49ers orbit return

Kyle Shanahan knows how to tell the defense a story.

The New Orleans Saints used to be storytellers, too, but the ability disappeared in recent seasons, and now they’re hoping to get it back when Klint Kubiak leaves Shanahan's San Francisco 49ers and becomes the Saints offensive coordinator.

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To get a feel for how the 49ers went about constructing their offense, I decided to lock in on one of their more interesting motions and follow it throughout the season to see how they built upon it and used it to set up other things. The biggest takeaway is that anything is possible within Shanahan’s scheme.

One of the hallmarks of his offense is the ability to run multiple plays out of the same look. The 49ers create tendencies to break them, or sometimes they’ll never create a tendency at all and just keep you guessing about what might come next. A defense never has a chance to get comfortable.

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The 49ers' ability to disguise their intentions might have been the thing that broke the Philadelphia Eagles this season. Philly was 11-1 when the 49ers came to town and stomped the Eagles, 42-19. Some of what San Francisco did in that game was simply incredible, but the one thing that stands out most is how the team built plays off of its orbit return motion.

What is orbit return? That might not even be the right phrase, but the team uses an orbit motion, which is when a player motions behind the deepest player in the backfield. The 49ers like to use this a lot, but they like to add a twist to it where the player uses a standard motion before cutting into the backfield and returning to the side of the field they were originally on.

The image below shows the path wide receiver Deebo Samuel traveled on one play.

The motion helps quarterback Brock Purdy quickly glean the Eagles are playing zone defense, and after recognizing that cornerback Darius Slay was playing off coverage on wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk, Purdy quickly fires off a pass for an easy gain.

But he probably should have looked back to Samuel, because of the numbers advantage San Francisco had on that side of the field. Samuel only had one defender to beat and had a fullback to follow behind.

This look is versatile, and you can see how problematic it can be for defenses with all of the things they have to account for. San Francisco used the same motion from the 2-yard line and sold play action on it to set up an easy touchdown pass after Samuel got the whole Eagles defense leaning the wrong direction.

By the time everyone turned around, Aiyuk had slipped behind the safeties and got open in the back of the end zone and Purdy found him off of a bootleg.

Slay, who matched up on the receiver running the lower route, might have been the only player on the Philadelphia defense who played this correctly.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a BA 🐝 @THE2ERA#SFvsPHI on FOX#ProBowlVote 🗳 https://t.co/bosbZYCB7K pic.twitter.com/bMsKbnLQ5N— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) December 3, 2023

The 49ers also hit Samuel in the flat for a gain in the third quarter off the look when all the options over the middle were covered.

Looking back over the season, it is staggering to see the sheer amount of offense the 49ers built off of this motion. In Week 1, the team used it on a handoff to running back Christian McCaffrey, and the Pittsburgh Steelers actually defended it well, but you can see all the different ways this could have gone, and so could everyone watching the film the following weeks.

Purdy easily could have held onto the ball, stepped up and pitched it to Samuel for a run off the edge. He instead handed it off inside, which is probably what the play called for, but it’s clear something more could be coming.

The 49ers set up another one against the New York Giants off of this motion and, again, Samuel had the outside of the field, but the team handed off inside for a gain of five.

You could see on the one against New York that the motion had players in the second level freezing, and by now, the 49ers were establishing a tendency teams had to account for. Samuel had yet to take a handoff from the motion, but the threat was there, and that’s all that really mattered.

The 49ers finally hit a running play out of it in Week 16 against Baltimore. While the Ravens were ready for it, it still gained six yards and, entering the playoffs, defenses had something else to be worried about.

More often, the 49ers will send Samuel across and use a similar return motion but have him cross in front of the quarterback when handing him the ball. We saw that in the NFC title game on a 6-yard run against the Lions, as well as a few other times during the season.

New Orleans did incorporate some of these same motions last season, but it was way too predictable. When you saw it coming, you saw it coming, because there was nothing built on top of it. What’s tough to tell about the future of the New Orleans offense is whether Kubiak gathered the same feel for how to build plays and call them so that they’re telling a story.

If he even picked up a little bit of that skill and added it to what he already showed in Minnesota, the Saints should be back in the storytelling business.