Isn't Frost's offense built specifically to combat defenses trying to do this? You're running a three wide receiver set and then all of a sudden Washington motions into the backfield with Mills and you have more of a power run formation into Nickle. Other people understand this way better than me, but feels like Frost can taken advantage of any defensive scheme the way he builds his offense and you can't sub to counter it.
Defenses playing some variation of Nickel is just personnel matching against 11 personnel sets, the most common sets in modern football. The personnel isn’t really an issue, it’s where they are aligned and Frost uses motion and formation to generate and exploit that.
The screen game is a huge part of this. He attaches some form of screen action to all sorts of plays. Let’s create a simple example. 11 personnel (1RB/1TE/3WR), Twins Left, H-back Right, RB left side of the QB. Put the ball on the left hash mark.
There are 3 reasons the defensive strength will be aligned to the right side of the offensive formation:
1) The TE is there (as an h-back)
2) The RB is aligned left meaning after he crosses the QB to receive the handoff he’s most likely running to the right.
3) The right side is the wide side of the field.
The defense has a few options here. They can shift their front to give an over hanging LB, but that’s problematic because that’s shifting away from the potential screen on the left side and that h-back can account for him. The better option is to rotate a safety down on that wide side.
That’s a good option that allows either the second safety to account for the slot receiver or he can stay at safety depth and allow a LB/Nickel/etc to account for the slot. This is the conflict defender, and he’ll often try to set himself to play both the slot and be the extra man in the box. (Without him the offense has 6 blockers vs 6 defenders).
All that setup is to get to the punchline. I’ve described a few ways the defense can remain balanced but Frost throws in a wrinkle. That h-back motions across the formation at the snap to catch a TE Screen. Now he’s really created quads against a balanced defensive alignment, vastly outnumbering the defense.
Depending on how the defense aligned to that he can now run something else out of that same look. With a fast RB, that can be a handoff now to the wide side of the field, but the weak side of the defense if they adjust for the motion. Could be all kinds of plays, but that’s what he’s always trying to do is create unbalanced looks, move those safeties around and exploit that for huge gains.
