So, on the first drive of the game we had one of the biggest plays of the game for either side.
So, I believe Kittle has an option route here. It looks like if he sees zone he'll sit down on a curl for a horizontal stretch, vs man it'll be a stick nod route where he'll fake the out and run a post. We motion Kittle across and the LB follows while LA shows 2 deep safeties indicating a man-coverage look.
At the snap LA goes with a cover 1 'robber'. It's called such because most teams when seeing cover 2 -man will look to attack the middle of the field so they drop the safeties down the middle to look to pick off those routes. I remember Rod Woodson taking an interception on a house call on MNF when he played for the raiders on this same defensive call. Jimmy sees the safeties change coverage so he knows if he's gonna hit Kittle he's got to hit him early our of his break.
Kittle does a nice job here against the man coverage. He starts his initial move before the defender can make any contact or disrupt him.
One thing that's great about a QB to be putting it on film that he can look to one side and throw to the other is that defenders can't key in on where he's looking every time. Even though he's looking over at Kittle the safety doesn't believe it and slides towards the 3 receiver side. Meanwhile, Kittle did such a nice job of faking his man out, he falls down. Though, a lot of players were sliding and slipping on this surface, it was as bad as Levi's in the early days.
