Different tempos allows you to keep the defense off balance. You can go from Hyper-speed to a huddle to a check with me system. If the defensive coordinator is focused on getting his play call in as fast as possible to keep up with your tempo, it allows you to take some extra time on certain plays. It allows the offense to be a little more complex while keeping the defense vanilla.

No huddle teams can also struggle to finish off games with a lead. Running a Four Minute Offense goes against everything that is in the DNA of a fast tempo no huddle team. As a coach, I made the mistake of not working on a slower tempo and it cost us in games where we needed to use up clock to secure a win. Using, and practicing a slow down tempo can help you to win those games. It also allows you to shorten the game if you are playing in a game where you think that is the best way to give your team a chance to win.

What Tempos Do We Use?

The first tempo we use is our fastest tempo that we call Thunder. The goal with this tempo is to get the ball snapped as quickly as possible in between plays. Our goal is within 5 seconds after the ball is spotted by the referees. We use limited shifts and motions because that takes more time than we want to use. We will snap the ball on first sound so our OL gets into position very quickly and we cannot change the play call once it is signaled in.

Our base tempo is called Lightning. We still want to snap the ball as quickly as possible, but we have more flexibility in what we can do with shifts, motions and play calls. A big part of our Lightning tempo is that we can run Check With Me (CWM) offense. The CWM is a very powerful tool that we use for multiple reasons: