also: screen pass · screen game
A pass thrown behind or near the line with blockers in front of the catch rather than protection behind the throw. A whole category, not one play, and the versions have almost nothing in common.
2 meanings, all below. Jump to the one you heard.
A pass thrown at or behind the line of scrimmage where the value is in what happens after the catch. Blockers get in front of the receiver, and the throw is essentially a long handoff that gets past the defensive line legally.
The defining trait is that a screen inverts pass protection. Ordinary protection keeps rushers away from the quarterback; a screen invites them, because a rusher who has run past the play is a defender who is no longer in it. That is why screens work best against aggressive defenses and do very little against passive ones.
Because it is a category, "we ran a screen" tells another coach almost nothing. The versions differ in who catches it, where the blockers come from, and what defenders they are trying to remove.
screen passbubble screen, tunnel screen, drawThe version the word originally named. The offensive line lets the rush come, two or three linemen release out to a side, and a running back slips behind the rush to catch a short pass with those linemen in front of him.
It is the slowest-developing screen and the one that depends most on selling a genuine pass first, which is why it is a situational call rather than a base one, and why it is so damaging when a defense guesses right.
back screen, slow screendrawOne Air Raid source counts screens left and right as separate plays, and screens appear in all three Air Raid sources the corpus read, which puts the screen game at the core of that family rather than at its edges. Naming conventions for them are heavily program-specific.
The blocking is the hard part at youth level, not the throw. A screen with linemen who cannot find a defender in space is a two-yard loss. It is worth honestly assessing that before installing one.