Aaron Rodgers: 'Pistol' Formation Just a Fad

Aaron Rodgers: 'Pistol' Formation Just a Fad

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, a traditional pocket passer, said the pistol formation and the read-option popularized by quarterbacks like Colin Kaepernick, Cam Newton, Russell Wilson, and Robert Griffin III is just a fad.

“I think the league is cyclical,” Rodgers said on Thursday. “Things have come back around that have been used 20, 30 years ago. But this, too, I think, will pass. Some of the pistol, read-option stuff will eventually pass. Now it might not be for 10 more years. The athletic quarterback, I don’t think, is going to pass at all.

Rodgers, whose team lost to the San Francisco 49ers and Colin Kaepernick, who ran the read-option to near perfection against the Packers last weekend, compared the read-option to the “Wildcat” formation that was popular years ago.

“I think as we saw five years ago with the Wildcat stuff, it had its success and less and less people are doing it,” Rodgers said. “Now it’s more of the zone-read stuff, reading the end and keeping it or pulling it with a quarterback who has some athleticism. At some point, on some level, they are going to figure out a way to consistently stop that.”

Chris Ault, who retired as Nevada’s head coach and was Kaepernick’s coach in college, is considered the godfather of the pistol formation. 

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