also: hot · sight adjust
The answer to a blitz that the protection cannot handle: someone converts his route short so the ball can come out before the free rusher arrives.
2 meanings, all below. Jump to the one you heard.
A pre-arranged adjustment in which a receiver breaks his route off short when the defense brings a rusher the protection has nobody for. The quarterback and the receiver read the same defender, so the throw goes to the space that defender left. It is a rule that lives across every protection rather than a route that belongs to one play.
hot, hot passcheckdown, audible, sight adjustmentThe receiver, rather than the route. The hot receiver is the man designated to be the answer against a given pressure, and he may or may not change what he runs. Older reference works carry hot receiver, hot route and hot pass as three separate terms.
hot receiverthe hot route itselfWhether hot and sight adjustment mean the same thing is a real disagreement about how blitz answers should work, not sloppy usage. One camp builds the answer into the play so nobody improvises; the other has the receiver read the coverage and adjust live. Some staffs have deliberately removed sight adjustments and replaced them with built-in hots. So the two words are synonyms in one building and opposites in another.
The reason this is hard to install is that it requires two players to read the same defender the same way under pressure, which is a communication problem more than a technique one.