The resurgence of the sixth offensive lineman: How NFL offenses will get bigger in 2025

• Getting extra linemen on the field more than ever: This year also saw the most games with more than six linemen in the first fourteen weeks of any season since 2016.

• Violations receive an employee benefit: After the defense countered passing attacks with smaller and faster defensive backs, the other side of the ball has responded with a philosophical shift.

• Receive PFF+ with a 30% discount: Use promotional code HOLIDAY 30 to unlock the PFF Player Prop Tool, Premium Stats, fantasy dashboards, the PFF Mock Draft Simulator, industry-leading fantasy rankings and much more – everything you need to win your season.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

If you personally attend a football match or even have an attentive ear while watching television, you know that when a referee says, “Number [XX] is an eligible receiver,” this typically means the offense has deployed an additional sixth offensive lineman for the upcoming play.

If you feel like you’ve been hearing that phrase a lot more lately, that’s because you have. Six offensive lineman formations are one of the hottest commodities in the NFL right now.

It ties in nicely with one of the broader schematic themes of the 2025 season. Offenses have realized that the modern NFL defense has become far too small, prioritizing speed over size when evaluating players in recent draft cycles. Now they have the body mass advantage to punish this.

We’ve seen an increase in heavier personnel groups, with multiple tight end formations prominent on some of the best offenses in the league. To counter this shift in philosophy, the use of starting defensive personnel (four defensive backs) is increasing for the first time since 2009, after fifteen consecutive seasons of continued decline.

However, no trend is more noticeable than the resurgence of the game with additional offensive linemen. They now account for about 7% of all the photos you see every weekend. For context, there has been more play with additional offensive linemen in the last nine weeks of this season than in each of the last four full regular seasons.

This year also saw the largest number of games with more than six linemen through the first fourteen weeks of any season since 2016. This isn’t just a trend that the league’s offensive minds collectively came up with last season. Instead, we have seen this movement actively grow throughout the 2025 season, virtually week after week.

This kind of data can easily be influenced by one or two teams heavily skewing the league-wide numbers, but that’s not the case here. What was once a niche area of ​​the game is becoming a staple of many offenses in the sport.

In Week 12, the Texans used an extra lineman on more than a third of their offensive snaps to secure a primetime win over Buffalo. The Dolphins repeated that feat a week later in their win over the Saints, before the Lions did the same to beat the Cowboys last week.

Not to mention the Steelers, Cardinals, Jaguars and Packers – all of whom have used extra offensive linemen on more than a tenth of their offensive snaps this year.

What might be even more interesting is which teams don’t use extra offensive linemen at all. The two most innovative offensive minds of their generation, Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan, are arguably the only two coaches to make one move with six offensive linemen so far this season.

In McVay’s case, he hasn’t used a six-lineman formation in more than three years. However, his Rams offense leads the league by a significant margin with 13 personnel (three tight ends), which is consistent with the theme of offenses generally getting bigger this season.

This trend of more than six linemen is still in its infancy. After surpassing the 100 snap total in Week 9, the league hasn’t dipped below that mark since. With the bye weeks for the season finally completed, there are no signs of this delay happening.

Weeks with 100+ snaps with additional offensive linemen, 2022-25

With this increase in extra-lineman sets, one might assume that offensive playcallers have become more flexible to accommodate this part of their offense.

When the opponent brings in an oversized body, defenses can make an educated guess that the offense is going to run the ball, and they would be right 73% of the time. But another 22% of the time they are fooled by a fake play-action.

This means that only 5% of sets with six linemen result in traditional passing dropbacks. That percentage of standard pass plays without play action is actually lower than what it typically was in the mid-2010s, when extra linemen were last in vogue. Perhaps by design, playcallers have become one-dimensional in these looks, attempting to set up run-fakes and strike with chunk plays outside of the play-action.

The numbers support this theory. The average target depth for standard play action throws this season league-wide is 8.0 meters. That increases to 11.0 yards when playing with an extra lineman on the field.

This is obviously due in large part to the extra time the extra blocker provides for the quarterback. While the extra lineman is defined as an “eligible receiver,” these big guys rarely plan to use that status. Offensive linemen have run just 40 total routes this season, catching just two passes — most memorably Tristan Wirfs’ touchdown reception against the Cardinals.

We all love to see big guys get involved in the receiving game. While there is still hope that these eligible receivers can get more designed plays in front of them in the coming weeks, it appears that playcallers are content to simply let linemen widen the size differential and continue to play fundamental football.

Ben Johnson deserves a shoutout for trying to throw a big touchdown against the Packers last weekend and not quite succeeding. Caleb officiated that game Williams only to find his second read, Colston Loveland, in the end zone instead.

The battle between offense and defense in the NFL zigzags every few years. The next big change is just around the corner.

Undersized defensive draft prospects with dominant athletic testing numbers that were previously ignored as “undersized” in years past are now scattered throughout the league. While their speed and range have been used to great effect to thwart the passing attack, attacking football has hit back in the simplest way imaginable. They just started using bigger guys.

If your team’s season is all but lost and your attention now turns to the NFL Draft, pay extra attention to the seven bigger defenders, especially at linebacker. Defensive coaches around the league are quickly growing tired of their sub-230-pound linebackers getting swept away by gigantic linemen in the run game.

Additional offensive linemen are just one part of the overall tide turning in modern football, but that wave is only going to get bigger and more intense as the 2025 season kicks into high gear.