In the old days, they were known as big plays. Or maybe long plays. It’s not clear when, or why, football people started to refer to them as “explosive plays” or just “explosives.” It was probably around the time football people started referring to position groups as “rooms.”
The football people also can’t quite agree on what defines an explosive play, because there is no official definition: Some use 15-yard runs and 20-yard passes. Others use less.
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“People tend to slant those to whichever one is favorable to them,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said last year.
There has been a growing consensus, however, that a stat is very important: Explosive play margin, as
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