Jon Gruden launches a campaign against clapping for snap counts

"Clapping is for Broadway musicals. It's for tennis. It's for golf. It's not for a snap count. I don't want to see one more clap on a football field. It's ridiculous.

If your quarterback is clapping, boycott the game or boo the offensive coordinator."

"I'm just telling you, I don't like all the false starts, man. I'll lose my god damn mind if we have too many of these. Because you guys had a lot of them."

"When you're in a short yardage (situation) and there's a lot of noise, I think that's definitely a deficiency when you go on the clap. The O-line's just waiting, you know? They don't really have an indicator. When the defense is moving and there's calls the defense is giving, it makes it hard for the big boys up front." 

"Kiffin will probably call me up and be pissed at me, but we're not going to get away with this shit in the NFL."

Then again, there's more to a clap than slapping skin to skin. Here's Riley Leonard explaining his snap count at Duke, which Gruden calls, "The greatest story I've ever heard in my life." 

It seems that Gruden's issue isn't necessarily the delivery method with which the quarterback tells the center to snap the ball, it's the (lack of) information conveyed from the QB to the rest of the offense before the snap, particularly at Ole Miss. Or at least it seemed that way back in the spring. 

So, what's the point here? What are we arguing about? Is Gruden wrong, or does he have a point?

Let's attempt to answer those questions with another question: What is Lane Kiffin paid to do, win games or prepare his players for the next level? Ultimately, I believe the answer is primarily of Column A with a dash of Column B. Ole Miss would certainly rather win 10 games a year with three draft picks than win six games a year with double-digit draft picks. 

The reality is that Kiffin is succeeding in both categories. Ole Miss ranked second nationally last season at 7.33 yards per play, third at 38.6 points per game, and won 10 games for the second consecutive season and the third time in the last four. And in April, Dart was the second quarterback taken when the New York Giants made him the 25th overall selection in the 2025 NFL draft.

It seems then that Gruden's issue is with the system as a whole rather than Kiffin in particular. The argument the old-timers make is that the Giants will have to spend time re-programming Dart to learn a skill that other quarterbacks would've already mastered by the time they got to the NFL. After all, it's not as if Ole Miss, Duke and Notre Dame are the only programs asking their quarterbacks to clap at the line of scrimmage. Just re-watch the video above for proof. 

Let's zoom out one more level now. Suppose that in 15 years, some coach and quarterback we're not aware of right now take the NFL by storm, winning three straight Super Bowls and leading the NFL in yards and points with an offense so simple that it's play calls are 1-to-3 words and a snap count that's a Lane Kiffin-style clap. Is football, by definition, a worse game because of it?

Plenty of people would say yes. 

"I think the quarterbacking has gone backwards a little bit in the NFL," Tom Brady said last summer. "I don't think it's improved. I don't think the teaching's improved. I think maybe the physical fundamentals might be a little bit improved because there's better information out there for quarterbacks to study on mechanics. But I don't think quarterbacks really are really field generals right now like they used to be.

"It's a broad statement, certainly. But I had total control. I had all the tools I needed. I was coached that way. I was developed to have the tools that I needed to go on the field so that whenever something came up, I had the right play, the right formation, the right audible, the right check at the line -- to ultimately take control of the 11 guys on offense and get us into a good, positive play.

"I think now, there's this try-to-control element from the sideline between the coaches, where they want to have the control," Brady continued. "And they're not teaching and developing the players the right tools so that they can go out on the field and make their own decisions that are best suited for the team. When I looked at Peyton Manning, he was a guy that I looked up to because he had ultimate control. And I think the game's regressed in a little bit of that way, based on what's happened in high school football, college football and then the NFL's getting a much lesser developed quarterback at this point."

Gruden would undoubtedly agree. As part of his dummy count system, Gruden used names for geniuses throughout history like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates... and Bill Walsh. Gruden himself is a student of Mike Holmgren, and Holmgren learned the game under Walsh as the 49ers quarterbacks coach in the late 1980s. Now years removed from his own coaching career, the most enduring clip of Gruden's 30-plus year career is the one of then-Tampa Bay Bucs quarterback Chris Simms struggling to spit out a play call that was probably a 4 on the Gruden Scale of Difficulty.

But the genius behind Mike Leach and the Air Raid system was it proved that it didn't take the West Coast's precision or its verbiage to conquer the skies. Was the genius of Leach, to make the pass game more accessible to more teams at a lower level of ball, actually a step backward for football at the highest level? Is this a game whose beauty can only be unlocked at maximum complexity?

I doubt seriously those thoughts were on Gruden's mind when he shot the video you watched above. But when Gruden campaigns a clap-count, he's really complaining about how the game is taught in every step that led to the snap.