Earlier this week I looked at a staple west coast offense concept that Washington Commanders fans can expect to see regularly under new offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, the Drive concept. Today, I thought I’d look at another concept Bieniemy is likely to bring over from Kansas City. The Sail concept is something that should be familiar to anyone that has read my work before. Sail was one of the go-to concepts for the Commanders’ previous offensive coordinator Scott Turner and is another concept that is used regularly throughout the league each week. 

For those unfamiliar, Sail is a three level flood concept, meaning the offense uses three receivers to attack or ‘flood’ three different levels of the defense. Typically, an outside receiver will run deep, a slot receiver or tight end will run to a depth of 10-15 yards and break outside to attack the intermediate level and then a running back or tight end will work out to the flat underneath. This is tough for a defense to handle because most zone coverages will focus on taking away the deep route and having a flat defender taking away the underneath route, but be stretched into leaving the intermediate route open. 

Let’s take a look at an example.

Here is an example of a Sail concept that the Andy Reid coaching tree calls “Picasso”. The outside receiver runs a deep post while the slot receiver spots up underneath as the bait in the flat. The tight end runs the sail route, getting to about 10 yards before stuttering inside and then breaking outside. You can see the space created for tight end Travis Kelce on that sail route by the other routes. The outside receiver takes the top off of the defense, forcing the deep defenders to focus on him while the slot receiver forces the flat defender to attach to him. This creates a huge hole in the defense for Kelce to run into and the Chiefs pick up a big gain. 

Now every team will have multiple variations of the Sail concept in their playbook, but the Chiefs often ran it slightly differently than what we saw with the Commanders last year. They have a couple of variations of Sail that stood out when studying Bieniemy’s scheme. 

The first variation that stood out is known as “Seattle” in the Andy Reid coaching tree. The idea of the concept remains the same, with three receivers running to three different levels, flooding one side of the field. But how they get there is slightly different. The receiver working to the flat is changed here, with a fake jet sweep continuing into the flat as bait underneath. The outside receiver also runs more of a straight go route rather than a post. But the major difference is how the tight end runs the sail route. 

In this variation, the tight end is asked to fully sell an over route before suddenly breaking back outside. This type of route works best off play-action, when defenses are expecting over routes to occur, but it’s not a requirement to make the play successful. We can see here how Travis Kelce really makes his route look like he’s running across the field as he releases inside off the line and angles his path towards the opposite hashmark. 

Once he gets to a certain depth, he suddenly breaks his route back outside, but you can see the impact his route had on the trailing defender. The linebacker in coverage fully bites on the over route and even starts to look back at the quarterback expecting the throw to go that way. When the quarterback suddenly throws back the other way, the linebacker loses his footing and falls over while Kelce is left wide open.

The Andy Reid coaching tree has another very similar type of Sail variation too. 

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