What's Been Sinking Kevin O'Connell's Run Game

On May 1st, 1915, nearly 2,000 people woke up in or traveled to New York City, possibly read that very headline, and boarded the Lusitania anyway. 

Captain William Turner (no, not that one) felt no hesitation about embarking toward Liverpool. In fact, he was so unconcerned he delayed departure for hours to give his niece a tour of the luxury liner. He ignored warnings from the British admiralty to sail in a zigzagging pattern, among other advice.

In fact, William Turner had likely been seeing warnings for some time. With the Great War raging for nearly a year, these threats had been nearly constant. Months earlier, Berlin had declared the waters around the British Isles and the northern coast of France a war zone. German forces regularly sunk or captured merchant ships in the contested waters.

Captain Turner was a decorated commander. He heroically saved lives on multiple occasions and had plenty of experience with Trans-Atlantic voyages. His confidence was well-earned. But it would be his undoing.

On May 7th, Turner looked out to see a telltale wake heading toward his vessel. It was too late to do anything but contemplate his error. As the Lusitania sank in the Irish Sea, Turner resolved to go down with his ship. Believing himself to be the last soul on board, he clung to a deck chair and awaited his fate.

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Hours later, a small steamer came by and plucked him out of the water. He was horrified to learn of the full death toll. He’d live another 18 years, racked with regret and survivor’s guilt.

In a sense, the German warnings were a case of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. There had been so many instances of violence in the waters, it became mundane, and the dangers were ignored. In modern times, we are certainly familiar with such a phenomenon. 

In a twist of macabre irony, Captain Turner’s son Percy perished at sea in the next World War. He served on a merchant escort ship called the Jedmoor. The Jedmoor was part of a convoy of merchant ships 

Their convoy veered north in response to intelligence about German U-boats, but that steered them right into a storm. The storm pinned them in place, the U-Boats caught up, and sank the Jedmoor.

There’s a lesson in the duality of these two stories that we can apply to football. When presented with a threat, it is unwise to ignore it. But your response to that threat can bring you into just as much trouble if it’s not well thought out. 

In football, pre-snap motion is reaching new heights of popularity. Nearly two-thirds of all plays feature some kind of pre-snap motion or shift. The Vikings, in particular, have their own style and use of pre-snap motion, but that could be changing. So what is it, what might it become, and is that a good idea? 

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When Mike Pettine retired as Kevin O’Connell’s Assistant Head Coach, he filled the role with Frank Smith, picking him out of the rubble of the Miami Dolphins. 

Smith served as Run Game Coordinator for Mike McDaniel’s offense, which led the league in motion usage for the vast majority of his time there. They led the league with 59% in 2023, and last year, they ranked just behind Buffalo.

What if Kevin O’Connell brought in Frank Smith to vault the Vikings to the cutting edge of pre-snap motion usage? 

To get an understanding of what that might mean, I charted a few select Vikings games and their usage of motion. I separated their motions into buckets based loosely on the Miami Dolphins’ system, and we’ll dive into their motion usage in another part. First, let’s define the Vikings’ motion usage and identify what problems O’Connell could seek to solve.

Below are screenshots of relevant motion ideas from an earlier Mike McDaniel Dolphins playbook, along with clips of the Vikings using them. Sometimes, I use words that are different from Miami’s, so I cropped out the verbiage to avoid confusion.

First off, there is a difference between pre-snap motion and motion at the snap. As the word “pre-snap” implies, these are movements from the offense that stop before the ball is snapped. Plays with motion at the snap, as one might imagine, are those where the movement from the offense continues through the snap. Pre-snap (I’ll call them shifts) can gather information, but gives the defense a chance to respond and the offense time to settle. Motion at the snap (I’ll call them motions) is more difficult to time and keep straight, but stresses the defense much more.

These buckets are very unofficial, but should help us pare down an already highly complicated system. Make no mistake, this piece will misidentify some motions — we’ll just have to embrace the occasional oversimplification in hopes that this shit makes a lick of sense.

The most common motion the Vikings use is Jet motion. It’s what it sounds like — a fake jet sweep. That playbook had a complex system of airline names across many variations, but for our purposes, we can call it all Jet.

Next most common is what I’ll call Escort motion. This is not the term for it that I see in any playbooks I have access to (you might know it as Sift), but it seems to be the word in the national lexicon, so we’ll go with it. It’s a cross-formation motion with a tight end — usually to block the defensive end.

Any motion from the tight end that crosses the formation will go into this bucket. Because most defenses declare the rushing strength by the alignment of the tight end, moving him across the formation in any context stresses their communication.

To play off these ideas, the Vikings occasionally call Counter motion. A player, usually a tight end but sometimes a receiver, motions halfway across the formation then quickly cuts back. 

Orbit is a rare but dramatic motion where a player goes across the formation behind the quarterback and running back, rather than in front. Again, I’m boiling down many variations into a single category to keep things manageable.

Hal and Hay are two words I’ll use for running back motions. These can also be defined as shifts, if the player gets set before the snap. 

There are tons of variants with a whole naming system for in vs. out, left vs. right, and which player is motioning. We won’t need that much detail for this project, so I’ll use Hal as an umbrella term for any motion where someone leaves the backfield, and Hay as an umbrella term for motions where someone enters the backfield. 

If a running back or fullback motions within the backfield, like shuffling in or out of an I-formation, I’ll call that Jazz. Again, Jazz refers to a specific motion, but I’ll group all similar motions into the bucket of Jazz.

Similarly, I’m boiling a ton of different wide receiver motions into a bucket I’ll call Short motion, which encompasses any motion where a player splits out wide, then motions closer to the formation. There can also be Short shifts. 

This is not to be confused with Insert motions or shifts, which bring a receiver or tight end into the “core” of the offense. Insert puts players right on the line of scrimmage, usually into a “sniffer” alignment. This is distinct from Hay, which places players in the backfield.

The Dolphins had their Cheat motion in the national spotlight in 2023, where a receiver motions farther outside at the snap. I’m taking all the other motions that widen a receiver and putting them in the Cheat bucket.

Many of these motions can be shifts as well as motions, but there are a couple of instances where I charted the shifts separately. If the receiver shifts across the formation, I labeled that Zoo (the Z is for receiver).

As you can see at the end of this clip, shifts like this can elicit a reaction that gives the quarterback information about the defensive play call. Carson Wentz alerts the play to something else, and hopefully we’ve generated an advantage.

If the tight end crosses the formation during a shift, I label it Fly. 

Once, on a short-yardage play, Carson Wentz shifted from shotgun to under center to feign a QB sneak. I labeled it Sneak, and it didn’t work.

For this project, I charted four games from the 2025 season: Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Washington. I wanted to investigate the season-long narrative about Kevin O’Connell simplifying the offense for various reasons. 

Did Carson Wentz get a different version of the offense? Did Kevin O’Connell dumb things down later in the season, when J.J. McCarthy started playing better? 

To the extent that motion charting can answer these questions, the answer is no. All four games fluctuated between the types of motions and shifts used, but not the frequency.

Below, our email subscribers will see a static image. Check out the published version on our website for an interactive applet! The applet allows users to exclude plays without any motion, view plays with just shift, just motion and total motion/shift vs. non-motion/shift rates.

In fact, the game following O’Connell’s famous choice to stop working on McCarthy’s mechanics used more motion than any of the others I charted. That doesn’t encompass all the ways a gameplan can be made easier for a struggling quarterback, but we can at least say that pre-snap complexity wasn’t the focus.