Less than a year ago, I quote-tweeted this thread on Twitter. Not because I'm some football genius who sees the future, I just had this nagging feeling that everyone was missing something stupidly obvious, and I was watching way too much football at the time, especially while doing PFF’s Data training.

In the thread, I talked about designed laterals as the counter to two-high shell coverage. You know, two-high shell, that defensive scheme where coordinators park two safeties deep like two helicopter parents chaperoning a high school dance?

Defensive coordinators have been spamming this since 2022. The coverage that says to the offense, "go ahead, throw your little 6-yard passes all day, we'll just wait here and tackle you after the catch"?

Two-high shell is essentially defensive trolling. It's the football equivalent of that guy who stands close to you in an argument but doesn't technically touch you. "What? I'm not doing anything. I'm just... standing here. With my two safeties. Preventing your big plays. What are you gonna do about it?"

What teams have been doing about it is exactly what the defense wants: checking down, running into light boxes, and slowly grinding their way down the field like they're driving through rush hour traffic. Revolutionary stuff, I know.

Two-high shell is designed to take away the deep ball and force everything underneath. What it's not designed for is the ball suddenly changing direction after the catch.

So I started researching. Not because I thought I was onto some grand conspiracy, but because the idea seemed too simple to ignore. Like, suspiciously simple. In my research, I’ve seen a few people talk about this and a few people even go into some concepts they think might work, but they never go into why coaches choose not to run laterals. Or why it’s such a blind spot. One of the best football players in this generation, Travis Kelce, thinks it’s one of the most under utilized concepts in football but no one really expounds upon the idea.

A few months later, Ben Johnson's Lions led the entire NFL in points per game. And how were they doing it? Laterals. Constraint theory. The exact stuff from that thread. Two hook-and-ladder touchdowns within normal gameplay. Not desperation situations. One other lateral TD that got called back was to the Lions prized Tackle, Penei Sewell.

I was shocked, started documenting, and found out way more about the early game that opened my eyes to what we left behind before we became obsessed with the forward pass.

I didn't predict the future. I just happened to see really excellent lateral use at an early age in football and it’s stuck with me ever since. I’ve always been enamored with the idea of post catch laterals & designed lateral trees after an already developed play.

I figured that when smart people start talking about exploiting systematic inefficiencies in a $15 billion industry, maybe laterals are worth paying attention to.

Especially when that industry has been religiously avoiding those inefficiencies for basically cultural reasons.

Ben Johnson wasn't even trying to revolutionize football. He was just... using the tools in the toolbox that everyone pretends don't exist.

Because of that thread, and because I apparently have nothing better to do than dive deep into football's systematic blind spots, I wrote a book about it. About how the most obvious play in football became the most feared. About how we coach intelligence out of our players and then wonder why they don't make intelligent decisions.

The tweet aged well. The book? We'll see. But I'll tell you this much: if you're still calling laterals "trick plays" after watching what Johnson did this season, you're not paying attention.

And that's on you, not the laterals.