It is an article of faith among football coaches and players that the offense should always vary the snap count. After all, the offense supposedly has two advantages over the defense:

• knowing where the play is going
• knowing the snap count

Who would want to give up half of their advantages?

Me, for one.

Actually, the rules gives both the offense and defense advantages. For example, the offense has to hold still. The defense can move around as much as they want in any direction. But I digress.

Varying the snap count has both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Interior line and offensive backs in the backfield can start to move one to two tenths of a second before the defenders if the cadence is rhythmic	Increased incidence of false-start penalties when one or more offensive players forget the correct snap count
	When crowd noise is high, some offensive players cannot hear the snap count
	Wide receivers can never hear the snap count or hear it late because of the distance the sound has to travel
	Cadence takes time which reduces the number of plays the trailing team can run to try to take the lead

False starts
For several seasons, I used no snap count at all. We snapped the ball in total silence. We had two false starts all season. Both one after another in the same game where a defender barked a fake snap count. Why my guy would jump when we had not used a snap count all season is another question. But it was unsportsmanlike conduct. Fifteen yard penalty and that was the last time that happened.

Except for a few anomalies like that, having no cadence totally eliminated false starts.

I could not find any statistics on false starts per se. The average number of penalties for an NFL team in 2004 was 112 for 913 yards. I do not know what percentage of those were false starts. I will guess about three penalties a game for five yards each or fifteen total per game.

Are those false starts worth the benefit of a faster get off from knowing the snap count? To answer that, you would have to measure the benefit of faster get off in the same units as the cost of the false start penalties. Yards would be the obvious unit. But football is a bit more complex than that. A false start penalty typically ends a possession because it makes to harder to get a first down—fifteen yards instead of ten—than the average team can handle. Failure to get a first down hurts the team’s efforts to score and thereby win the game and helps the opponent’s efforts to score and win.

One question is whether the faster get off is gaining more than the fifteen yards being lost to the false start penalties. I can only say that my teams that did not use any cadence seemed to do significantly better than my teams that used cadence. That may have been due to better players on those teams. But my sense of the situation is that the lack of a cadence made those teams more successful.

Reaction time of linemen to hut sound
International Association of Athletic Federations says that if an athlete moves sooner than .1 second after the start signal, he false started on the grounds that a human cannot react that fast to a signal. The world record reaction time was .101 seconds which may have been achieved by anticipating rather than reacting. It takes .006 seconds for the sound of the “hut” to travel from the quarterback’s mouth to the tackle’s ear. It takes .026 seconds for the brain to send the signal to the feet to move.

In football, there is no electronic disqualification time, but coaches who emphasize get off risk false-start penalties which can quickly offset the value of extraordinary get off. In addition, the defensive line is going on visual ball movement which takes no time at all to go from the ball to the eyes of the defender. Light moves a 186,000 miles per second.

An article at http://condellpark.com/kd/reactiontime.htm says reaction times are mostly .13 to .15 seconds and these are world championship sprint races.

According to the book Football Physics by Timothy Gay Ph.D., the reaction time of a football player is .2 seconds, that is, it takes .2 seconds from when the quarterback says “hut” until the brain receives the command to go until when the body starts to go.

A rhythmic cadence enables the offensive linemen’s brains to issue the command to their muscles to go .2 second in advance of the actual “hut.” The defense cannot issue a go command from their brains until they see the ball or the offense begin to move so they are .2 seconds late getting going.

In high-level swimming and track competition, the go signal is a light and any racer who starts moving before humanly possible, that is, before the fastest reaction time of superb athletes, is disqualified on the grounds that he or she must have issued their brain command to go before the light.

In football, it is legal to give the brain command to the muscles .2 seconds early, but it can only be accomplished with a rhythmic cadence.

Speed differential
According to the book The Physics of Football by Dr. Timothy Gay, the advantage of Anthony Muñoz knowing the snap count and his direct opponent Lawrence Taylor not knowing was that Muñoz was going 8.3 feet per second and Taylor was going 5.1 second when they hit. Taylor was going slower because he started later than Muñoz which means Muñoz had more time to accelerate toward his top speed.

Is this good? Sure. But then L.T. was all-pro without ever having the advantage of knowing the snap count. So it was not decisive.

Never an advantage to the defense
An old coach colleague of mine told me that his quarterback once kept going on one in a game in college and the coach said he was getting killed as a result. He said he finally told the QB to change the snap count or he was going to kick his ass.

Nice story. Often heard football story. But it makes little sense. Going on one or not, the defender never has an advantage over the offensive player. Even if the defender “knows” the snap count, it just puts him on an equal footing with the offensive player. It gives him no advantage. So if my coach colleague was getting his ass kicked when both players had the snap count, he must have been an inferior player who had no chance to best his man unless he had a two-tenths of a second head start on him.

The defense never knows the count for sure
More importantly, the defense never knows the snap count the way the offense knows the snap count. If you always go on one, the defense still cannot count on it. If you always go on one and you sense that the defense is going on the snap count instead of visually as they are trained, you can easily run a freeze play where you just line up and call cadence, but no one moves on your team. The defense who “know” that the ball will be snapped on one all jump offside and you get a free five-yard gain.

That, in turn, will cause the defense to go back to watching the ball rather than trying to go on the first “hut.”

Terry Bowden
When he became the head coach at Auburn, Terry Bowden told his offense to always go on one. How did that work out. His team went undefeated.

I have always had my teams go on one, if we had a cadence at all. I prefer not to have a cadence at all. In that case, we go on ball movement, same as in a scrimmage kick, same as wide receivers always do, same as the defense. How well my teams did was a function of the quality of our players. I had both winning teams and losing teams always going on one.

Only applies to guards, tackles, and tight ends
When you think about it, the benefit of knowing the snap count only accrues to the guards, tackles, and tight ends. The wide receivers are too far away. They have to go visual so they get no benefit from knowing the snap count. The center, in my “no cadence at all” approach, snaps whenever he wants after he feels QB hand pressure so he is the first to know because he decides.

The quarterback is the one who gives the silent hand pressure in my approach, so he does not need to hear a snap count. Finally, the offensive backs do not need to hear the snap count because they have no defender right in front of them the way the linemen do. They can just watch the ball.

I coached varsity tight ends one year. After a few games, I could tell that the starting tight end was not making any effort to remember the snap count. He obviously was waiting for others to move and going on that visual sign rather than the audible “hut.” I chewed him out and gave him some tips to help him remember like balling his fist up and pushing the snap count number of fingers into his palm in the huddle. He ignored me and continued to wait until the other offensive players got off before he would move.

How did that work out? We were league champs. He never false started. He was named second team all-league at tight end.

Reaction time of wide receiver to hut sound
At sea level, sound travels 340 meters per second. Actually, it depends on humidity and temperature, but that’s an average. Wide receivers, on average, are about 18 meters from the quarterback. That means it takes .05 seconds for the sound of the hut to reach them or about .05 ÷ .006 = 8.33 times as long as it takes to get to the tackle’s ear.

As a result, wide receivers are trained to watch the ball rather than listen for the snap “hut.” Therefore, there no benefit whatsoever to varying he snap count or even having a snap count with regard to the wide receivers.

No snap count for scrimmage kicks or shotgun
There is no snap count for scrimmage kicks, that is, punts and place kicks. There is also no snap count for shotgun-formation plays. Everyone goes on ball movement. So how important the benefit of varying the snap count can be if it can be totally abandoned on scrimmage kick downs.

No wake-up call
If you go on any snap count—varied or otherwise—you have to have a cadence leading up to the “hut” that triggers the snap. When we used no cadence at all, we often snapped the ball when the defense as still in their huddle or when one or more defenders had their backs turned to us. That happened mostly at the beginning of the game, but happened sporadically throughout the game. It’s great when you can snap the ball behind the backs of the defense or even only some of them.

In other words, the cadence preceding the snap “hut” serves as a wake-up call to the defense. Furthermore, such cadences are so universal that the defenders come to rely on the offensive cadence far more than their coaches realize and far more than they should.

Obviously, giving the enemy a wake-up call before every play is not a good idea if you can avoid it. And you can avoid it unless you insist on the use of a snap count.

Cadence violates hurry-up rules
One of my Football Clock Management Rules is that you should call for the snap as soon as possible after the ready-to-play signal when you are in a hurry-up tempo. That book also says you should usually be in a hurry-up mode whenever you are trailing plus in certain end-of-first-half situations. In other words, you should be in a hurry-up about half the time on average.

The typical cadence takes about seven seconds. The average play takes about six seconds. If you can stop the clock at the end of the play, by getting out of bounds, throwing an incomplete pass, or calling time out, the additional second of a seven second time span can be used to start another play. So every time your quarterback utters a cadence, he is preventing you from running one and maybe two plays later in the game.

Each hut and the silent space between huts takes about two seconds. So every time your quarterback calls for a hut, he uses two seconds. Over the course of a game, it adds up. By the beginning of the fourth quarter, every hut has cost about 15 two-second time spans per quarter or 3 quarters x 15 huts per quarter x 2 seconds per hut = 90 seconds. As I said, each play takes about six seconds, so by wasting 90 seconds on one hut per play, you reduce the length of the game by 90 ÷ 6 seconds per play = 15 plays. If at the end of the game, you do not run out of downs but you do run out of plays, the fact that you wasted 15 plays worth of time barking huts may well mean that you lost the game trying to capture the get-off benefits of saying those “huts.”

Remember, this is just the time lost from saying one “hut.” The time lost from the entire cadence is 7 seconds per snap. By the beginning of the fourth quarter, the team has wasted 3 quarters x 15 plays per quarter x 7 seconds worth of cadence per play = 315 seconds which is enough time to run 315 ÷ 6 seconds per play = 52.5 plays. Some teams do not run that many plays in a game!

This is the main reason not to vary the snap count. In order to vary the snap count, you have to have cadence and a snap count. If you are not the favorite or are trailing in the game, you cannot afford to waste all those seconds and plays for a benefit that is only measured in tenths of a second.

Not a problem if in slowdown
If you are supposed to be in a slowdown, which you generally should when you are a head and in certain end-of-half situations, you should wait until the end of the play clock to call for the snap. In that case, the cadence causes no wasted time. Enjoy.

Summary conclusions
• Having no cadence at all or a shorter cadence has tremendous clock benefits for an underdog or trailing team
• Having no cadence at all avoids giving the defense a wake-up call before every play
• Varying the snap count causes false-start penalties
• Although the theoretical advantage of varying the snap cout is a .01 to .02 second head start, the defense cannot assume they know the ball will be snapped will always be what you have done on previous plays so they will not be able to start earlier without risking encroachment penalties. So you get most of the same advantage if you always go on one and run an occasional freeze play.
• If the defense actually knew the snap count, it would give them no advantage. It would just place them on an equal footing with the offense in that regard.

To contribute an idea or comment to this Football Think Tank web site, either email to johnreed@johntreed.com or fax to 925-820-1259 or snail mail at 342 Bryan Drive, Alamo, CA 94507.

Best wishes,

John T. Reed