What is "shot passing?"

What does it mean for an offense to be built around "shot passes" or set pieces?

Back when I was getting started out at Football Study Hall in the early 2010s, I was trying to learn as much about the game as possible and apply my learning through film study in order to develop #content ideas. I was learning about passing game concepts and how they work, what the quarterback’s progressions were and how the route combinations were supposed to get receivers open against different coverages, and I’d try to find examples on film.

Watching Kliff Kingsbury the blessed’s Texas Tech teams along with some other Big 12 offenses, I was quickly struck by how rare it was that a quarterback would actually go through a progression. The vast majority of the passes would be some kind of quick game concept, either a called screen or an RPO (or with Tech, fake RPO) short toss out into space. Even when they would run a real-looking progression concept the ball was generally going to the first read and it was striking that the quarterback never seemed surprised.

I didn’t have language for describing these plays teams would call but it was apparent that a fair percentage of the Big 12’s prolific passing was quarterbacks dropping back and throwing to predetermined spots and routes they’d rehearsed in practice. Eventually this sort of feature would start to takeover in the NFL and now we have the language of “shot passes” to describe it. You’ll rarely find an explanation anywhere though and it’s one of the things I’m most frequently asked about in comments after referencing it.

It’s kind of like the term “woke,” which can have a more or less precise definition, but has become a general catch-all term for anything deemed culturally liberal and over-bearing or obnoxious.

I’ll at least try to define and explain “shot passing.”