X's-&-O's of NFL: Many routes to learning a playbook

Darius Slayton is entering his fifth NFL season. He’s spent all of them with Daniel Jones as his quarterback; they came to the Giants together as draft picks in 2019. This is Jones' second year running the offense that Brian Daboll and Mike Kafka imported, the one that basically extended Slayton’s stay with the team.

If there is anybody on the field who knows exactly what he’s doing at all times, it should be Slayton.

“But every blue moon, DJ gets in there and says something and I’m like, ‘Hoo, boy!’ " Slayton told Newsday. “If it’s something we haven’t called in a long time, it can be like, ‘Oh, man, I have to really rack my brain.’ ”

When that happens, he usually bides his time in the huddle to see where everyone else goes and then tries to figure out where he’s supposed to line up based on the vacancies. Then he’ll start looking around for other context clues and go through a long process of elimination.

“I’m thinking, ‘OK, it can’t be a dig, can’t be a slant, can’t be a go,’ ” he said. “And then I usually land on the right one.”

It’s an illustration of just how deep, complex and confusing an NFL playbook can be these days, and there are as many methods for memorizing it as there are players in the league. Everyone, it seems, has his own technique, ranging from mnemonic (memory) devices to checkerboards to a sort of immersive virtual reality. As players enter the NFL, they have to figure out what works best for them.

TECHNOLOGY SURE HELPS

Jets tight end Jeremy Ruckert said he stole a study habit from quarterback Chris Streveler, who was with the team earlier this summer before suffering a hand injury.

“He had a good method where he speaks the plays into his phone off the paper and he’ll play the video back and kind of quiz himself,” Ruckert said. “I started to do that too. I know a lot of other young guys did that. We use that, flash cards, everything. It’s kind of like schoolwork, but this is your job now, so it’s a lot more fun.”

The concept of a playbook as a book of plays is one of football’s many anachronisms, right along with watching film (no one has used actual celluloid for decades) and calling the football a pigskin (Wilson makes the official NFL footballs out of cowhide and has since 1941). Gone, for the most part, are the three-ring binders filled with X’s-and-O’s and squiggly lines telling players where to go. Now just about every playbook is an e-book on an iPad or other tablet along with a link to actual video of the play being run properly — although as recently as two years ago under Joe Judge and Jason Garrett, the Giants were working off printed pages. It turns out it wasn’t just their philosophies that were out-of-date.

These days, even the Giants have joined the league in the 21st century, and there are a number of ways they embrace technology in teaching the more than 250 offensive plays with more than 500 words of vocabulary to their “students.”

“We do a lot of ‘walk meetings,’ ” said Kafka, the Giants' offensive coordinator.

Those consist of the players standing inside a large tent in the corner of the team’s fieldhouse with a large projection of the play and its name on the canvas in front of them. They are able to line up, hear the call, see the words, visualize their responsibilities and then go through their maneuvers as best they can in the 10-or-so yards of space they have.

“They’re not running it, they’re not jogging it even, they’re just walking in their spot,” Kafka said. “What you are learning is a lot of these guys from college are coming up and their offense was basically one-worders or they had a signal-caller on the sideline, so the playbooks, you have to formulate around that a little bit. Maybe go with less words and more concepts. But this way you can put them in spots and they can visualize it. The play and the big picture is on the screen. They can see it here and they can run their route.”

Defenses do the same.

“Matt Eberflus, when he was my coach in Indy, he always said: It’s not necessarily the what, it’s the how,’ ” Giants linebacker Bobby Okereke said. “So first of all, you are figuring out the what. Like what’s my job? What’s my responsibility? But then it’s how to do it. The intensity to play with, the physicality to play with. It’s combining both. So yeah, you can learn what you have to do in X’s-and-O’s, but then you have to go execute it violently on the football field. It takes a little while for that to click in. And vice versa. You can’t just be running around like a maniac. You have to be disciplined.”

ALL DAY, EVERY DAY

That’s how they learn as a group. Individually, it’s up to them to figure things out. And the majority of their days are spent doing just that.

“We have meetings until 6 and walk-through after that until about 7:15. It’s all ball all day,” Ruckert said. “Then you have to get home and make sure you are eating and be sure you are getting picked up because the alarm comes pretty quick the next morning. But you have to put those hours in afterward. It’s just all day. You don’t want to get behind, you want to get on top of your plays so you can go out there and not think about it.”

Jets rookie offensive lineman Joe Tippmann is finding that out this summer.

“It’s definitely an ongoing process,” he said. “Maybe some people can just remember it all on the first try, but I like to dig into the playbook first, go through the whole thing and figure out the areas that don’t stick as well. Then I’ll either make flash cards, and if I can, I’ll watch tape of people actually executing what is in the playbook. Then I’ll go from there . . .  The last thing I do before I go to bed is look back through the day, through the playbook, and kind of find the areas where I struggled and places where I might need to step it up.”

Even veterans have to cram. Defensive lineman Al Woods is in his 14th season, but it's his first in the scheme the Jets are using in which he has to attack more than react. He said because he is a visual learner, he tries to do more walk-throughs than rote memorizations.

“It’s making sure I know what’s going on, even what’s going on if a play breaks down,” he said. “Emergency situations, emergency calls. ‘Oh, [expletive]! What do we do now?’ type of situations . . .  I’ve just had to kind of empty my brain of 13 years of one thing, but it’s been fun.”

PIECES TO PUZZLE

Sometimes, though, old-fashioned studying is what is required, even if it comes with a clever twist.

“It’s got to be non-stop repetitive memorization and quizzing yourself,” Giants receiver Isaiah Hodgins said. “I’m a big note-card guy. I get a lot of note cards. My wideout coach in Buffalo taught me to draw the whole play in black and then the position you want to learn in red so you can say, ‘If they call this, I got this route.’ But there are so many different methods. Josh Allen used to teach me ways of getting checker or chess pieces and making a whole offense out of them. You’d flip over a note card for the play and see how fast you could move all the pieces where everyone had to go.”

It’s fun to picture bishops running slants, knights running outs, rooks running go routes.

“I would have my wife call out the play and I would pretend there was an O-line in the living room and go walk to my spot and do my route,” Hodgins said. “There are so many ways, but it has to be an every-day, non-stop thing.”

Giants offensive tackle Andrew Thomas said he and many of his linemates used the app Quizlet, the same one thousands of school students around the country use to pepper themselves with facts for Earth Science, French or Social Studies tests. It’s basically a digital flashcard that shows a term and then with the flick of a wrist, it shows the definition. If you get it right, you move on from it. If you don’t, it goes back in the pile and comes around again at some point.

Those apps have their perils, however, as NFL paranoia runs deep.

“They took it down now because they didn’t want it to get out,” Thomas said. “We had a code and everything, but they didn’t want to do it. When I was learning it, though, I had access to it. That helped me for sure.”

The good thing is that most times, besides the quarterback, not everyone needs to understand every part of every play call (although it certainly helps if they do).

“It’s impossible — I shouldn’t say that, it is possible — but memorizing every single play for me is not ideal,” Slayton said. “I like to know what the concept is and then if I end up on the field, I know like, ‘OK, if I end up this far outside the numbers, I can’t have certain routes.’ So some of them are eliminated in my head. That helps me keep it all together.”

Kafka said when he was a quarterback in the NFL, and now that he is a coordinator and on the in-game headset, he likes to visualize building a play the way a kid might stack Legos, snapping the rectangular pieces together one by one to create a whole new design.

“So if I call ‘Doe strike 92, Z cross, X pressure,’ that would be a two-by-two set,” he said of a play that has two receivers on each side of the offensive linemen. Each piece of the play call is a segment that tells one group of players what they need to do. “But I want to know who is my chipper, which way is the back going, where are my X and Z, who is on the Z cross, who is on the X pressure. You are building that play out. Then you flip it over and you know from the left hash, I want to call it the other way around. It’s just creating a muscle memory so whenever you get that play called in your headset, you’ve already built it and you know what it is. You are breaking it up into sections for yourself so you can build that play.”

IMPROV NO JOKE

Not every play comes from the playbook, of course, and that’s even more of a reality for the Jets, who will rely on the improvisational skills of their quarterback to lift them above the two-dimensional drawings on the pages of their tablets.

“It’s the Aaron Rodgers offense,” said wide receiver Allen Lazard, who played with Rodgers in Green Bay and joins him  with the Jets this season. “He plays in the state of flow and just letting the game happen. When you have 11 guys who are able to play like that, that’s when beautiful plays are able to happen. Magic is able to happen on the field.”

That was evidenced early on this summer. At the first walk-through on the afternoon of the day the players reported to training camp, Rodgers  already was flashing hand signals, tweaking routes and adjusting the details on plays that he hadn’t even gone over with the rest of the team in meetings. It was up to them to keep up.

That kind of second-level on-the-field learning continued, even for the veterans. Tight end C.J. Uzomah is entering his ninth season in the NFL, and when he started practicing in late July after starting camp on PUP, the first pass he caught in team drills from Rodgers was a no-look throw that came his way.

“Those are crazy," he said. "I’ll let you know right now, you don’t get used to those. Even just in group install stuff, you better have your eyes on the quarterback at any given time. It’s messing with the defense, and as long as we are on the same page with him, we’re good, but it creeps up on you.”

Uzomah said those have been the most challenging parts of learning this new system, going beyond the book. They’ve also been the most fun parts.

“It’s such a free-flowing [offense],” he said. “Within the confinements of the play, within the confinements of the drop, within the confinements of the coverage, there is a little more freedom. It’s not running a straight line. If he has a seven-step drop, I know I have to be in this area and he’ll find us in that area, as opposed to having to run 12 yards and cut in and do this and do that. It’s different. It’s usually you have to get to the 12-yard mark and then break, but he’s like, no, if you get 10 yards, if you get 9, if you get around that area, he is going to find you. It’s an adjustment because it’s what you want to do while playing, but you are always like, ‘Nah, Coach said to do 12 yards so I’m gonna do 12 yards.’ That is a little bit of an adjustment, but it’s great.”

STUDY, STUDY, STUDY

Teams typically install their schemes in chunks of six to 10 plays a day. They’ll go through the whole book once in spring workouts, again in minicamp and then at the start of training camp, so by the time they start the regular season, they have been taught it three times. Of course, each day those plays stack up, so while learning the new ones, they have to remain masters of the previous calls.

When players arrive off waivers or in the middle of the season, they typically get a crash course in the game plan and not the whole playbook. They may just learn a handful of words and schemes to get them through the upcoming game.

But how long does it take to learn the whole playbook?

“It depends on your dedication to it,” Hodgins said. “If you are a guy who is going to study for three days and take two off, it’s going to take you a while. But if you are every day no matter what, I am looking at these before I go to sleep, before practice, after practice, all that, I mean, you can get it in a couple months if you really, really try. It’s based on your discipline and your habits.”

Apps, flash cards, chess pieces, tablets, audio files, even educated guessing.

When it comes to learning the playbook, there are no wrong answers . . .  just as long as they help the player eventually arrive at the right one when it counts.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.