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Lane Johnson’s Non-Penalty False Start is the Perfect Example of Why Context Matters

Kevin Kinkead

By Kevin Kinkead

Published:

Two items from the Eagles’ Monday night win.

First, did you notice that Jordan Mailata has learned the Lane Johnson/Jason Peters get off?

Again, it looks like Mailata is jumping early, but the cadence is actually timed perfectly with Jason Kelce’s snapping. I made a brief clip here to slow it down and show you how the outside leg moves at the exact moment in which Kelce begins to move the ball:

The second item relates to Johnson, who totally got away with a false start right before halftime.

I want to use this Tweet to explain why context matters:

The refs totally missed that one. Johnson clearly jumped early, and the video clip circulated heavily on Twitter with people saying some version of “he gets away with this every time!”

However, this was not a typical Lane Johnson set. If you go back and watch the replay, or even remember the play in real time, Jalen Hurts went up to the line, saw something the defense was showing, and then changed the play at the LOS. Johnson and the rest of the line adjusted, and he got the cadence incorrect.

Point being, people are taking an atypical sequence and passing it around as a typical sequence, which is incorrect. On 99% of non-audibled play calls, Johnson is doing the same thing I showed you in the Mailata clip above. He’s timing his release with Kelce’s snapping of the ball. In this particular case, he wasn’t synced up on the audible and jumped way too early:

Infrequently do you see Jalen Hurts change a play and then let the play clock tick down that far. You don’t see it very often, which brings us to the tried and true adage of “more than one thing can be true” –

  1. Johnson false started
  2. that was not how he usually moves

Context matters on these kinds of things, because what you have now is people sharing an outlier video clip, showing one thing, to make an argument for a different thing. There are hundreds of plays that better exemplify Johnson’s timing with the back leg, but essentially what you were looking at on Twitter was national accounts, or people not watching the game, who think Lane does this on every play. He doesn’t. On the vast majority of these plays, his timing is accurate and movement is legal.

Kevin Kinkead
Kevin Kinkead

Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com

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