With 10:32 to play in the third quarter of a Week 7 game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, Brock Purdy settled under center with his offense on the opponents’ 1-yard line. Purdy tapped his helmet, which caused fullback Kyle Juszczyk to also tap his helmet, likely to confirm the play to running back Jordan Mason was still on. The 49ers had their backs in the I-formation, with one tight end to the left and two tight ends to the right, all of them on the line of scrimmage.
Most Chiefs defenders looked like track runners at the starting line of the 100-meter dash. Their legs were twitching and all six down linemen were rocking up onto their fingers in preparation for a short-range collision to try to prevent San Francisco from taking the lead. At that moment, the 49ers were the league’s seventh-best offense in the NFL in terms of EPA per play, while the Chiefs were the 10th-best defense along with the 10th-best red zone defense.
Steve Spagnuolo, the most decorated NFL coordinator in history, was calling the Chiefs’ defense against Kyle Shanahan, one of the league’s most innovative offensive play-callers. It was a two-time Super Bowl rematch, including the most recent one played.
When the ball was snapped, though, Purdy simply walked forward into the end zone behind his center, completely untouched and—I say this after watching the play countless times after it was highlighted on the Twitter/X account of play-design guru Dan Casey—seemingly before many of the Chiefs’ players knew the play was over. My obsession with this moment began first with its aesthetic. It’s like watching a robbery in broad daylight with no arrest. It’s like watching an ocean part for someone to simply walk through. There are plenty of plays in the NFL where someone scores untouched, even at the goal line when a quarterback runs a bootleg off a fake for a touchdown, but not from the 1-yard line on a QB rushing play up the middle. This is literally one of the most crowded spaces in all of sports, up there with a rugby scrum or a contested rebound with time expiring.
The Brock Purdy false pull QB sneak, which @CoachDanCasey got me obsessed with, has so many layers. Been watching this play on repeat. pic.twitter.com/kK8tgdQSDR
— Conor Orr (@ConorOrr) December 11, 2024
My obsession continued with a thesis: that Shanahan had invented the anti-tush push. Instead of assembling all of the team’s heft into one place and smashing the quarterback into the end zone like a stuck remote control button, the 49ers utilized some theatrical, backfield window dressing to make the play look like one thing before sneaking Purdy in through the front door of a great defense. Why risk your quarterback being barreled underneath a ton of humanity when you don’t have to?
But after showing the play to a number of coaches, the reality is far more interesting and goes deeper than a Reddit wormhole on the toxins contained in your frying pan. This one-yard Purdy touchdown is a window into how thorough a team’s preparation truly needs to be for a given week. It’s a window into the do-or-die theory behind situational goal line football and, ultimately, a window into just how hard it is to gain one yard in the NFL. As expected when reporting a story about the minutiae behind a 2024 quarterback sneak, it also obviously led me to an interview that resurfaced a nearly quarter-century-old accusation tied to Spygate.
This is the story of my favorite one-yard play, and how it traveled from an alleged drawn-up-on-the-sidelines middle finger to modern day social media showstopper that made one Ivy League coordinator tell his wife days before he called it: “If we hit this, it’s going to go viral.”
Chapter 1: Outcharge
Some of the best coaches are the easiest to prepare for, in theory, because they have an established library of successful practices. Spagnuolo, when facing teams that tend to run to the outside, has a habit of lining up his defensive tackles over the guards and “outcharging” them. An outcharge is a common defensive maneuver in which a defensive tackle shoots outward in an attempt to choke out a run that is stretching toward the offensive tackle or the tight end. A linebacker typically fills the void left behind by the tackles so as not to leave the gap completely exposed, and can sometimes be in a unique position to make a huge play.
Particularly in a goal line situation, this practice is useful given that, as one coach interviewed for this story says, these scenarios are often like a penalty kick in soccer. A goalie, like the defense, knows his back is against the wall and the only way to improve the odds is to make a calculated guess. Goalies tend to cheat to one side in the ways that Spagnuolo is trying to offer his tackles a similar advantage. Guessing wrong allows for a short touchdown run that was almost inevitable anyway. Guessing correctly forces an offense into a different set of play calls or forces it to take a field goal, removing points from the board.
In a game against the Cincinnati Bengals last year, with Cincinnati facing a fourth-and-1 on the 6-yard line, Kansas City’s defensive tackles outcharged, causing the Bengals’ center and guard on the right side to dive after Chiefs nose tackle Mike Pennel. The panic move left the middle of the offensive line so exposed that linebacker William Gay was able to walk into the backfield and wrap his arms around Joe Mixon just as the running back took the handoff.
What’s difficult for opposing play-callers, however, is that Spagnuolo doesn’t always do this against outside rushing teams. In 2023, the Chiefs were in 21 total red zone situations in which the offense needed 1–2 yards, either for a first down or a touchdown, according to NFL Pro. When facing the New York Jets, for example, the Chiefs had a defensive tackle who was shaded, or partially lined up, over the center (the Jets ran a play-action pass to tight end C.J. Uzomah for a touchdown). A few weeks later, against the Green Bay Packers in a nearly identical situation, the Chiefs’ tackles did run outcharge (the Packers ran a play-action pass to tight end Ben Sims for a touchdown).
Additionally, the Chiefs have one of the best defensive tackles in modern NFL history in Chris Jones. Sometimes, his reaction timing off the ball is so fast that it’s hard to tell whether he is outcharging or whether he simply has a great read on the play.
Regardless, it was a near certainty that outcharge was going to be in the arsenal for Spagnuolo against the 49ers in 2024 (and likely was in the Super Bowl a few months before, though San Francisco did not have a true goal line situation in that game to necessitate it). Shanahan repopularized the outside-zone system first pioneered by his father, Mike, and the legendary offensive line coach Alex Gibbs. In ’23, only one team ran the ball to the outside of their left tackle more than the 49ers.
Shanahan, who declined to be interviewed for this story via a 49ers spokesperson, would be ready to counter.
Chapter 2: The Chess Match and the Reveal
In a 2020 game between the Chiefs and Carolina Panthers, Teddy Bridgewater walked to the line and uttered something inaudible just as Chiefs linebacker Damien Wilson started to rock toward the line of scrimmage.
This utterance, some coaches who have watched the play speculated, was Bridgewater “canning” another play call and checking to a run after having seen enough information to make him believe the Chiefs were outcharging their defensive tackles.
This is one of the major indicators that an outcharge is coming, and Wilson’s action on this specific play was nearly identical to the action current Chiefs linebacker Drue Tranquill took before Purdy’s walk-in touchdown. Tranquill, knowing that outcharge had been called and knowing that he had to fill the gap left behind by the defensive tackles, began to take a few steps toward the line of scrimmage, closing the gap he had to travel.
Bridgewater didn’t sneak the ball but instead checked to a running play that went to the same gap and exposed the same weak point. Watch then Panther Christian McCaffrey walk into the end zone on that play.
This little moment reveals one of the most incredible parts of this particular scenario. Several coaches I spoke to talked about the psychological chess match that is happening on countless levels simply for the right to lay claim to a few inches of grass. Consider …
• Spagnuolo is betting that Shanahan is running to the outside. Shanahan sends in his quarterback with two plays and depends on the quarterback to pick up on a cue that would help him decide whether to run to the outside or sneak it up the middle.
• The defensive linemen in this situation are often coached to simply barrel forward with reckless abandon in the instructed direction. Defensive line coaches are often not concerned with offside penalties at the 1- or 2-yard line because with a half the distance penalty, the defense is only really ceding a few more centimeters of turf with the flag. At the same time, this hair-on-fire attitude has to be balanced with near perfect alignment. Any difference in the way they would typically line up or adjust the distance between one another is a silent indicator of what’s to come.
This conundrum can be illustrated in another less-memorable QB sneak vs. outcharge in a game between the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins in Week 2 of 2019. En route to a 43–0 blowout win, Tom Brady rumbled into the end zone for a one-yard touchdown run that put New England up 23–0. Brady checked to that call after noticing a distinct difference between the Dolphins on a previous goal line snap.
Look at these two alignments:
Not only had the Dolphins left the center uncovered, but defensive tackles further down the line were putting more space between one another, indicating that the inside defensive tackles were traveling in their direction.
Think about the difference for the offensive linemen who, while certainly worrying about jumping offsides, don’t have to be the least bit concerned about giving away what they’re going to do because it’s all part of the subterfuge.
• Now, back to Chiefs-Niners, the linebackers were in the most perilous position. They could not inch forward so as to indicate outcharge, but they had to get closer to the line because they were further away from the ball than the offense had to travel to score. Not inching forward gives up valuable turf and makes them look lazy and flat-footed on film. Inching forward discloses the play call.
Understanding all this, Shanahan seized the moment to add his own personal panache and force all of Kansas City’s momentum against itself.
Just as Purdy snapped the ball, both of San Francisco’s guards “pulled”—or sprinted toward their respective sidelines—in order to block outside defenders. Juszczyk followed the pulling guard to the right and Mason followed the pulling guard to the left. All of these maneuvers were visual cues to Kansas City’s defenders that they had guessed correctly on the outside run. Given their directive to missile ahead, both interior defensive tackles surged toward Juszczyk and the pulling guard on one side, and Mason and the pulling guard on the other.
This left Purdy, center Jake Brendel and Tranquil alone in vast space. As Purdy tucked the ball into his arm like a cumbersome briefcase and strolled forward, both of Kansas City’s interior tackles, Pennel and Derrick Nnadi, turned around with perfect comedic timing akin to the burglars from Home Alone; bursting through a door only to find a can of paint swinging toward their heads.
Shanahan, though, cannot lay claim to this play as his own. Like most of the best calls, this particular sneak was created in a moment of hopelessness by a coach who felt his back up against the wall.
Chapter 3: A Desperation Call
“They only have 10 guys in there!”
The sound of John Madden’s voice was broken up by an official’s whistle. The Patriots had just taken a timeout, up 17–3, after an error after an en-masse, five-player substitution. The St. Louis Rams were at the 2-yard line with a little more than 9 minutes remaining in Super Bowl XXXVI.
What occurred during this timeout is heavily dependent on how one views recent league history and what their own personal beliefs are about that era’s Patriots, who would later become embroiled in a controversy in which the team was found to have videotaped opposing clubs’ signals.
Marshall Faulk, the Rams’ star running back, would later go on to say he believes the team’s final walkthrough of that week was videotaped, which gave New England the ability to stop certain new plays. The Boston Herald reported on the taped walkthrough back in 2008, but later had to issue a front-page retraction. Bill Belichick denied taping the walkthrough in ’08.
“In my entire coaching career, I've never seen another team’s practice film prior to playing that team," Belichick told the Boston Globe. “I have never authorized, or heard of, or even seen in any way, shape, or form any other team’s walk-through. We don’t even film our own. We don’t even want to see ourselves do anything, that’s the pace that it’s at. Regardless, I’ve never been a part of that.”
So, what does this have to do with a quarterback sneak? Well, after calling Mike Martz, a great deal, apparently. Martz, the Rams’ head coach at the time, claims to have been the first to utilize this specific sneak in a game. But he had never run the play with Kurt Warner, the Rams’ starting quarterback in the Super Bowl.
Martz says: “We hadn’t run it in such a long time that, by the time we’d gotten to the Super Bowl, since [New England] filmed everything, they knew what we were running. So I called timeout [sic], I think we were on the 2- or 3-yard line. I said, Hey, do you guys remember the sucker sneak? They said yeah. Well, we’re gonna run that. Both guards pull; center, you just block the [middle] linebacker; and Kurt, you just get into the end zone. We drew it up on the sideline. We hadn’t run it in a long time.”
At this point, asking for more detail on the play itself felt like digging in on the director’s notes for a certain memorable production of Our American Cousin, but Martz has been on the record with his accusations of practice spying in the past and there was a far greater risk at hand of losing valuable information about the sucker sneak—we now had a name!—to the sands of time.
Martz said that, in the huddle, he’d instructed both of his guards to present with extra-wide splits from the center (again, the distance between themselves and the players to either side), knowing that each of them would be covered by a defensive tackle no matter where they lined up. Belichick, like Spagnuolo and other great defensive minds, had some habits that were predictable. This negated the need to guess whether the Patriots’ players would outcharge because Martz was playing New England’s sound defensive assignments against them. An overhead view of the touchdown confirms this, with massive splits between the center and guard on both sides and much narrower splits between the guards and tackles. Still, to be safe, Martz also instructed both guards to pull to add another distraction for the defensive tackles to contend with.
Warner took the snap and burrowed behind his center, Andy McCollum. Patriots defenders Richard Seymour and Anthony Pleasant both shot forward, with Pleasant getting a hand on Warner’s shoulder and Seymour getting an arm around Warner’s waist.
“We’ve run that play about a dozen times,” Martz says. “And it never failed.”
In 2004, Martz ran the play on a fourth-and-1 against the Dolphins from the 15-yard line, and it was so wide open that Rams quarterback Marc Bulger ran all the way to the end zone. As Bulger snapped the ball, he started to fall forward but realized that literally no one was going to stop him, so he stood upright and began a sprint for the goal line.
The sucker sneak scored a 20-yard touchdown back in 2004 in a game between the Rams and the Dolphins. Look at Marc Bulger getting free! pic.twitter.com/PurljxWWfz
— Conor Orr (@ConorOrr) December 11, 2024
Martz’s contributions to the Greatest Show on Turf are significant and were, at the time, earth-shattering, given the homogeneity of the NFL’s offensive schemes. Now, he’s watching JV teams run his running back bullet pass, for example. And, oddly enough, he was seated on his couch with the 49ers game on his TV in October when Purdy walked through the Chiefs’ defense completely untouched.
“I watched it live. I laughed,” he says. “Said, ‘There’s a sucker sneak. Someone finally did it.’”
Chapter 4: The Sucker, Reborn
On the Tuesday before Penn played heavily favored Harvard in mid-November, Quakers offensive coordinator Greg Chimera found himself with exactly 30 free seconds at the end of a practice period, and time to run one more play with nothing else on the script.
Chimera walked over to the offensive line and explained the concept of a play he had seen a few days prior and couldn’t shake—Purdy’s walk-in touchdown against the Chiefs. The defense thought Chimera was making a typical adjustment and, as they were providing a scout look for Harvard, were aligned with two defensive tackles meant to read and react to the guards. None of the other coaches knew. The Quakers snapped the ball completely unsure of what would happen and scored on that play, despite having drawn it up on a moment’s notice. Throughout the week, even as the defense became acclimated to the call, it kept working.
Chimera now had his pet project baked into the plan. He needed to tailor a few parts of the concept to fit two major issues:
One: The Quakers don’t run plays from under center, so there is an increased distance between the quarterback and the vacant space he has to run through.
Two: Chimera noticed that, in test-run scenarios, the eyes of his defensive tackles went first to reading the pulling guards and second to the running back. There was concern, given the longer distance the quarterback had to travel, that eyes on the running back—situated behind the quarterback in a pistol-like formation—would also draw defenders right back to the player holding the ball as well.
The solution came in the form of running back Malachi Hosley, the Ivy League’s leading rusher and the person most defenders would assume was getting the ball anyway.
“I told him to pretend like you’re a punter on a fake punt,” Chimera says, meaning that he instructed Hosley to take a few steps out like he’d be receiving a pitch and then pretend the ball had skied over his head. “Now, if either of those defensive tackles see what’s going on, their eyes go to the window dressing of the running back.”
With the tweaks worked out, Chimera says he couldn’t contain his excitement during the week. Every Wednesday, the staff DoorDashes Chipotle and sits together watching each and every trick play from the previous weekend of football, so hitting this would mean something. He told his wife about the potential of scoring on the viral play in a game.
“She didn’t know what I was talking about,” he says. “She was like, O.K! Good luck! Can you do the dishes?”
He had to wait until the fourth quarter for the right scenario to even consider calling the play, which the coaching staff called “Puppy.” The Quakers had the ball first-and-goal and called a running play to Hosley, who had nine rushing touchdowns on the season and averaged nearly 120 yards per game.
“In my head, I kind of want him to get stopped, because then it’s the perfect spot to run the play,” Chimera says, laughing.
And after Hosley went down, after a cutback inside had him met with a pile of defenders, came Chimera’s moment. Inside the booth, there was an atmosphere he’d never felt before, like the place was ready to explode. Quarterback Liam O’Brien clapped his hands, setting in motion the pistol snap. As the ball was flying through the air, Hosley began to dive stage right like a parent who just stepped on a plastic dinosaur. Both of the guards pulled at the same time, taking the Crimson tackles with them, creating a small baseball diamond worth of space in front of O’Brien. The quarterback ran forward as the panicked defensive tackles turned to see the reveal. William Bergin, Penn’s center who, just the play before, was in a shoving match in the end zone, took Harvard’s middle linebacker and threw him four yards to the right, clearing the rest of the way. Matt Leon, the play-by-play voice of the Quakers said over the livestream: “WHERE’S. THE. DEFENSE?!”
Here's @Greg_Chimera taking the false pull QB sneak to the next level with a totally badass call against Harvard in a big spot. pic.twitter.com/hTOpw1Ps0S
— Conor Orr (@ConorOrr) December 11, 2024
“It was the funniest 10 seconds in the headset all year,” Chimera says. “Everyone is going nuts at the same time.”
Of course, it goes deeper than that, as all good play calls do. For one, Bergin just remade his highlight tape, with the sucker sneak front and center. More importantly, Chimera’s wife, Allison, confirms that as soon as she saw the play online she thought it was cool and “reposted it.”
There is an ephemeral beauty to it as well. Over the course of four seconds, there is synchronicity as the two guards begin their pull looking like two sides of the same person escaping a funhouse mirror. Physical comedy as the back leaps up into the air. Artful violence as the center gets his hands on the linebacker’s ribcage. And, of course, the quarterback walking across the goal line like some sort of floating deity above the battlefield. Maybe that’s overstating it to some people, but not for me. Not on this play.
Chimera gets it.
“Very rarely, in life or in football, do things work out exactly the way you want them to,” he says. “But we were hoping it would look exactly like that.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sucker Sneak: Investigating the Most Interesting Touchdown of the NFL Season.
