
McVay also uses play action a lot. Which is another factor that comes into play in the NFL, hesitation. Anytime you can do anything to keep defenders off balance, you're at an advantage, this is a game of inches after all.
What makes this interesting nowadays, is lack of practice for NFL defenses and constantly changing personnel. This leads to more hesitation, more mistakes.
This is why these new offenses we're seeing tend to use a lot of motion, play action, west coast spread type principles. They have good coaches that are great at seeing tendencies and know how to exploit them. They also do just about everything they can to keep a defense off balance and force mistakes.
McVay runs less RPO but pretty sure they're near the top of the league in play action. Primarily same personnel every play. Other teams are running RPO stuff (not read option), and college kids are picking it up quick and its changing the game.
Some people don't like it, but it's not going anywhere. It's not some sort of "trick", as you can see in the article or really watching most of these attacks. The principles are sound, at the core defenses are simply getting outschemed. That route he noticed Barr on Woods was straight up football.
I think it's pretty revolutionary. Fun to watch.
