A look at the "familiar" defense...
 

In a recent MP game, I saw an unusually quick sprint to the point where my team was getting the dreaded "defense was familiar with that play." in fact, it happened to my team on its 11th and 13th plays of the game.

I thought that this super-compressed example might serve as a worthwhile learning ground for what seems to be going on here. The complete box score of the game (we won handily, so I'm not complaining that this did me in or anything)( can be found here but I'll excerpt the initial series of our plays below.

First drive:

Hawk Mountain: Single-Back formation with trips receivers, strength is left. The defense is in a 34 and 2-deep man-to-man coverage, expecting the run. 1-10-HWK39 (1Q: 11:39) Johnny Phillips pass completed to WR Roy Nunn for 14 yards. Tackled by S Leonard Amano. The receiver ran his route right over the middle of the field. Nunn gained 3 yards after the catch.

Hawk Mountain: Single-Back formation with trips receivers, strength is right. The defense is in a 34 and 3-deep zone coverage, keying aggressively on the run. 1-10-WBA47 (1Q: 11:01) Johnny Phillips pass completed to WR Alex Bensen for 15 yards. Tackled by OLB Marlon Ready.

Hawk Mountain: Single-Back formation, strength is right. The defense is in a 34 with dime personnel and 2-deep man-to-man coverage, keying aggressively on the pass. Sellers is blitzing. 1-10-WBA32 (1Q: 10:22) Johnny Phillips pass completed to WR Zach Inzinna for 19 yards. Tackled by CB Mike Small. Inzinna gained 2 yards after the catch.

Hawk Mountain: Single-Back formation, strength is right. The defense is in a 34 with dime personnel and 2-deep man-to-man coverage, expecting the pass. 1-10-WBA13 (1Q: 09:46) Johnny Phillips pass completed to WR Roy Nunn for 12 yards. Tackled by OLB Neil Sellers. The receiver ran his route right over the middle of the field. The quarterback threw into double coverage.

Hawk Mountain: Single-Back formation, strength is left. The defense is in a 34 with dime personnel and 2-deep bump-and-run coverage, expecting the pass. 1-1-WBA01 (1Q: 09:04) Drew Gartland ran outside the right tackle for 1 yard and a TOUCHDOWN! Key block delivered by Clarence Kasner. Hawk Mountain 6, Wilkes-Barre 0

Okay for what it's worth... my gameplan in that league (assuming it is being used) calls for the single back offenses to be used a bit in passing situations, but not overwhelmingly like we see here. In a standard 1st and 10 situation, I basically would expect us to be in the "slight passing" range 9according to the gameplan screen definition" and from there, I'd expect us to be in each of these formations (single back, and single back trips receivers) about one play in seven.

My QB knows 11 formations, which isn't great, but in a fairly balanced situation, this doesn't seem like it ought to provide a major hidden limitation.

A football-logical way for the "familiar" message to be applied would be that the more often the defense sees the same formation and/or play, the more likely (modified by play diagnosis and/or defensive playcalling) the defense will guess correctly. If that's what's going on here, I don't have a problem with it. It looks like you just got bad dice rolls that caused you to call a bunch of plays in Single back early, increasing the odds of the familiar message.

That's exactly what I think this tiny case study seems to show... weird dice rolling put us in the same formations for nearly every play, and while it was working great, eventually the defense sort of caught on.


Notice, however... of the two "familiars" I got one in each of the two nominally different single back formations.

What I don't know is whether it's possible that some of the same plays might reside in both of these similar formations... perhaps there's a somewhat subtle message here, too. Maybe my team was calling "the same play" from a couple similar formations, and that itself was adding up my tally toward the dreaded familiar message.

(I think I shifted some of my playcalling away from the base single back and toward the single back trips to try to avoid this... now I'm wondering if perhaps that either has a limited effect, or fairly little effect in combating this problem)

I think one of the guys who calls his own plays said that they're definitely tied together.

Yes, and while I have more or less assumed that what play-callers see in that version of the game does in fact play out underneath the surface in the game that gameplanners see... I think this little episode lends some meaningful evidence to that theory. (Which was my main point in posting this)


So... seems to me that if you're trying to "mix up" your gameplans to keep defenses on their toes, you need do to a little bit more than vanilla and french vanilla.