CINCINNATI — Last week, a few days before his team’s 24-17 wildcard win over the Ravens, Bengals wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase stood by his locker and praised coach Zac Taylor for a game plan that moved him in different formations and resulted in nine catches for 84 yards and a touchdown.
“Zac did a good job that last game, moving me around and keeping me close to the RPOs,” Chase said. “That was pretty cool. It was one of the best game plans he’s ever had.”
It only took four days to drop a notch in the Chase rankings.
What Taylor, offensive coordinator Brian Callahan, quarterbacks coach Dan Pitcher and offensive line coach Frank Pollack concocted for Chase in Sunday’s 27-10 divisional round against the Bills was nothing new, but the frequency was.
And the results definitely were.
There were nine plays – including four of the first 12 – in which Chase spent time in the offensive backfield before the snap. Sometimes he would start there and move out. He stayed seated a couple of times. Most often, he would start in the slot and rocket into orbit behind quarterback Joe Burrow and the running back currently in the game, forcing the defense to make difficult adjustments that were usually flawed and occasionally fatal.
“Sometimes you change passing power with him in the backfield, then they have to make decisions about how to handle that,” Taylor said. “Sometimes it can prevent matchups. Sometimes it can mess you up.”
On Sunday at Highmark Stadium, the Bills were mostly a mess.
The Bengals gained 107 yards for an incredible 11.9 per game in those nine snaps that saw Chase take up backfield space.
Four of those were passes, with Burrow completing all four for 66 yards, including the 28-yard touchdown to Chase to cap the opening drive.
On the five run plays, Joe Mixon had three carries for 31 yards, Samaje Perine had one for seven, and Chase one for three.
“These are movement-shaping people,” said JT O’Sullivan, former Bengals quarterback and founder of the QB School, during his analysis of the feature film on the QB School’s YouTube channel.
“This is beautiful. This is art. World-class offensive construction,” O’Sullivan continued while deconstructing the formation that created a 16-yard run from Mixon, his longest of the day.
Let’s take a closer look at each of the nine pieces.
Play 1: First-and-10, Cincinnati 32, 1:45 remaining in first quarter (third play of game).
Chase moves from right to left in orbit, leaving no receivers on the right side of the formation. He sits on the 28 as a swing option in the flat and draws cover from Bill’s linebacker Tremaine Edmunds. But Burrow beats Tyler Boyd, who makes a switch release with Tee Higgins, for a 23-yard gain on a corner route and puts the Bengals in Buffalo territory.
Play 2: Second-and-3, Buffalo 28, 11:48 remaining in first quarter (sixth play of game).
Chase starts in the backfield and moves to the left slot.
The Bills play the zone and Chase and tight end Hayden Hurst sit in the zone with Hurst in the flat and Chase in the middle about 5 yards downfield. Burrow pockets himself as he feels pressure from the left edge, and two Buffalo defenders await a checkdown on Hurst. Chase turns and sprints to center court and is wide open when he catches the ball at the 9 before splitting the safeties to find the end zone for the first points of the game.
“It was a good little package,” Pitcher said.
Play 3: Second-and-5, Cincinnati 33, 9:24 remaining in first quarter (eighth game of the game).
Chase lines up in the left slot before orbiting behind Burrow and pulling nickel corner Taron Johnson into the box while the two linebackers slide left leaving the center defense open.
Right tackle Hakeem Adeniji pulls and obliterates Johnson, giving Mixon a huge gap to run through for a 16-yard gain.
“I’m not a defensive fanatic, but I can tell you I don’t want a tackle running on my nickel DB and trying to fill the B gap,” O’Sullivan said. “All this action says swing screen, swing screen, swing screen, so you’ve got the linebackers over there and you’re running the barrel, you’ve got this nickel with an NFL tackle wrapper for you.”
“If the defense is going to hold two safeties up, this nickel has a huge responsibility,” Pitcher said. “And Buffalo doesn’t really play base defense, so it doesn’t matter who you put on the field, that Nickel is out there and they’re asking a lot of him. This enabled us to open up a number of advantageous positions.”
It was one of five scheduled runs (there was also a 21-yard scramble by Burrow) to go for 10 yards or more on Sunday, and two of them came off the pack with Chase in the backfield.
Play 4: First-and-10, Buffalo 30, 6:48 remaining in first quarter (12th play of game).
Chase, the least productive play of the pack, runs behind Burrow and takes a deep pitch 7 yards from the line of scrimmage. He tries to wait for his blocks before flipping up, but the play stretches too long and only goes 3 yards.
It’s a reminder of why Taylor and the rest of the staff waited so long to lean more heavily on Chase’s use of the backfield after they started tinkering with it last season.
“The first time we played Baltimore, that didn’t put us in a great position,” Taylor said, referring to a second and twelfth game in Week 5 of that year that saw Chase and Mixon Burrow in shotgun formation with Chase flanked Take the surrender and get stretched wide by the penetration from the inside, resulting in no gain.
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The Bengals had two similar errors in the same series at the Jets two weeks earlier. On the first play of the drive, Chase stood in the slot and took a jet sweep for a 1-yard loss. On the 11th game, a fourth and 1 at the Jets ’19, Chase lined up in the left slot, orbited behind Burrow, took the field 7 yards past the line of scrimmage and failed to reach the marker, a yard for lose a turnover on downs.
But Taylor remained committed to the plan and continued to build on it.
“There’s a first part of the package that there’s reasons to do, and then there’s things that you need to wear to complement that,” Taylor said. “Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don’t. Whether we wear that every week or not, it’s more dependent on the scheme they’re going to present on defense whether that gives us an advantage or not. But the initial intent is always that we think we can emphasize them that way, and then you have to build on that and be ready for some adjustments that they might make. There’s a lot in there.”
Play 5: First-and-10, Cincinnati 25, 7:25 second quarter remaining.
It was the first game on the drive after a Buffalo touchdown that reduced the Cincinnati lead to 14-7. Chase and Perine flank Burrow with the shotgun.
Burrow changes the game and Chase goes into the right slot, Higgins slides further to the right and Perine flips to Burrow’s left.
Burrow looks for Chase over the middle, but he’s covered by Johnson, so he checks 4 yards down to Perine.
Play 6: Second-and-1, Buffalo 26, 4:02 second quarter remaining.
Chase and Perine again flank Burrow, who moves Chase to his left behind as the ball is caught.
Dig hands to Perine in the middle for another big chunk. Perine gets 5 or 6 yards before he’s even touched and ends up with a 7 win.
“It’s hard because if you’re trying to do any kind of doubling or something, now you have to add the element of, ‘Well, what happens when he lines up in the backfield? What are you doing?’” said Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, explaining the dilemma for his view of the plan. “And usually that’s going to really change the coverage because you don’t want to double down on a guy that’s in the backfield because these guys don’t generally go on deep routes. So now it’s all under it or giving them the ball and stuff like that. It just adds another layer to your preparation when you try to just say, “All right, we’re going to double it in this piece.” In general, you don’t talk about it when he’s also in the backcourt now.”
Play 7: Second-and-10, Buffalo 20, 3:22 second quarter remaining.
This is just two snaps to Perine’s 7-yard gain, and the Bengals are at it again.
Chase is in the left slot and is circling the formation. Johnson follows him.
Dig hands to Mixon, who will run into the area left by the slot corner to gain 6 points.
The Bengals move into the red zone and end up scoring a field goal from Evan McPherson to take a 17-7 lead at halftime.
Play 8: First-and-10, Cincinnati 38, 6:27 remaining in third quarter.
Chase starts in the right slot. He moves into the backfield, to Burrow’s left, while Trayveon Williams is on the right.
Buffalo does not change its facing.
Chase moves behind Burrow, who hits him 5 yards from the line of scrimmage for a screen, and he turns it into a 12-yard win.
“There are a few different flavors of the packages,” Taylor said. “Some games work, some don’t. He’s proven to us that he’s able to understand anywhere we want to put him and he can do it, whether it’s just catching the bubble and missing people and really out of nowhere a first to get down. This is the weapon we have with Ja’Marr. So you have to find ways to be creative and use it.”
Play 9: First-and-10, 50-yard line, 3:00 p.m. remaining fourth quarter.
Chase is in the left slot, circling Burrow. Johnson, the slot corner, calls.
Mixon again runs into the area cleared by Johnson for a 9-yard gain, a nine-game gain and 61 yards, and finishes with a field goal from McPherson that increases the lead to the final 27. 10
The crease will dwarf the Bengals near the 400-yard mark in their next series. They finished with 412, the second-highest total in franchise history behind the 439 they posted in the 2013 wildcard loss to the Chargers.
Chase ended up with five catches for 61 yards and a touchdown (along with a 10-yard touchdown that was canceled on replay), plus a whole lot more offense caused by all the movement and time in the backfield.
“Sometimes you go into a pack like that and maybe it gets called a few times, and sometimes it hits early and gets called more often,” Pitcher said. “I just think Zac is doing a really good job in the game, seeing how the defense is adjusting and using what’s working at the moment.”
And Sunday, everything worked. Burrow was accurate and distributed the ball to everyone. The line with three new starters held up. And the running game was both efficient and explosive. When that happens, the opposing defensive coordinator basically throws up their hands and doesn’t know what to do.
“Every time you hand the ball to all kinds of guys, and we have a lot of different guns, everyone feels like they’re a part of it,” Pitcher said. “We’re taking first down after first down after first down, there’s just a confidence and momentum building and you feel a sense of deflation and frustration from the defense. It’s a game played by people with emotions and there are definitely moments in the game where you can feel that in your opponent.”
(Photo: Bryan M. Bennett / Getty Images)