Shotgun or Under Center? The Great Short Yard Debate in College Football

Wisconsin had the lead, the ball, the fans were excited and they had a chance to take advantage of it.

It was fourth-and-1 in the first quarter Saturday at the Alabama 39, and fourth-and-1 is a comfort zone for Wisconsin football. It’s a happy time. It’s the Spotted Cow and a basket of cheese curds. The Elite Badgers’ offensive line has used fourth-and-1 to deliver lasting blows for decades — especially at Camp Randall Stadium, especially against higher-ranked and more talented opponents.

At that point, Wisconsin lined up in a shotgun stance with three receivers and one running back. Quarterback Braedyn Locke caught the ball and passed it to Tawee Walker. Walker was immediately buried for a fumble. Badgers legend JJ Watt posted a response to “X”: “Don’t line up in a shotgun stance on 4th-and-1. Ever.”

And millions of college football fans nodded with conscious contempt.

Do not line up at the intersection of 4th and 1st Streets.

Whenever.

— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) September 14, 2024

And all of you, including Watt, are wrong.

You’re not wrong to complain about every play that doesn’t work, to conclude that the decision to play was ill-conceived from the start, and to assume that the person who made it spent the previous week looking up rules on TikTok instead of studying the opposition. That’s our right — no, our duty — as citizens watching football.

But when it comes to shotgun and short yardage in this sport, those plays are made much more often, with a higher success rate, with average gains, than short yardage plays from under center. That’s what the data tells us.

* data from TruMedia

That’s the sport. In college football, quarterbacks get the ball in the shotgun position much more often than they do under center, and if that’s what your team does and practices, it’s going to do it in the short yardage as well.

“There’s absolutely no right answer to any of those questions,” Memphis coach Ryan Silverfield said. “But why are you going under center for that one touchdown if you never do?”

Wisconsin runs a version of the Air Raid under coach Luke Fickell and offensive coordinator Phil Longo. It’s a shotgun, one back and three or four receivers on every play. So the Badgers did what they do and got crushed. They ended up losing 42-10.

But for the record, they ran four other plays on third-and-1 or fourth-and-1, all shotgun, and converted all four. It didn’t look like the traditional Badgers football that stands out in the Big Ten, where there’s still a lot of action under center, but the 80 percent success rate means that short yardage was the least of Wisconsin’s concerns Saturday.

That’s a higher conversion rate than average, but the overall numbers also favor the shotgun. Looking at the entire 2023 season and the 2024 season so far, according to TruMedia, FBS teams that ran out of shotgun on third-and-1 or fourth-and-1 converted 75.2 percent of the time and averaged 4.3 yards per carry. Teams running under center on third-and-1 or fourth-and-1 converted 74.7 percent of the time and averaged 2.3 yards per carry.

Shotgun runs are also more than twice as common — 2,666 of them compared to 1,048 runs from under center. Those numbers don’t include sacks — which count as negative rushing yards in college football — and QB kneeling.

“When I was a coach, I would have preferred to see a power play and a center in those situations,” said retired coach Phil Bennett, whose career included stints as defensive coordinator at Baylor, LSU, Texas A&M and seven other schools, as well as six years as SMU’s head coach. “When you go under center and you have a deep back, you give the defense a lot of information, and we feel good about that, especially if we’re breaking it up. Now, if there’s a half-yard to go, that’s where you have to love to go under center to make the QB slip away.”

The QB steal is the largest part of the under-center pie. Of those 1,048 short yards from under-center, only 39.8 percent went to running backs.

For short-yardage running backs, shotgun runs were five times more common than under-center runs — 2,125 to 417. The shotgun was effective 74.9 percent of the time for 4.3 yards per run, while the under-center was effective 68.9 percent of the time for 3.2 yards per run.

Why? The vast majority of those shotgun runs give the quarterback an opportunity to read the defense and make a decision after the snap based on what he sees — which is also why the run-pass option has overtaken the playbooks over the past decade.

“You look at the NFL now, what they’re doing with guys like (Patrick) Mahomes and (Josh) Allen and Lamar (Jackson), it’s a double read and it’s hard to beat that,” Bennett said. “The quarterback and the playmaker, both deep, have a vision of the defense and they make decisions based on that.”

It’s a passing game, from high school to the NFL, that creates opportunities to run against favorable numbers. Tennessee’s wide-open, fast-paced attack with vaunted quarterback Nico Iamaleava is a prime example — the Vols enter a big Saturday at Oklahoma with the nation’s No. 3 offense (336.3 yards per game, 6.96 per rush).

The sport is more about passing to set up the run than running to set up the pass. But there’s still plenty of room for the latter in the gamut of college football schemes. N.C. State defensive coordinator Tony Gibson, for the record, disagreed with Bennett, saying, “The downhill run is harder to defend” on short yards.

Part of that, said Gibson — whose defense recently surrendered 249 yards on the ground in a 51-10 loss to the Vols — is that defenses have become lighter and quicker to adjust to offenses. Of course, that also depends on the quality of the opponent. Michigan just won a national championship largely by overwhelming defenses, and future pros are all over the depth chart.

Memphis is an example of a program that employs a modern-looking offense — a shotgun 11-man offense, one guard, one middle blocker and three receivers, most of the time — but still values, practices and runs plays from under center.

The key part is practice. Some coaches don’t want to spend much, if any, of their limited time on things they rarely use. Memphis has sub-center periods in every practice and sometimes runs three tight ends and fullbacks. Silverfield’s experience as an offensive line coach contributes to what he calls the “physical mentality” he wants his team to have.

“We believe you can do both,” Memphis tight ends coach Brad Salem said. “At some point, it’s going to benefit you if you can line up under center and play that way.”

Memphis took advantage of that on third-and-goal from the Florida State 2-yard line in Saturday’s 20-12 road win. The Tigers went hard, quarterback Seth Henigan faked a pass and found Anthony Landphere for a touchdown pass.

It was one of countless examples of short-yardage choices from Week 3, including Pittsburgh scoring the winning touchdown against West Virginia on a completed shotgun snap and stopping rival Washington State’s Washington on fourth-down and goal from the 2-yard line — shotgun, speed, stopped.

Some of the reactions to that play sounded a lot like what Watt had to say about his alma mater denying a fourth-and-1. But as for that one failed conversion, if Locke — Wisconsin’s backup quarterback — reads the defense correctly, he’ll get a stop and have plenty of room to run outside.

Running short distances from the shotgun position is more effective than under center. Here’s the whole story.

But if Watt’s comment was more about Wisconsin’s overall shift to the Air Raid and away from the power football that defined the program — and continues to define much of the Big Ten — that’s a different story.

(Tawee Walker Photo: Dan Sanger/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)