Rick Neuheisel talks about the "Spread Offense"

Rick Neuheisel on "What do you think of the spread offense?" Neuheisel:

[T]here are times when I look at spread offenses and I see value. The key to the spread offense, and the reason why its successful, is that it adds an extra player. It diminishes the need for great offensive linemen, because you’ve got a little longer because you are always in the gun, and the quarterback’s a runner. So, in essence, he becomes a blocker, and can account for an extra defender. All great thoughts . . . . The problem at UCLA is that you have to beat the Trojans. And it's also the benefit at UCLA, because when you beat them, you’re going to be among the nation’s elite. So you have to be a physical offense. I know that two years ago SC got beat by Oregon up in Eugene, but his last year, SC with their physical defense was able to beat the heck out of a very, very good spread offense Oregon team.

You’ve also seen when you lose a quarterback in the spread offense, things can go awry, as happened with Oregon two years ago. They lost Dennis Dixon and then I think they lost their last three games to Arizona, to UCLA and then to Oregon State. It’s a difficult offense to have a lot players at the quarterback position because it’s so [much] decision making, which requires all the repetitions and, yet, you’re exposing them.

I was the benefactor of a type of spread offense, even though it was an option offense, it’s the same math in terms of the quarterback’s [being] a runner in Marcus Tuiasosopo at Washington which we took to the Rose Bowl. So, I understand the benefits and the virtues of having the extra guy. I just think you have to be careful about how often you expose that quarterback. [Jeremiah] Masoli at Oregon was maybe the player of the year had he burst onto the scene maybe a couple weeks earlier last year. But, if he’s gone, what happens to the offense?

That being said, the other thing that kids are interested in today is the chance to go to play on Sundays. You are not seeing spread offenses played on Sundays. Vince Young would have been the perfect guy to go and do it, but even Vince Young didn’t want to do it. And I have it on authority, because Norm was there, because he doesn’t want to get hit anymore. He doesn’t want to get beat up on an every-Sunday basis and shorten his career length. So, quarterbacks that are interested in going to the NFL would like to be in pro-style offenses. So, you can go and attract guys. [Likewise,] offensive linemen, frankly, would like to be in offenses that are going to be like the NFL because they’d like to have a chance to play in more of that scheme. It goes on down the line; the more you play like an NFL offense, the more the NFL can look and see your skill level and adapt it to that. That argument gets more watered down the further out you go because obviously receivers can still play receiver, and running backs can still play running back.

But it’s an interesting question, and I think you can never, ever stop investigating it, and researching it, and having some components of it. There were some components of the spread offense in what we did last year. We got into the old wildcat stuff, and it isn’t as though we’ve got our heads in the sand. I just think, to start with, we’ve got to be a physical running team that can handle the line of scrimmage with the likes of a very talented defensive team like USC.

(H/t: TeamSpeedKills and Bruins Nation.)

There's a lot going on there, to say nothing of the Norm Chow/Neuheisel sandbagging of Vince Young as "not wanting to get hit anymore." Team Speed Kills rightfully takes Pretty Ricky to task for conflating the "spread" -- which best describes certain formations with multiple receivers -- with an entire offensive philosophy: "Basically what he described is the Rich Rodriguez/Urban Meyer style offense (except for the part about the spread not being physical). However, that's not necessarily what a spread offense is."

That's true. And Neuheisel is all over the place in this answer. Yet, assuming that Neuheisel, when he says "spread" means that particular type of running QB spread, still identified some points worth addressing. He says the spread is great, but (a) it's not physical enough to be used to beat Southern Cal consistently, (b) it's too quarterback dependent and prone to injuries, (c) the pros don't use it so recruits might not want to, and (d) that said, it does have certain arithmetic advantages in terms of getting extra blockers or numbers.

This is a broad topic, about which I have previously had much to say already. And, though I agree that Neuheisel oversimplifies in equating the "spread" with the Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez/Oregon spread-to-run-the-QB offenses, it's not entirely fair to say that he's way off base. I take Neuheisel as understanding that, in its most general sense, "spread" is just a formation with some extra receivers. But it's also true that "spread offenses" -- often self-described -- have claimed an identity, and as lame, vague, and non-descriptive as the term is, what is the alternative? (Note my term above was "Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez/Oregon spread-to-run-use-the-QB offenses" -- hardly a model of clarity or brevity.)

So when someone asks Neuheisel, who for years has run a west coast or three-wide type pro-style pass attack, "What do you think of the spread?" naturally he's going to think of it as opposed to what he and Norm Chow do, which, at least at one time, people would have described as "spread" in the sense that the New England Patriots or Arizona Cardinals are spread. (Imagine if someone dropped Neuheisel and Chow's offense into 1983 -- they would undoubtedly be "spread.") Indeed, the core of Chow's offense is used by Mike Leach in his four-wide all the time Airraid; if Leach is "spread" and Chow is not, then that means we put a great deal of weight in the cosmetics of being in the shotgun, and it begs the question of at what point does your use of a tight-end make you "not spread"?)

In any event, this Wittgensteinian debate about defining "spread" versus "pro-style" versus "spread option" (Wait, is Florida "spread option" or is Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech?) obscures some of the actual points Neuheisel makes, which are worth addressing. For now, everyone should just understand that we have no good terms anymore, as "spread" and "pro-style" and even "option" (now co-opted from true triple option teams to anyone who pitches it after their zone-read, and sometimes announcers even refer to the zone-read as "option" which it is not -- it's just an amped up bootleg pass; more on this later) have bled their descriptive lives away. So let's get to the underlying issues, assuming we are all talking about this running QB spread -- which includes a wide swath of teams still -- as opposed to just multiple receiver formations.

Neuheisel's points

Here's Neuheisel's points, paraphrased, and my brief responses.

(a) The spread isn't physical enough to be used to beat Southern Cal consistently. False. USC is just a damn good team, so you can get by with this little fallacy since everyone loses to USC a lot anyway. It's really not worth wading into the spread being a physical or finesse offense argument right now, suffice to say that it is fairly silly. Now, Texas Tech is no smashmouth team, but Neuheisel was discussing the spread to run teams: who can say Florida was not physical enough? And he admits that Oregon beat USC, yet his reason that they lost later was not that they were less physical but that their quarterbacks were injured. I think some teams are more physical than others, but in this case the spread aspect doesn't change anything. Adding a tight-end for a wide receiver can't change your whole team dynamic, and neither does it define it.

(b) The spread is too quarterback dependent and prone to injuries. Well, there's an irony about this coming from Neuheisel whose first season was marred by a multitude of quarterback injuries, and then the subsequent horrendous play of the guy they were stuck with. So yes, I completely agree that the spread -- just ask Michigan -- requires excellent quarterback play. But that's the trend with all offenses now. The difference between the spread and some other offenses is that you look for a wider variety of skills in the quarterback, and a good team can play to them. The guy does need the ability to run a little bit (again, just ask Michigan), but neither does the guy have to be one of USC's 5-Star statuesque passers to succeed. In other words, the spread is a double-edged sword in this respect. Yes, you absolutely need a good quarterback to succeed with because it is so focused on him, you can have success with a wider variety of quarterbacks. Indeed, Oregon is exhibit A last year: they had great success despite losing several quarterbacks throughout the year.

(c) The pros don't use it so recruits might not want to either. I'm no recruiting guru, so I can't tell you what they want, but it's true that the Pros are never going to be truly spread in the sense of the zone-read or triple or all that. Now, with the wildcat maybe they see some arithmetic advantages (see below) while still keeping the ability to throw the ball a bit more. We'll see, in any event. But however true this argument is, it's not an argument about why you should or should not use the offense in college, other than the recruiting aspect. And again, in the last several years the National Champion has been quarterbacked by guys like Vince Young and Tim Tebow, so I'm not convinced that recruiting is really as bad as they say.

(d) That said, the spread does have certain arithmetic advantages in terms of getting extra blockers or numbers. This is of course the truest thing Neuheisel said. It was well summed up by one of Rick's mentors, Homer Smith, quoted in a recent post of mine:

The spread offense today features the running QB. Defensive problems come from not having a tackler ready for the QB at the line of scrimmage. . . . As long as running QBs keep winning the jobs, the spread will be the formation of choice. Someone has to tackle the QB. If that someone is looking for a post pass, the QB is going to have running room.

With this quote it's no surprise that Neuheisel equates "spread" with running QB. But Coach Smith's point is exactly right: if your quarterback is a threat to run, you can dramatically alter the defense's structure.

All this flows from the simple fact that there are eleven players on one side and eleven players on the other. Every ballcarrier necessarily has an unblocked counterpart: if you bunched up and tried to block everybody one guy is still unblocked. Maybe you can dictate who that is so he is too far away, but the defense will always have one guy.

In the NFL, the quarterback hands the ball off on a run play and stands there. The quarterback's counterpart is usually the deep safety -- he stays back in case there's a play action pass. The runningback's counterpart is still free to come up and make the tackle.

With the shotgun run game and great faking and reading, the quarterback can alter the assignments. He can occupy two defenders: the backside defensive end, who must watch him for a run, and the deep safety, who has to guard the post-pass. This opens up blocking in the run game. Note the two circled defenders.



Alternatively, you could also just look at it as a transfer of who is assigned to whom. Instead of the defensive end being unblocked and able to chase down the runningback, he must account for the quarterback. So even if the safety is responsible for the runningback (a tendency you can exploit with play-action), your runner is still through the hole before he gets tackled.

Thus, there are plenty more issues with the "spread" to work out, and in the process that term has quickly lost almost all use as a meaningful and descriptive term. I agree that it should probably be relegated to describing only a formation, but it's not easy to transfer everyone's lexicon, and it's not like I have a ready subsitute term in place. And Neuheisel raises some interesting -- and common -- points about the offense, but I can't say I agree with him up and down. It sounds more like he's trying to justify why they do what they do rather than what seems to be popular, and he shouldn't have to. That's his choice, and he will succeed or not on that basis.

A Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot - Part 1

The most famous game that involved a team running the run and shoot offense was one where that team lost: the infamous "greatest playoff comeback of all-time," where the Buffalo Bills came back from 35-3 down to beat the Houston Oilers in overtime. The storyline was, to many, that the Oilers' four-wide offense couldn't control the clock and gave up the lead. Maybe so. But something had to go right for them to get the 35-3 lead (and score 38 for the game to send it into overtime). Maybe the offense failed to prepare the defense -- that was a common meme for years, but seems to have receded when spread offense teams like the Florida Gators or the New England Patriots comebine great offenses and defenses.

And it's true, no NFL team runs the pure 'shoot anymore (though some high school and small colleges do, and of course June Jones does at SMU). But the concepts live on, and the "spread 'em and shred 'em" philosophy the 'shoot engendered has found more and more converts over the last two decades. But the offense is not particularly well understood; it is still considered an outlaw approach. And true, the dedication the offense requires to be run well also requires something approaching exclusivity: not much time is left to devote to doing other things.

But, I am a big believer that the 'shoot both can be a very viable offense in and of itself (hello June Jones!), and, even more than that, I think that understanding the offense is one of the best ways to really understand passing offense generally. This is evidenced by the fact that the offense's concepts live on in the playbooks of every NFL team and a great swath of college and high school ones.



So, this offseason I am starting a multi-part series on a "Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot." The series' purpose a few-fold: (1) to explain what makes the Run and Shoot distinct from the larger umbrella of "spread offenses" (including Mike Leach's Airraid, with which it is often compared and confused with); (2) to explain the offense's core tenets in a way could provide insight into all passing offenses; and (3) to provide a possible real-world system that distills the run and shoot's major points (and combines them with some of the best of the modern passing game) into something that could be used at the high school or small college level.

In this introduction, I will begin with some of the offense's core philosophy. In future posts I will address some of the specifics.

Philosophy and tenets

There are four major points that make the 'shoot the 'shoot, and then a few ancillary ones that have come into play over the years.

Pass-first offense. Not all spread offenses are pass-first, and not all teams that use run and shoot concepts are pass-first, but if you're going to commit to the offense, you begin with the past (and often end there too). When the Hawai'i coaching staff under Junes Jones gave a clinic talk to other coaches at the AFCA convention a few years back, they named their talk "For those who like to throw the ball." One of the major reasons for this is just practice time: you can only do so many things well. By specializing as pass-happy team they get an incredible amount of repetitions doing the things they do over and over and doing them well.

Four wide-receiver commitment. Now there's much debate within coaching circles if you can be a "run and shoot" team without being a four-wide receiver team. (Ironically, the Bills who beat the Oilers in that game and helped drive out the pure shoot were themselves a team that used primarily run and shoot concepts but with a tight-end, hence their nickname, the "K-Gun.") Moreover, run and shoot teams are actually far less multiple by formation than the typical spread team. They typically use a two-by-two spread look or a "trips" spread look with a single backside receiver and three to the other side. And they rarely go five-wides. There are many reasons for this -- including specialization of players -- but a big motivator is that their receivers and quarterback do so much reading after the snap they want to keep it simple before it; they want to see where the defense lines up and attack that. If you have fixed assignments, you are more concerned with moving the defense around to open those up; if you can adjust on the fly, that doesn't matter as much.

Receivers read the defense on the fly. This is probably the biggest difference between the modern "spread" and the 'shoot. Some of that distinction is a matter of shades of gray, but in other cases it is quite dramatic. The point about formations was made above, but the basic theory behind the offense goes back to the originator, Tiger Ellison. As the story goes, he wanted an offense that emulated what was most natural, so he observed playground and backyard football. He said you didn't see highly formalized lines and alignments or wedge plays and all that. Instead you saw a kid, on the run, tossing passes to receivers who would keep moving until they found open spots. To Ellison, if you didn't coach the kids too much they began "run and shooting" on their own, so he thought this was how people really want to play. Hence, his receivers would read and react on the fly to get open.

As Mouse Davis, who did as much to develop the modern 'shoot as any human could, has explained: "We are always going to adjust on the run to the defensive coverage," he said. "If the defense sets in one look, we are going to make one route adjustment. If the defense sets in another look, we are going to make another route adjustment."

There are a few ancillary points that have been part of the offense, but to a varying degree. For my purpose in this series they are important but not imperative.

Quarterback movement. In Ellison's original shoot and the versions used by Mouse Davis and in the NFL, the quarterback always began with a "half-roll" or semi-"sprint out," where he moved the pocket and attacked the corner. If you watch the video below of Portland State (now coached by run and shoot veterans Jerry Glanville and Mouse Davis; Portland State is in white and black), you'll clearly see what this looks like. This comported with Ellison's original vision of the run and shoot, and the fact that pass defenders had to contend with the threat of the quarterback running at them distorted the coverage. Nevertheless, some teams now have evolved to more of a dropback look, and June Jones now at SMU uses something of a hybrid. Moreover, what pass protection schemes you want to use will influence how you have your quarterback drop back.

Motion. This is probably one of the bigger changes with the 'shoot. In the original days, the idea was to have motion on every play, constantly moving from twins to balanced and back and forth. Now, however, defenses are better at disguising their reactions to motion and not giving away whether they are man or zone, so most teams have just disregarded it and just chosen to play. Nevertheless it is still a good tool to reveal certain techniques, and never underestimate how much it can affect a defense to change the strength of a formation.

Wrap-up

This is enough for now. In future parts of the series I will address topics like adjusting pass patterns on the fly, the basic run and shoot concepts like "switch," "go," and "choice," pass protection, marrying other pass concepts with the shoots, and quick passes and screens. Below are a few more run and shoot clips.

The Lions' new coach Jim Schwartz: football pragmatist?

The Detroit Lions hired former Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz to be their new head coach. A daunting gig, to be sure: achieving success in Detroit might be beyond any coach's realistic hopes. But, insofar as they might have a shot, this is an excellent hire.

There are the obvious and ESPN-ready reasons to hire Schwartz: (a) that he has been defensive coordinator with the Titans under Jeff Fisher, running one of the league's best units there, and (b) that he has worked with Bill Belichick, which come NFL hiring time is like holding a golden ticket.

But there's a better reason, and it is one that should give Lions fans at least a glimmer of legitimate hope: the guy has a brain. Yes, he has a degree from Georgetown, which puts him ahead of most NFL coaches, but more importantly he has proven that he has an inquisitive, analytical mind, which is all-too-often in short-supply in the NFL.

This past fall, the New York Times ran an article on Schwartz saying he was like the NFL's version of Billy Beane, the empirically minded general manager of the Oakland A's made famous (and in some circles, infamous) in Michael Lewis' great book, Moneyball. Beane, as you may remember, helped revolutionize baseball by favoring detailed statistical analysis to aid him in determining his draft picks, batting order, and pitchers. It famously led him to pick up and use guys no one else had any interest in or had even heard of.

(A running theme in Moneyball was Beane's repeated failed attempts to trade for some then-unknown minor league player for the Red Sox that he nicknamed the "Greek God of Walks" for the player's ability to repeatedly get walked more than just about anybody, while also driving up the pitch-count and consistently getting on base. He even had trouble getting him because the then Red Sox's front-office couldn't even remember that he was on their roster. That player? 2008 All-Star Kevin Youkilis.)

The other thing Beane did was win against the odds. The A's repeatedly made the playoffs despite having a payroll a mere fraction not only of juggernauts like the Yankees, but most other teams in their division and around the league. Lewis' answer to the question "How was Beane doing it?" was that Beane was outsmarting his opponents. It was not necessarily that he was smarter, but his approach was: the A's were willing to do away with "common wisdom" and even the kind of impressions most scouts give regarding a prospect: "Wow, look at the guns on him. He just looks like a baseball player." As a result, the A's routinely beat teams with payrolls twice theirs. And, now, the so-called sabermetric revolution has almost entirely swept through baseball. Even teams that don't rely on it as heavily as the A's still have some guys with laptops and Ivy League degrees slipping around their front offices these days. (The Red Sox too are now somewhat considered a Moneyball based organization, though one with a rather large payroll.)

But football is a different animal. On the one hand, football coaches and aficionados were engaged with advanced statistics long before baseball. Virgil Carter, former quarterback under Bill Walsh, actually computed the "expected value" of field position back in the 1960s. (He actually did it while enrolled part time in Northwestern's MBA program while also a player with the Chicago Bears.) Yet, as I have previously written, football is the most complex sport of all. You cannot model the game as a series of one-on-one battles as you can with baseball; indeed, the goal for both offense and defense is often to get two on one or three on two. But that has led far too many coaches, fans, and commentators -- maybe it is the machismo, maybe it is just the complexity -- to denounce and deride statistics out of hand, without basis.

Enter Schwartz. As the New York Times reported:

Schwartz, now the defensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans, had an economics degree from Georgetown University, an abiding fascination with statistics and a preference for watching game film over television. That made him a kindred spirit with his first N.F.L. boss, Bill Belichick. But when Schwartz told Belichick his findings from an early N.F.L. research project almost 15 years ago, Belichick said he did not believe him.

“Fumbles are a random occurrence,” Schwartz said he told Belichick. “Being able to get interceptions or not throw interceptions has a high correlation with good teams. But over the course of a year, good teams don’t fumble any more or less than bad teams. Bill didn’t agree. He said, ‘No, good teams don’t fumble the ball.’ But actually, they fumble just as often as bad teams.”

With the Titans, Schwartz once encouraged the former offensive coordinator Norm Chow to run more on third-and-short because his research indicated that it was more effective than passing.

Unorthodox thinking like that has earned Schwartz, 42, a reputation as one of the N.F.L.’s leading practitioners of statistical analysis — “Moneyball” for the shoulder-pad set — using them in coaching the defense for the league’s only unbeaten team . . . . Belichick regards Schwartz as one of the smartest coaches he has been around.

As the Times points out, however, in the NFL, being known for your analytical skills is, strangely enough, not always a plus:

But being known as a “stats guy” is not necessarily a compliment, because statistics do not hold the romantic place in football that they do in baseball. Although every coach uses plenty of data — the Titans’ Jeff Fisher tracks how long his team takes to break the huddle — football is unlikely to bestow statistics-driven celebrity on anyone the way the baseball book “Moneyball” did on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

(Of course, as Salon's King Kaufman points out in his article "Ignorance is not a sportswriting skill," baseball isn't always that enlightened either.)

In a previous article I discussed the anti-stats view, which I said can be described as nothing but neanderthal in nature. But sometimes it is just inertia and an unwillingness to be beholden to anything that doesn't seem "up front" or real; to these people, they feel like they have the experience and perception to "just know" -- Hey, it's common sense. But as Lord Keynes warned, what many call "common sense" is often just some past blowhard's own shoddy analysis or comment preserved and repeated over time, without examination.

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. " - John Maynard Keynes

Think of the myriad examples, like "balance," play-calling, spiking the ball, or going for it on fourth-down. This is why Schwartz offers some hope. He may not succeed in Detroit, but, to me, he appears more likely to do so than anyone else. He will no doubt attempt to go in there and put together the best possible plan, not just a collection of truisms and cliches: Orwell's advice about writing can be applied to putting together a football team and organization; he discusses reading a writer who, in his opening paragraph, appears to have something important to say. But the rest of the writer's piece collapses because whatever fresh thought he began with was quickly replaced with a series of tired cliches and overused metaphors. The final product was thus imprecise, impersonal, and banal.

The analogy works for coaches. You might be talented and have a vision, but if all you can say is that we're going to "outwork our opponents," "we're going to have balance," "we will establish the run," or "we will be more disciplined than our opponents," then you're in trouble. All those are worthy goals (mostly), but they aren't always particularly constructive. Indeed, although in high school, maybe you can do these things because you might know the game more and be better organized, the NFL is a different animal. In the NFL, if a guy doesn't work he's cut; if a coach doesn't win he's fired. Rod Marinelli's Lions rarely lacked effort. They simply lacked wins.

In gleaning other hints about Schwartz's mindset and approach, I saw his name arise in the context of another Michael Lewis piece, this one about Texas Tech's Mike Leach:

At least one N.F.L. defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz of the Tennessee Titans, had stumbled upon Texas Tech accidentally and said, Oh, my. The surprise runner-up in the search earlier this year for a new San Francisco 49ers head coach, Schwartz had scrambled to answer a question: if he got the 49ers job, whom should he hire? He was just in his mid-30's, and his football career stopped at Georgetown (where he graduated with honors in economics), so he really hadn't thought about this before.

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.

... Whoever played quarterback for the Texas Tech Red Raiders was sure to create so much offense that he couldn't be ignored.

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. . . . Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."

. . . This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn't know if Leach's system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn't sure it wouldn't.

The takeaway is not that Schwartz will be hiring Mike Leach as offensive coordinator. (In fact, he has hired Scott Linehan, which -- despite some outcry -- is generally a good choice. Many coaches, including Urban Meyer, still think Linehan is a bright, bright guy, and as a coordinator his offenses always put up points.) But the fact that he'd even consider back then should be heartening: it means Schwartz is looking for results backed up by the numbers, appearances and cliches be damned. Leach's offense looks screwy: the linemen are linemen split out wide, four receivers line-up on nearly every play, yet it gets results, and results with inferior talent at that. Beane was derided and mocked when he'd pick up a pitcher with a funky sidearm delivery where the ball was released only a few inches from the ground -- a release no scout could ever condone. Yet the derision would fade when they realized that few hitters could hit that crazy delivery, at least for a time. Beane was shopping for discounts.

Schwartz, as head coach of a struggling team, no doubt will be looking at the bottom line, and he too will have to shop for discounts. Traditional or different, he wants results. He appears to be a pragmatist. In that job, he'll have to be.

Winning football games on Mondays through Saturdays

One part of the Times piece on Schwartz particularly struck me:



"Sometimes, [being statistics-driven is] an easy thing for people in the media to use against you,” Schwartz said. “ ‘Oh, yeah, he can’t adjust; he’s just a stats guy. They don’t really understand the game.’ That’s why sometimes, the whole stats thing is a dirty word.

“If you ask me, Would you rather have a great fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy on Sunday, a guy who can dial up plays and he’d be the best in league, or a guy who is best in the league from Monday to Saturday preparing, I respect the guy who prepares. You’re not always going to be rolling 7, 7, 7 and be hot every week. But if you prepare well during the week, you’ll be consistent from week to week.”

This exact sentiment formed the gravamen of Walsh's west coast offense. Quotes from Walsh:

I have been afforded the experience that allowed us to conceive an offense, a defense, and a system of football that is basically a matter of rehearsing what we do prior to the game. . . .

What we have finally done is rehearse the opening part of the game, almost the entire first half, by planning the game before it even starts. . . .

Now why would you do such a thing? I know this, your ability to think concisely, your ability to make good judgments is much easier on Thursday night than during the heat of the game. So we prefer to make our decisions related to the game almost clinically, before the game is ever played. We've scouted our opponent, we have looked at films, we know our opponent well. . . . To be honest, [in the heat of the game] you are in a state of stress, sometimes you are in a state of desperation and you are asked to make very calculated decisions. It is rarely done in warfare and certainly not in football; so your decisions made during the week are the ones that make sense. In the final analysis, after a lot of time and thought and a lot of planning, and some practice, I will isolate myself prior to the game and put together the first 25 plays for the game. They are related to certain things.

...But whatever you have, if you have planned it and fail, you can't blame yourself for losing your poise. You can't blame yourself for panicking if you have planned these things and they fail. You may really search yourself for the kinds of decisions you made on Thursday night, but you certainly can't make the decision during the game. As a coach, one of the things you are always fighting during the game is the stress factor, breaking your will. The stress factor will affect your thinking. I have been in situations where I could not even begin to think what to do. From that point on, I knew that I had better rehearse everything.

And, too, you can add in analysis that there is no time to do during the game. You analyze the probabilities, you remove the irrational choices like going for certain field goals on certain fourth and shorts.

A few years ago I wrote about the idea that gameplanning and weekday work is advantageous both because you can be meticulous but also because you gain important self-restraint capabilities. I drew on a lecture given by Nobel Laureate in Economics, Thomas Schelling (yes I know, it is not exactly the same as a Nobel Prize as established by Alfred Nobel). To illustrate, Schelling used a story about Captain Ahab; you can read it here.

But a similar story with the self-constraints that gameplanning puts on the coach (as compared with the seat-of-the-pants approach favored by so many) is the story of Odysseus (or Ulysesses) and the Sirens: when Odysseus's boat approached the sirens -- whose sweet singing had lured many sailors to their deaths -- he first put wax in his sailors' ears to block out the music, then had his crew tie him to the mast, thus making him powerless. In the moment, when his boat went by the sirens, he was irrational, and wanted nothing more than to steer the boat to him. But his rational self had already judged this, decided against it, and denied his later, weaker self the same choice.

Although not nearly so dramatic, gameplanning and the script often works the same way (though with slightly more flexibility than one has tied to the mast). Hopefully, for Lions fans, it is this methodical, analytical approach that Jim Schwartz offers.

Moreover, this story highlights the interdependent role that head and assistant coaches must have: they must take turns as Odyssesus and the crew, tying each other up, making the plans in advance, and even, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, entirely ignored, as Odysseus was.

As noted above, gameplans should nevertheless be contingency based; they must be flexible enough to respond to what an opponent does. But of course gameplans are based on this: those who reject scripting because they are too wooden just really don't understand what scripting is. But, a well crafted gameplan can still handle these scenarios and be created in a detached setting.

Moreover, the other important factor is that some information simply cannot be processed merely in-game; answers will only be yielded by careful study through the week. You simply don't have time to crunch all the numbers, assemble data on all the fronts and schemes, nor run down the variety of contingent scenarios. But if you do that, and then combine it with what you learn during a game, you have a chance to win. And, through your study, you might see options -- like maybe what Mike Leach does, the wildcat, or some other forward thinker -- that traditional football intertia blinds you to. As I wrote a few weeks back:

[F]rom Peter Bernstein's book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.

The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.

And it will remain controversial . . . because the future will be paved by numbers and judgment, marching, somewhat awkwardly, hand in hand.

Good luck to Jim Schwartz.

The rise and fall of the spread via Purdue's Curtis Painter

Dr. Saturday recently wrote about his guiltiest pleasures of this past college football season. One of them was Purdue Quarterback Curtis Painter's rather miserable season, despite all the preseason hype from so-called experts like Mel Kiper.

Curtis Painter's Implosion. I do feel for Joe Tiller, a perfectly decent coach who brought the spread to the Big Ten when it was still considered a novelty, went to a Rose Bowl and whose tenure in West Lafayette should be remembered as an unambiguous success. But one of the banes of my existence in preseason was the unfathomable hype for Painter, led by Mel Kiper, who anointed Painter the top senior quarterback prospect in the country despite his wretched mark (0-14 from 2005-07) as a starter against BCS conference teams that finished with a winning record. Painter subsequently tossed one touchdown to six interceptions during the Boilermakers' 0-4 Big Ten start -- during which Purdue scored 6, 3 and 6 points, respectively, against Penn State, Ohio State and Minnesota -- and was benched just in time to watch a redshirt freshman who began the season at running back light up Michigan for a season-high 48 points in November. In short, I was right and Mel Kiper was wrong ... so wrong, in fact, he'd dropped Painter to No. 2 on his list of the top senior quarterbacks by December. Way to eat crow.

For starters, I totally agree about Kiper. Aside from the fact that almost no one knows how to properly evaluate quarterbacks (scroll down for a discussion of Malcolm Gladwell's "quarterback problem"), it is well known in football circles that Kiper is just a fan -- he possess no uncanny scouting skills. (But who really does?) There's nothing wrong with that, but all he brings to his "rankings" and assessments is exactly the same thing you or I would after watching a lot of games on TV and checking the stats. That's it. No more, and no less. Kudos to him for doing what he does, but that's all it is.

But I think Curtis Painter's woes (great against weak teams, mediocre to poor against good ones) can be partially explained as a data point in a larger story. This story gets back to my discussion of the rise of the terrible spread team, and even my earlier post about whether the spread has reached its apex as far as helping the little guy beat the big goliaths with lesser talent.

Painter never started under the original Purdue offensive scheme architects, namely Joe Tiller plus Jim Chaney. Chaney left to go to the NFL (now he's with the University of Tennessee), and in stepped Ed Zaunbrecher, who had followed great success coaching offense at Marshall with some success doing the same at Florida under the Zooker and less at Illinois. When Zaunbrecher got there Tiller had already decided to move in some new directions with the offense. But, while there were differences the problems wound up being many of the same things, because of the talent and overarching philosophy.

In many ways, under Zaunbrecher I liked a lot what Purdue was doing. If I had to compare their offense to anyone else's in terms of structure and schematics it likely would have been the New England Patriots under Belichick/McDaniel -- one-back sets with a tight-end, shotgun, and lots of base, simple 5-step concepts like the snag, all-curl, three-verticals, four-verticals, underneath option routes, and smash. This was slightly different than the original Tiller model with Chaney when Drew Brees and Kyle Orton had been there, which was more no-back and more three-step drops.

Brees-Tiller-Chaney clips:



Painter-Tiller-Zaunbrecher



(Compare the quick drops and completely spread sets that Brees tended to operate from with the longer developing plays used with Painter. Some of this is styles--Painter probably had a stronger arm than Brees, and Brees was a quick decisionmaker with a quick release. And some of the evolution was necessary. But it's worth pointing out the slightly different styles.)

In any event, the Tiller-Chaney-Brees model of four and five wides and three-step drops began to turn somewhat stagnant against the big boys; it's not a phenomenon entirely unique to Painter. Kyle Orton began the 2004 season as a Heisman contender and then Purdue rattled off loss after loss and failed to generate enough offense. And the reasons were simple: by then, if you spread out Wisconsin, Michigan, or Ohio State, they had guys who matched up with all your receivers, and if you had any advantage at all they could still put a floater or robber defender to bracket him and take him away.

But, despite the changes with Zaunbrecher, the exact same pattern emerged, except almost even more brutally. From about 2002-2004, with the Chaney short-passing model, Purdue would manage a number of completions, all of them for very, very short yardage, no run after the catch, and would hope to break a play or two. You saw a lot of that with Zaunbrecher, but mixed in were a lot of very difficult to complete downfield passes to guys who were not open. The week before, against Syracuse or even Minnesota, they'd look like the Patriots. Against Penn State or Ohio State, they looked like Syracuse. Though Zaunbrecher was more willing to stretch the field, against these top teams they could not shake anyone free. Plus, this exposed the quarterback to pressure and the line to certain protection issues, something that had not been as much of an issue with the previous quick-release approach.

In my 2006 article, I wrote this about where the spread was headed:

The offense has arguably become the opposite of an equalizer, it has become an amplifier: if you are talented you can really rack up the points because no one can cover Vince Young, Ted Ginn or the like one-on-one, but if you're not, you just get sacked and no one gets open.

So -- and I recognize that there were other issues at work like play-calling and Painter's at-times erratic decision-making -- but to me Purdue and Curtis Painter became an object lesson for the effect of the spread. When they played out of conference opponents or Big 10 bottom dwellers, they lit them up: their offense worked perfectly to create matchups and generate plays that garnered chunks of yardage at a time. But against the big boys, they got manned up, pressed, jammed, and blitzed into oblivion.

And maybe even Purdue's new head coach, Danny Hope, who coached with Tiller back in the Brees days and this past season, has noticed this. He chose not to retain Zaunbrecher and has instead hired Gary Nord from Florida Atlantic, who spent the last two decades as Howard Schnellenberger's offensive coordinator. If anything, his offense is NFL-esque, but almost a throwback to the early 90s of the Cowboys under Aikman and 49ers with Steve Young. Maybe it will be a success, or maybe it won't. But the days of Purdue being spread-only are likely over.

Tiller? Definitely a success at Purdue. Maybe his biggest fault was that his idea was so good it got copied and assimilated too quickly.

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

Paul Johnson Describes His Flexbone Offense: It Derived From the Run and Shoot, and Then the Option Came Rolling In

I've been writing a lot about Paul Johnson's offense recently. But sometimes, it's best to get it from the horse's mouth. (Note: It's not the wing-t, and it's not just the triple option. And, although close to the wishbone, it has evolved from it. That's why it is called the flexbone: the run & shoot doubleslot formation with some 'shoot passing concepts, and lots of option, though with plenty of other wrinkles sprinkled in too.)





UPDATE: Looks like LSU's coaches saw this video and have been reading my site. They fared far better than Georgia and the ACC.

Why Oh Why Can't We Get a Better Press Corps: A-11 Edition*

ESPN and the A-11: a combination that guarantees poor reporting.

The ESPN recently had a cover story about the A-11 or "All-Eleven" offense, which I have written rather extensively about. My contention with it boils down to the fact that the entire offense is based around a particular rule exemption merely designed to allow speedier athletes on the field when a team punts (hence why it is called the "scrimmage kick exception") and that if the A-11's creators and proponents want to make their offense an every down one they should do it like how other rules get created, which is roughly democratically, by getting their representatives on the rules committees to do away with the eligible number restrictions to begin with. (At every level of football the offense must have five guys with ineligible jersey numbers -- i.e. 50s-70s -- who are ineligible to catch passes no matter where they line up, except when the "scrimmage kick exception" kicks in.) For some reason the A-11 types seem more committed to doing it via this rule exemption, which strikes me as surreptitious and a bit odd. (If you believe your offense is the future why not just get the rules passed? Especially since your rule exemption forces you to keep your quarterback to take seven yards deep shotgun snaps?)

For example, the image below does not depict the A-11, but instead something that has been going on for years. The difference between the A-11 and what is going on with Florida below is that, with Florida, the defense can identify receivers and linemen by their jersey numbers; in the A-11 they would all be wearing eligible numbers and, one second before the snap, some guys would step on the line and become ineligible while others would not. (And indeed, the A-11 creators are firm in stating that what they are doing is new and not old, though I'm not so convinced.)



In any event, the author gets flat wrong how the rule at play works:

Normally used for punts, the rule stated that as long as the player receiving the snap was seven yards behind center, any teammate wearing the jersey of an eligible receiver (between Nos. 1 and 49 or 80 and 89) was permitted to go downfield.

No. The offense is still limited to five eligible receivers after the snap: the number of eligible receivers is still restricted to the ends and people in the backfield, and the offense must still have seven guys on the line of scrimmage. Thus there are always five guys ineligible. What the eligibility restrictions did is that ineligible numbers -- 50s through 70s -- were ineligible even if in the backfield. The article therefore implies that offenses are getting six, seven, eight guys into the secondary, which is just not true, even in high school.

Further, the piece doesn't ever bother to explain how the offense actually works, or even what any of the opposing views might be. There is some lip-service given to debunking the straw-men and misguided Platonic Idealists who think it is "just not football," but those are easy targets. It never takes on those who fear that a wholesale adoption of the offense will remove spots for linemen on teams, or those with process-oriented objections like mine, which is extra-salient since all football rules are arbitrary -- 100 yard football fields, four downs, eleven men on the field; these are all important rules no? Yet the Canadians vary them all.

Instead, we get loaded gems like these:

Curiously, Titans coach Jeff Fisher, the other co-chair of the NFL's Competition Committee, says he has no interest in modifying the rules to allow for a full-blown A-11, because it would alter the game too radically

"Curiously"? As in, if only Jeff Fisher wasn't blind to the truth in front of his face, he'd know what's good for him. But this has to be in there, and the ESPN writer has to paint the A-11's rise as our witnessing some kind of Hegelian inevitable march through history:

Shock to the System

Wowed by The Wildcat, Spread HD and A-11? You ain't seen nothing yet. An offensive revolution is coming to the NFL. Can anyone stop it?

by David Fleming

"An offensive revolution is coming to the NFL"? As indicated above, the A-11 is illegal in the NFL; the scrimmage kick doesn't work how it does in high school. It doesn't work in college how it works in high school either. In high school any time the "snap recipient" is more than seven yards deep you can be in the scrimmage kick exception; in college it "must be obvious that a kick might be attempted." That language excludes anything but fake-punts, because it is only "obvious" that a kick might be attempted when there are things like, oh I don't know, there's a kicker on the field and it is fourth down. (Again, I'd have less of a problem with this if they just lobbied to get the restrictions done away with to begin with. I could buy that; it'd be what people wanted. The A-11's approach strikes one of caprice.)

Anyway, let's get more fundamental here.

That's why their playbooks are barely distinguishable from the ones Paul Brown first handed out in the 1940s. "When it comes to new ideas, I wouldn't say the NFL is risk averse," says former Ravens coach Brian Billick. "I'd say it's downright paranoid. You want something new? Sure, go ahead and try something. Make one mistake, and your ass is out on the street."

With offenses standing still, it's only a matter of time before defenses close the gap; witness how the Cover 2 has largely neutralized Walsh's creation. As scoring plummets, you can bet the league, once again facing scary economic conditions, will react as it always has—with more offensive-minded rules changes, followed by new schemes designed to take advantage of them. "The game will always evolve," says Falcons president Rich McKay, co-chair of the NFL's Competition Committee. "The only question is, What's next, and when is it going to happen?"

Let's unpack this.

• The major reason why Paul Brown's playbooks are still so influential is because of geometry and arithmetic. There's only eleven players and only five eligible receivers. (This is true even in the A-11, though before the snap they cause confusion because some guys pretend like they might go out but are actually ineligible and if they cross the line of scrimmage -- and the ref spots them, the real sticking point -- they are still ineligible. The A-11 doesn't change that.) And the dimensions of the football field are the same, and so the coverages are largely the same as they were back then. You still face Cover 2 (two deep), Cover 3 (three deep), Cover 4 (four deep), and Cover 1-man (one deep) and Cover-0 man (none deep). So the reason the plays seem so similar is because there's only so many ways to deploy your receivers to take advantage of the open spots. In fact, I've seen (and helped) the Piedmont A-11 guys with their pass concepts. Trust me, behind the fact that there's a lot of guys standing up before the snap, after the snap it's the same concepts you would see from the Steelers, Paul Brown, Mike Leach, or Urban Meyer.
  
  
• Billick is right about innovation in the NFL, though only to a point. This is a point worth elaborating on, but innovation goes in different directions in football. Macro-changes -- of the kind like the single-wing resurgence, run and shoot and spread, triple-option, and other arguments about the very structure of football and its geometry -- tend to come bottom up for the reason Billick states: small schools and colleges have little to lose. It doesn't work? You're no different than the last guy. And you need to do something different to give yourself a chance. But the NFL in many ways dominates the micro-evolutions: it's millions of dollars, staffs as armies, unlimited equipment, and only workaholics need apply. It's football 24/7; ideas get chewed up, synthesized, and assimilated. They might not merge the flexbone with the run and shoot, but they will play around with every single way you can get into three-verticals in a game, from every formation you can. It's Walsh taken to its logical extreme. All the best ideas are eventually tested in the pros. We're a long way off from the A-11 being there.
  
  
• Cover 2 neutralized the West Coast Offense? Bizarre. Who did the reporter speak to? The so-called "Tampa 2" was made famous in the 90s by Tony Dungy. Who did Dungy play more than anyone else then? The Mike Holmgren-Brett Favre Packers. Because in the Tampa 2 the middle-linebacker vacates to the deep middle, Holmgren ran the crap out of the "Texas" concept, where the tight-end flies down the middle and drags that linebacker deep and the running back runs an angle route in that void. Countered? The Packers won a Super Bowl and won many of those contests. And the author's point is a complete non sequitur. Cover 2 countered the West Coast Offense (presumably by taking away short passes), so now everyone is spread and... throws even more short passes?
  
  
• The final point is when the author just starts making things up. Scoring shall plummet! Plummet! Then they'll have to let in the A-11.

The proliferation of the spread-style scheme in high school and college means there are fewer classic pocket passers in the pipeline. When the well finally runs dry, NFL QBs will naturally evolve into smaller, more durable runners who can handle the physical pounding of the game and throw when they have to. Assuming the NFL creates special roster exemptions, teams might sign four of these new prototypes (think: Tim Tebow), platoon them two at a time like tailbacks or hold one out for safe-keeping until November. Instead of banking everything on one $12 million star, teams will pay four passers $3 million each. And with tougher QBs and less economic risk, they'll be free to run wide-open schemes, like the run 'n shoot, that expose passers to more hits.

So, the fact that more and more teams throw the ball at the lower levels means that there will be fewer guys who can pass, pocket or otherwise? The author is right only if you take the most narrow view of it: there will be fewer guys who can only pass, but there will be many more -- a la Tim Tebow -- who can do many things. What they focus on will depend on their talents and their system. But who can argue that suddenly the NFL will become a league of "durable running QBs" who "throw when they have to"?

I admit I have always liked the idea of a shotgun spread with two QBs -- call it the "Twin Tebow" offense, but at this point we're very far removed from having to expand something called the "scrimmage kick exception."

Anyway, there's a few things going on here. One, is that, as is normal with any other tabloid, ESPN the Magazine is hyping the next big thing before it's done anything. (The A-11 is kind of the Lindsey Lohan of football offenses: everywhere today; fond remembrances and bold statements tomorrow; maybe even a DUI or two in the future before we forget about it.) No A-11 team has had any kind of success -- which is not an entirely fair criticism, since the early adopters are largely small schools and downtrodden programs who need a boost both in terms of hype and getting kids out to play, which is often the biggest battle they face. Yet, as the video below shows, this is hardly the stuff that dreams are made on. Not bad, but revolutionary? And worth relying solely upon a rule exemption? Then I'm not sure.



In any event, I began as a fan of the A-11, but as I explored it more -- something the author of this ESPN piece has not done -- you see that its roots are shaky. Again, I am no football purist. I don't think there is "true football" or that it doesn't involve passing or the spread. I do disagree with some kind of bizarre view that football's history is inexorably moving to the A-11 (we've had Arena football for over a decade, flag football and 8-man football for longer). It's just a different animal. But if they want the A-11 to become a part of high school, college, and pro ball, then they should get the eligibility number rule changed rather than trying to rely on a rule exemption.

Which, I should add, I would support. I repeat, I would fully support doing away with the eligible number restrictions (which was put in place essentially to eliminate the tackle eligible passes). But I would do it head on, not through this rule exemption, and I would also increase the time that players must be set before the snap from one second to two or three. (In high school it is only one.) That way, it wouldn't be as difficult for defenses and officials to identify who in the heck is actually eligible or ineligible, which I suppose does reduce the concept's effectiveness. But, since there is no platonic ideal football, it's all about finding what rules make a game we all enjoy. All rules in sports are arbitrary (three strikes, 10 foot high goal posts), so they can all be changed. Here's to the game evolving the right way.

*As noted previously, I got the idea and name for this feature from the excellent Brad DeLong.

No Such Thing As Platonic Ideal Football

I originally wrote this as part of my lengthy (lengthy!) piece on the A-11 offense, but I think it probably got buried. This is something that I depart from many football coaches and purists about. Despite the fact that I have beef with the A-11 offense, one of those contentions is unequivocally not that it is not real football. That's a bogus reason. I have stated many times that football is just a game, and all its rules are arbitrary. I call those who believe otherwise the Platonic Idealists. Below is a reprint of what I previously stated about the offense.

The Platonic-Idealists

[There exists the argument that some offenses are not "real" or "true" football and therefore is bad.] Yet, haven’t we heard this charge before? Yes we have: The spread isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. And the run and shoot isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. And the West Coast Offense isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. And the wishbone isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. At one time the argument was that the entire T formation with a quarterback behind the center wasn’t real or true football and therefore it was bad!

[I]s there some pure, true, Platonic-ideal football? If not, then why? The answer is [no] because football is a game; all the rules - except ones designed around safety - are arbitrary. They might have in mind competitive balance, but this doesn’t make it “true” or “real” in any meaningful sense. What are the most fundamental, “true,” important, or essential rules in football that you can think of? For me, short of the shape of the ball used, my tops would probably be the 100-yard football field, the limit on both sides to eleven players on the field, and the limit on offenses to four downs to score or get a first down. Certainly, all would rank higher than the number of players who might possibly be eligible to receive a forward pass pre-snap, which logically must also rank lower than the number of actually eligible receivers.

Yet, setting aside eight-man football, flag-football, and Arena football, look at Canadian football: the field is 110 yards long, each side has twelve players with six – aside from the quarterback – who are eligible to receive forward passes, and the offense has only three downs to work with.

Now, if the line of scrimmage was abolished and instead of scoring touchdowns by carrying an oblong ball into the end zone teams were instead required to either kick a round ball into a net or by to throw a round ball through a hoop aligned ten feet above the ground then the game could no longer be called football simply because we wouldn’t be able to recognize it as such. But obviously the ability to recognize the sport as football is something far looser than what the “true football” ideologues advocate as eight-man football and Arena Football, to say nothing of the spread, the wishbone, the West Coast Offense, or even, yes, the A-11 offense, are clearly recognizable as football.

So, again, there simply is no such thing as “real” or “true” Platonic football. The next time someone next to you says, upon seeing someone successfully employ a double-reverse pass or some next-wave offensive system, that what you just saw was not “real” football (this group includes many football coaches) you can safely think to yourself that this person has no idea what they are talking about, and you can decide for yourself whether to let them know it (if it’s your Boss or Father-in-Law, I suggest agreeing or simply staying mute). Football is a game designed for fun and its rules are designed for no other reason than to promote fun and safety for players and spectators.

This view is buttressed by the fact that the primary reason for a sport’s rules is tradition, and nowadays most sports, including football, have ruling bodies that establish the law of the land and continually adjust those rules. If there was Platonic-Ideal "true” football, then the believer would have to view these rulemaking bodies as either improperly tampering with the immortal or, somewhat more likely, that they were continuously tinkering with football in its current form to achieve in this world something more closely resembling true, idyllic football through a process that would have to be described less as rule making and instead as divination. Both are, of course, ridiculous, just as the base claim that there is such a thing as Platonic “true” football is ridiculous. I certainly don’t imagine that this is what such rule makers actually see themselves as doing, but if you accept the “true football” argument, those are your inescapable conclusions.

The Florida Gator/Urban Meyer Offense

The book "Spread Formation Football," written by Coach Meyer, begins with the line: "Spread formations are not new to football." Very true.

Wait, I should have been more specific. "Spread Formation Football" was written in 1952 by Coach Dutch Meyer of TCU. Yet that Meyer's edict applies with as much force to today's Coach Meyer as it did then, if not more so, because it highlights a simple truth. Urban Meyer, and his offensive coordinator, Dan Mullen, are not geniuses, nor are they innovators. Indeed, Florida's offense is not new; it is not novel; it is not even that unique. Urban Meyer would agree and say, that's okay. His offense may not be new; it is merely very, very good.

The Gators have a legitimate shot at another national title, and I can't think of many coaching matchups more fun than Nick Saban's defense pitted against the the Meyer/Mullen/Tebow run 'n gun.

In this post I will briefly overview the philosophy behind Meyer's offense and then some of the core run game concepts, though I can do neither full justice here. But it's worth discussing to dispel some misnomers that get floated (especially by announcers and ESPN-types). Meyer does not run the wing-t from shotgun (his offense is not based around "series football" as those offenses are), he does not run the run and shoot with more running, and the option is only one part of Meyer's offense. Strangely enough, I would say that the inspirational fathers of Florida's offense have to be Joe Gibbs and Dennis Erickson, who helped establish and pioneer the one-back offense. Indeed, as will be discussed below, Florida's main run plays are basically the same ones both guys made popular in the '80s, though from the shotgun and a bit more option sprinkled in.

Surprised to hear these roots? Meyer is not shy; he admits that he was a late-mover to the spread offense, though as the years pass he looks more and more likely to be the last man standing. In the year of the rise of the terrible spread, we still have Meyer's flying Circus, complete with his rhinoceros of a quarterback.

Meyer bounced around as an assistant coach, finally as receivers coach at Notre Dame under the schematically brilliant but instinctively cro-magnon Bob Davie. Meyer has recalled losing to Nebraska in 2001, and being struck when, after they lost, he found one of his best players, David Givens, crying at his locker because he was unable to help his team win: he hadn't touched the ball the entire game. He swore to run an offense that got his playmakers the ball. While at Notre Dame, he began meeting with his intellectual mentor (his actual mentors were guys like Lou Holtz), Scott Linehan. (Yes, that Scott Linehan.) He was hired as Head Coach of Bowling Green, and decided that -- in years that just happened to be the rather formative ones for the spread -- he would have his staff learn at the masters' feet.

So, eschewing typical coaching visit hotspots like Ohio State, Michigan, Florida, and the like, Meyer directed his staff to make a midwest pilgrammage to learn from the likes of: John L. Smith and Scott Linehan at Louisville; Joe Tiller and Jim Chaney (now St. Louis Rams) at Purdue; Randy Walker and Kevin Wilson (now at Oklahoma) at Northwestern; and, of course, with Rich Rod at West Virginia. What all these guys had in common was they were one-back or spread coaches, they had the ability to run the ball (though Meyer focused more on passing with a team like Purdue), and they had an organized, conceptual way of thinking about football. Before Meyer's first season at Bowling Green:

Mullen and three assistants joined Meyer to visit Louisville and then Northwestern, Purdue and West Virginia, looking to blend ideas from each program after Meyer became Bowling Green's head coach in 2001. When all the coaches returned to Bowling Green, Ohio, they gathered in an office at Doyt Perry Stadium for a series of meetings over two weeks, diagramming concepts on a grease board and then converting it to computer.

"Obviously it was a very small foundation at that time," Mullen said, "that has grown into a very big house now, all the people that are running our style of offense."

(Compare this complete commitment to becoming a spread offense with some other programs you may have heard of.) Nevertheless, I don't want to overvalue Meyer's clairvoyance here, and neither would he. While back in 2000 the average fan and sportswriter did not exactly anticipate that schools like Northwestern, Louisville, Purdue, and West Virginia were the cradles of the greatest offensive revolution in thirty years, many in among the football cognoscenti did. (Self-plug: Like me. No seriously.)

But this is not a story solely about schemes. Meyer has always won football games, wherever he has been. When he arrived at Bowling Green he engineered one of the great turnarounds in football history, and I have known many great schemers who failed to win football games (Hal Mumme). In any event, later, Meyer and Mullen spent time with Navy and Georgia Southern (you know, with some obscure coach named Paul Johnson) to continue learning about option football.

So what did Meyer actually learn from these programs and coaches? We can see it from what he eventually did and now does. Broadly, Meyer and his offensive coordinator, Mullen, wanted to be shotgun focused, to spread the field, to be able to throw effectively, and run the ball and run the option. That hardly narrows it down, but that's sort of the beauty. The simplicity comes in how few schemes there actually are, and how almost cliche they are in practice: the inside and outside zones and zone-read, the counter, the trap, quarterback power, and the option game (with jet sweeps sprinkled over top, though I won't address that much here). This is the same spread playbook high school teams are running; indeed, there's little that Meyer runs now that Northwestern and West Virginia weren't running back then. Most differences are simply cosmetic.

I will only summarize his passing game. Meyer learned his passing offense primarily from what Purdue and Louisville were doing in their spread heydays. (Though it is important to note that both Purdue and Louisville at the time were traditional "one-back" spread offenses -- derivative of Dennis Erickson's one-back offense -- so although he focused on their passing games their running games were consistent with the inside zone and counter game Meyer was installing with advice from Rich Rodriguez and the Northwestern folks.) Meyer developed a system based from spread formations, with focuses on quick passes, lots of quick shallows, pivots, and other quick moves. (The biggest evolution in the Meyer/Mullen offense at Florida has been the attempt to improve their play-action game, which has always been tough for shotgun-spread teams to convincingly do.)

I turn next to the Meyer/Mullen approach to offense, followed by some of the primary run game concepts.

Meyer and Mullen's Philosophy

More important than the actual concepts Meyer uses is his approach. Meyer's offense is not like the wing-t (despite what commentators say), nor is it exactly analogous to traditional option offenses, like Paul Johnson's at Georgia Tech. This is because Meyer's offense -- like most other spreads -- is not entirely based around "series football," or a set play followed by its counter followed by the counter to the counter. Instead it is a more conceptual, more pro-style approach.

As mentioned above, the real sea-change for Meyer occurred when he visited Louisville and met with Scott Linehan, who at the time was coaching under John L. Smith. It was then that Meyer began thinking about the spread as more than just a formation, but a comprehensive approach to the game.

The entire theory can be summarized briefly: If the defense plays with two safeties back -- so long as the offense forces the defense to cover its receivers by employing constraint plays -- the offense has a numbers advantage in the box to run the ball against.



If the defense plays with a single-high defense -- again so long as it employs its constraint plays (which are not limited to bubble screens, but include play action passes and draws to be used when defenders begin looking too heavily for the run or pass) --there is no advantage in the box but the offense should be able to pass, as it does have enough numbers to protect the quarterback. So a team like Florida will look to throw. Against soft coverage, the offense will look to throw underneath; against press man, the offense will play around with receiver splits to free guys against man and will employ more routes good against man to man, like corners, option routes, and whip routes (begin like a shallow cross, stop and pivot back out to the sideline at five yards).



Finally, if there is no deep safety then the offense knows the defense is in cover zero and it expects the defense to blitz. The defense is saying, either we're going to get you, or you're going to get a big play; we're betting on us. Florida has a lot of responses, but at some point you have to be willing to go deep against cover 0.



And that's really it. From there, the coaches will look to individual matchups to exploit, slight structural or leverage advantages, and especially for when guys get themselves out of position. So long as the defense stays in its base coverage, Meyer and Mullen run their base stuff and it's just about execution. As soon as guys get out of position or the defense tries to get cute, they go to their constraint plays.


The Run Game

So let's look at some specifics of their run game. I can't cover everything (trust me, it would get boring quicker than you think), and the nuances change from year to year and week to week depending on personnel and defensive adjustment. But at core, Meyer still runs the same major concepts he ran all the way back at Bowling Green, which are run plays that go back as long as teams have run the ball. The major runs are the inside zone (with the ubiquitous QB read attached to it), the counter, the trap, the quarterback power and iso(lation), and various forms of option football. No matter what the defense does, Florida is going to practice and run these plays.

I will not really address the zone-read, though it is still the base of their offense. That play has been addressed extensively, and I discussed the play years ago.

Counter

The base form of Florida's counter play is quite simple. The playside line slow plays (or even pass sets) and then fires out and blocks the man down and double teams to the linebacker; the backside tackle pulls and leads; and the running back takes a counter step and then folds over the ball, looking to follow the pulling tackle's block. The quarterback reads the backside end (there's that zone read again), and if he crashes down the quarterback will take off and run.



Meyer and Mullen keep this same basic structure but do play around with the specifics: instead of the running back, they can have the running back cross in front of the QB and have the quarterback run the ball behind the pulling tackle; they can have the running back line up to the play side and take his counter steps there and circle back; and they can use two backs (or one back and another player faking a jet sweep) to show the counter fake. They can do all this because it is one simple blocking scheme and the backfield actions and ball carriers are the easy part to change, as are what motions or formations you want to use with it.

More recently, Florida has begun running more of the traditional "counter-trey" play so popular in the pros. The difference here is that it involves two pulling players: one who traps the defensive end and the other who pulls and leads. Indeed, this is another play showing how Florida's offense is just the translation of traditional concepts to new sets. Compare Meyer's the version of the counter trey that Meyer ran against South Carolina:


With the traditional I-formation version of that play:



It is also worth noting that Meyer has used more and more "H-back" types in his offense recently, which give him more versatility in his blocking schemes, but still is a micro strategy designed to affects the front and create leverage rather than effect some large change on the style of offense. But, as nice as schemes are, they do not really do the play justice. The Gators ran the counter-trey twice against South Carolina: both times for long (long!) Harvin touchdowns.





Trap

The trap is one of the oldest plays in football. Against penetrating defensive tackles, the line initially does not block those guys, then the backside guard pulls and destroys the tackle. Florida runs this play both as a trap to the running back and with the quarterback alone.



Quarterback Power

Obviously, it is in Florida's interest to use their quarterback in the run game. The power play is a team that every I formation team and every NFL team has in their playbook. The fullback kicks out the defensive end, the line blocks down and double teams the defensive line up to the linebackers (coaches often use the term OIL -- "on, inside, linebacker" -- to teach the blocking on this play), and the backside guard or tackle pulls and lead blocks into the hole. From the I, the quarterback hands it off to the tailback. In Florida's offense, the quarterback is the tailback. And this has obvious advantages: as indicated from the discussion above, the offense has a distinct numerical advantage when the quarterback is a threat that necessitates a defender's attention on run plays rather than just a statue who hands it off and gets out of the way, as NFL quarterbacks do. In any event, the play is diagrammed below.



Option ball

During coaching clinics, Meyer often mentions that he likes to ask defensive coaches what they hate to defend, and he says their answer is always option football. (I'd wager that most of Georgia Tech's opponents this season would tell you the same thing.) I am not going to spend much time on the zone-read-triple option, which to me is a nice but ultimately unsatisfactory play. It's a nice wrinkle on the base zone-read, but unlike the traditional triple option, it is not designed in such a way that the offense is correct every time. (That is because the initial read is of the backside defensive end; but even if he stays put, the success of the playside inside zone play still depends on however the blocks turn out, as opposed to the true triple, where you know it will be a success because you have double teamed everyone and the only threat is the man you're optioning off of.)

But Florida has increasingly used a form of the true triple -- the "veer" -- in its gun-run game. Had I written this article earlier this season, this would have been my focus, but as it stands this is still but one tool in Meyer and Mullen's arsenal.

In the traditional veer, the line ignores several of the playside defenders, instead crashing down and crushing the defensive tackle and linebackers. The offense can do this because it "options" off a series of defenders: when done correctly, the offense is always right and the defense always wrong. So the offense gets a good deal: it gets double teams it would not have otherwise gotten by "blocking" defenders through optioning off of them. While option football is not easy, you have a better chance of success optioning off a great defensive end to make him wrong rather than sending overmatched tight ends and fullbacks to try to block them. So this is the advantage. The traditional veer looks like this (hat tip: Hugh Wyatt):



Florida's looks largely similar (though Florida gets into this set through a variety of motions, shifts, and the "pitch man" is often a wide receiver).



More clips below, including some pass game clips. (As a hint, the trick to watching these, particularly the first, is to watch the line/defensive line and linebackers and not to just follow the ball; you can always tell where the ball is going):











A Word on Defending the Spread

This is a topic for another time, but it's worth a word on how you defend the spread offense. It's not difficult -- in theory. And clearly, teams have gotten better at it. But defending a team like Florida, with all their talent, is quite the chore. Defending a spread team where the quarterback is not a threat to run, whether by design or talent (ahem, Michigan) is the simpler task. But if the quarterback can run, the offense gains the advantage of an extra blocker when it can spread receivers and the quarterback can run.

Against the old option attacks, the quarterback's counterpart had to line up on the line of scrimmage and hit the quarterback on the line, and the defense basically had to play without a safety (are you listening, Georgia?). Against the I formation attacks so popular in the '90s (and earlier), the quarterback's counterpart -- the free safety -- could stand back in the middle of the field and keep the quarterback from throwing against single coverage. Indeed, the rage in the '90s was the rise of the "eight-man front" defense, and this was the defense the spread developed to counter.

But against the spread where the quarterback is a legitimate dual threat, like Florida has with their Heisman winner, the defense must do both of the above. The quarterback's counterpart has to be on the line of scrimmage to hit the quarterback on runs (as with the option attacks), and back in the middle against passes (as against traditional formations). This is not a debatable point; as Homer Smith said, "this is arithmetic, not theory."

The answer is that you have to have safety-type players who can play the quarterback but also can, if it is a pass play, race back and play as either a robber or as a safety. The defense simply must be able to play man, and it must have the ability to blitz and attack both the quarterback and any other backfield player. (Though this is not easy; faking is better than ever, partially because it involved reading and not faking.) Finally, you must have the ability to zone-blitz to put pressure on the quarterback but still take away the short slants and quicks (or at least threaten to be able to do so).

In other words, you have to play defense like Nick Saban does. But there is no foolproof system; speed is king; and players win games. And there is no doubt that a spread like Florida's is a beautiful thing to watch because it forces the defense to play perfect and to succeed it must be able to multi-task like defenses have never been asked to do before.

Conclusion


To understand why Florida's offense is successful -- for reasons other than because it merely unleashes a bunch of great players, though that cannot be understated and Meyer never fails to credit his players -- I think it is helpful to compare Meyer's "spread option" with another "spread option": Paul Johnson's flexbone. The mechanics of Johnson's flexbone has been described in great detail elsewhere, but the comparison is useful.


Some have derided the labeling of Johnson's offense a "spread option" at all. The charge is that it doesn't look like other "spread" teams. But all this view does is highlight the meaninglessness of the term "spread." The bone itself began as an option offense, and became the "spread option" -- i.e. the flexbone -- when coaches began flexing the tight-ends out to become split ends. The purpose was to provide more of a horizontal stretch to create the lanes and the leverage for the offense.


And that is exactly what Meyer does. His offense is "spread option" in the sense that it was spread before it was ever option (and you may go an entire game without seeing any actual option; the zone-read excluded). But Meyer and Mullen are trying to simplify what defenses can do, to make them show their hand. And wants to find the creases, in whatever form and wherever they are.


Woody Hayes built his defenses around his understanding of the converse of this principle.. An autodidact of military history and strategy, Hayes understood that the best and simplest way to stop an offensive assault was to corral it into a controllable space, as small as possible, to limit its available strategies. Having done that, you could then predict your opponent's points and methods of attack and close them off. Johnson's triple-option, in Mark Richt's rueful words, "stretches you from sideline to sideline." Meyer's offense does the same.


But let's go one step further. Why does that work, particularly with regard to the run game? You hear about the benefits of spreading all the time from sportscasters but with little explanation of why (other than vague generalizations or incorrect statements about "one on one matchups.") To answer that question, let's look at another similarity between Meyer's and Johnson's offenses, which is one reason why in a spread offense the run game is often more important than the pass game.


While, from a passing perspective, the "spread" merely gets you one-on-one matchups that your receivers may or may not win, spreading your formation to run gives you something far more valuable: leverage. Meyer's schemes are not tricky, nor and they are original. But they are sound. When you block a front, you do not send your linemen -- however big, and however talented -- to just fly out to hit a guy to try and hopelessly make him go where he does not want to. Instead, you put your kids in position to win. You use double teams. You "trap" defenders who rush hard upfield. You use lead-blockers in a way to give your runner a two-way go that he can win every time. And you option off defenders to make them wrong, every time. Football is still a game about power, strength, and quickness, but it's always better to be smart about how to focus that power, strength, and quickness where it is most likely to be successful.


If the old running offenses of yesteryear, in reflecting earlier times, were like punishing boxers who engaged in matches where the biggest and strongest won, then offenses like Johnson's and Meyer's, in reflecting their times, are like martial arts: without sacrificing either strength or power, they punish you but also use speed, quickness, and cleverness to hit you where you do not expect and probe to find your weak spots, and to exploit them, without mercy.

(As a disclaimer: I am not responsible for any of the musical suggestions accompanying the video clips. I just find clips that seem to do the trick. My site works best without sound, much like a library full of leatherbound books and rich mahogany.)