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

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.

Rhythm Nation: Auburn Hires Gus Malzahn

Auburn, AL. Well-respected, staunch, defensive minded head coach hires "innovative" "spread guru" as offensive coordinator. Good news?

Crap. Here we go again.

Or maybe not?

There are a few differences here between what Franklin and Tuberville tried to do (or said they were trying to do). The biggest, I'd say, is that Malzahn's spread is not exactly like other spreads, whether pass-first ones like the Airraid or run-heavy spreads like Urban Meyer's or Rich Rodriguez's. That's because the schemes are simple - very, very simple - and the core of the offense is not even about schemes: it's about tempo.

Mike Leach runs a type of spread no-huddle, but his offense moseys to the line with the confidence and deliberate swagger of an old cowboy (or pirate?). They line-up and get a handle on what the defense is doing, call a play, and go. Franklin used the no-huddle (at least until he got to Auburn!), and even had a form of it called "NASCAR" which was intended to be an up-tempo light-speed level no-huddle, with the ball snapped quickly after the previous play.

But nobody does what Malzahn does. If some no-huddle teams, like Franklin's, are light-speed, then Malzahn's spends the entire game in something akin to "ludicrous speed."

The key to his offense is to get the play in with via hand signal, wristband (rarely), or a board on the sideline, and have the ball snapped within four to five seconds of it being set. He even has a speed designed to snap the ball as soon as the whistle blows. It requires endurance and discipline.

And his practices go at this same ludicrous pace. There is almost no lolly-gagging around and each play in practice must be snapped within twenty-five seconds of the last one for maximum reps. (As an added point of interest, because his offense often inspires bizarre and novel reactions from defenses - i.e. things they hadn't done before playing him - he has his teams practice against almost all fronts and coverages every single week just to be ready for whatever they throw at him.)

Is Chizik Trying to Copy Oklahoma?

So, you can see why this might be appealing to Auburn, even with a defensive minded head coach. As Dr Saturday recently pointed out, "only Oklahoma's 1,036 total plays bested the Hurricane's 1,007 this year, though TU led the nation in yards per play." I think this is no coincidence.

Oklahoma too has a fairly basic system as far as schemes go. They don't do anything that a lot of teams don't. Their passing game is kind of a derivative of what they did under Mike Leach and Mark Mangino, but they have gotten away from the pure faith of the Airraid and now use a lot of rather traditional (meaning, common) concepts. Labeling them spread, pro, multiple, or whatever is a bit futile. (When asked what offense Oklahoma runs, Bob Stoops said simply: "The Oklahoma offense."). They use both the "I" and other traditional sets, though are probably still more "spread" than anything else. But before people jump down my throat, I note that I think Wittgenstein was accurate when he said most arguments boil down to people's different uses of labels and language, in this case what spread or pro means to one person versus another.

Kevin Wilson, OU's offensive coordinator, is not known as a passing guru, and few would confuse him with one. But he knows one thing extraordinarily well: the no-huddle up-tempo offense. He ran it at Northwestern with Randy Walker, and that's how OU killed people this year. They have all these great athletes, they have solid schemes, and they go so fast they mow you down. I have to think Chizik envisions this kind of result.

Chizik spent the last few years getting his lunch stolen on a weekly basis in the Big 12, and he got destroyed by nouveau spread teams like Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, and Missouri, though he kept it close versus OU. I have to imagine that Chizik, like Stoops when he arrived at OU, wants to take some of those tough offenses he faced with him. And what better model to follow than Stoops? Both he and Pete Carroll have had national success as defensive coaches-to-head coaches by installing aggressive offenses.

Will it work?

The other side of Malzahn's attack, apart from the no-huddle aspect (I can't emphasize enough how unique it is to base your offensive philosophy around a tempo rather than simply schemes), is that Malzahn wants to formation you to death. The infamous "wildcat" or "wildhog" offense was developed while Malzahn was at Arkansas, though definitely with input from Houston Nutt and then-QB coach David Lee (now with the Miami Dolphins). See below for an ESPN video about the Wildcat with a brief interview with Malzahn.



But Malzahn is less spread and formation to run than he is infatuated with angles and geometry: he passes to set up the run, he uses a lot of shotgun, multiple receivers, and he does a lot of innovative things with wing-backs, tight-ends, fullbacks, and with guys in motion to get any advantage he can.

In this way his offense has advantages over what Franklin was doing at Auburn. If done correctly, the tempo and formations really are what eats the defense up. The schemes themselves are simple. Franklin had trouble getting his offense going because he did not have a solid trigger-man who could make his reads and likely lacked the coaching support to get one ready. Malzahn - at least for a time - should be able to mask some of those deficiencies while his players get up to speed through his tempo and formationing, and then from there just give them simple assignments. Now they will still have to learn all the signals and motions and the like, but this is (usually) easier because that just requires a kid to learn what he has to do rather than constantly react to the defense.

Thus Malzahn's offense is kind of the anti-run-and-shoot, which uses only a few formations but many reads after the snap.

The downside of the offense tends to be turnovers and defense. In Malzahn's first year at Tulsa, they led the nation in yards per game and were in the bottom eight or so in total defense. This year, Tulsa was second in the country in total yards (to Houston) and scoring (to Oklahoma) but ranked in the 80s in total defense. Now, you can make the fair point that if not for the Malzahn-experience, their defense would be just as bad but the offense would be on par as well; neither the conference, talent, nor team would make you expect Tulsa to have a good defense.

But the other problem can be turnovers. They don't necessarily turn it over more, but with more possessions and more plays you do create the risk of more turnovers, which tend to kill a team. This is the key point for Chizik: will he be able to tolerate that? Or will he eventually turn around and do a Buddy Ryan after a bad sack or fumble. (Ryan, then defensive coordinator for the Houston Oilers, slugged then offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride during a game after Gilbride's run-and-shoot incurred a bad play. Keep in mind that the Oilers won eleven games that season and the offense was one of the best in the league; Ryan simply did not "respect" Gilbride's run-and-shoot offense (he still uses some run-and-shoot principles with the Giants); Ryan liked to call it the "chuck and duck.")

So, you always have to fear the familiar story: defensive coaches often just do not like the high-risk-high-return offenses, and sometimes mere variance can be confused with incompetence or an actual problem (as it was with Gilbride's 'shoot and Ryan). But it's also true that offensive guys can be a bit narrow minded at times, losing sight of the bigger picture in an effort to score points and rack up yards. Remember the lessons of Hal Mumme.

Malzahn's Schemes

Not too much to say here. In many ways Malzahn's run game resembles Urban Meyer's: Malzahn's is based on four-run plays - the inside zone, the outside zone, the counter, and power - with reverses, fakes, QB runs, and jet sweeps and play-action all built off those four plays. He also throws in some quick traps and draws for good measure. Again, nothing revolutionary. He will play with formations, shifts, and motions. He likes wing-backs. He will line up with the quarterback in the shotgun and put both runners next to him as a sort of offset I-formation. He will use receivers in the running game. And his quarterbacks don't run like Tebow but he runs some option and they are always a threat on the reads and counters.

The passing game is equally simple. Unlike the Airraid, which is based off of a lot of horizontal type routes (crossing routes, quick flats and the like), most of Malzahn's routes are "vertical" stems. Think of a passing tree: the receiver bursts off the line upfield to get the defensive guys moving, and from there can go deep, break inside, outside, curl or hitch up, or do a variety of things. He likes deep square-in routes, seam routes, and of course, he runs plenty of smash.

The rumor is that Malzahn got his passing game from Evangel Christian, which is similarly based on simple vertical stems to the routes and quick break-offs by the receivers.

But, in the end, it is the tempo that defines Malzahn's ludicrous-speed-Space-Balls offense. Time will tell both if he gets to run it (Franklin never got to install his up-tempo NASCAR, and Arkansas did not focus on up-tempo no-huddle while Malzahn was there under Houston Nutt), and, if he does install it, if it works.

Random highlight vid pulled from youtube (if anyone has any good online video of a Malzahn O (particularly Tulsa) please let me know; I'd love to post it):



Note: I am much indebted to the always great Coach Huey football coaching site as I did extra research on this article, as with Malzahn's various resources and of course his no-huddle book.

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.

Paul Johnson's Flexbone Meets the Run and Shoot: Delightful

In a pre-bowl game interview, Georgia Tech's Paul Johnson said:

"We don't have our whole system in yet," Johnson said Monday at the Chick-fil-A coaches luncheon. "We'll use the extra practices to work on some of our run-and-shoot stuff.

"There are a lot of the areas of the offense that we are still not very adept at," he added. "We've got to improve in the passing game. We've got some work to do in all areas there and this will give us that opportunity."

That's enough to make every offensive minded guy salivate. Johnson's vaunted flexbone plus the run and shoot? Like pizza and beer, these two things sound perfect together. But of course things aren't always so rosy. Both the flexbone-triple option and the run and shoot are practice intensive offenses, and I don't think we should expect Georgia Tech to open up and throw for 400 yards when they play LSU. But this isn't a bolt out of the blue; Johnson's been around the 'shoot for a long time and its principles have long been a part of his offense.

Indeed, back in the day Johnson was offensive coordinator for a Navy team that upset Cal in a bowl game by racking up 646 yards, including 395 from the air (and they even used a three-receiver stack formation while doing it). And if you go back and study Johnson's offenses you'll see some of the major run and shoot concepts. As I said though, don't expect Georgia Tech to turn all chuck 'n duck. But what can we expect?

I expect to see two trusty run and shoot concepts in particular to make a fairly prominent appearance: the Switch and the Go.

I have described the "Switch" previously, though there's always different flavors in how you do it.

The concept is, at core, a two man concept. Two receivers release and "switch": The outside guys angle inside for 5-6 yards before pushing vertical, while the inside guy runs a "wheel route" under the outside guy, rubs right off of his hip, and then turns up the sideline. That's when they play gets interesting.

In the original R&S, each receiver had [several] delineated options depending on what coverage he saw. They could break it quick on slants, run vertical routes, post routes, curls or in-cuts. When it worked it was beautiful. But sometimes, to borrow Yeats's phrase, "things fall apart." Or simply it took immense practice time for receivers to get good at running the play.

In my previous post I discussed how some modern teams have adapted and simplified the reads. Expect something along those lines in Johnson's aproach, though he still gives his receivers freedom to find the open spots. Remember, option football is a mentality, and it applies to passing as well as running.

The other play, the "Go," is another classic. It is a "trips" route where the outside guy runs a go route or take-off vertical, the middle receiver (usually the guy in motion) runs a "middle-read" or "seam-read" that divides the middle of the field, and the inside guy in trips runs a little flat route after jabbing inside. The play works on a few levels: first, you often get the flat route guy open on a rub off the seam-read receiver's hip; and second the go, backside go, and seam-read often divide up the deep middle coverage to create open spaces for big plays. The thought process is to keep throwing that flat route until they come up for it and then hit them with a big play, either down the sideline or in the seams.


But, if you want someone to explain how the "Go" works, then why not ask June Jones?




Two notes. First, observe that Davie in the video says that the two toughest offenses to depend are the 'shoot and the wishbone, and further note that the flexbone is merely a form of the wishbone. Johnson knows what he's doing.
Also I just want to point out that the only real differences between what Johnson would do with the "Go" and what June Jones would do would be: (a) the slots would be tight-slots rather than slot-receivers; (b) the quarterback would be under center rather than in shotgun (thus actually making the quarterback more of a running-threat when he looks at the flat route as with the original shoot); and (c) the reads for the slot-receiver may - or may not be - somewhat simplified. That really depends on the slot receiver and quarterback. Johnson is not beyond giving them full-freedom, though he can't emphasize it every day in practice like pass-happy June Jones does and still be able to execute his option attack. Like everything else in football, it's a balance.
Update: I want to note that I made a correction to the above: it was actually Navy that upset Cal in that bowl game (which happened to take place in Hawai'i). Though Johnson was OC at Hawai'i at one time as well.

Smart Notes - Dec. 22, 2008

1. Not a good time to be a Ref

Two rather dramatic referee videos emerging from this weekend. In the first, some kid in a high school game targeted the Ref (watch the left free-safety):



In the second, from the Rams-Seakaws game, the Refs get a little revenge:




2. Why Oh Why Can't We Get a Better [Football] Press Corps?

I stole this line from economist Brad DeLong, and I plan on doing a few more of these sections to point out some of the more egregious errors sportswriters and pseudo-journalists make. This isn't the worst example, but I was watching ESPN's infamous NFL Countdown show with Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, and the revolving array of NFL cast-offs. They did a piece about injuries, which was fine and all: the moral was that NFL players all play fairly banged up throughout the season. Not a surprise. But throughout the 10 minute or so segment, they never bothered to get into the nuances (unsurprising). But one thing they were interested in was comparing some guys who were tough versus others who were not. (Keyshawn Johnson flat out said that Julius Jones spent all his time in the training room.)

In Bill Walsh's amazing book, Finding the Winning Edge, he had some really insightful points about injuries. Namely, that different positions can handle injuries different. Walsh observed that offensive and defensive linemen tend to be able to play through certain injuries with greater ease, than, say, a defensive back.

For instance, imagine if two players have a gimpy or somewhat sprained ankle. The offensive guard, though it is by no means easy, can play through it. But would you really want your press-man cornerback to play with a sprained ankle? One bad step or slow recovery and it's a touchdown. The injury is far more debilitating. Walsh made the same point regarding receivers: they have difficulty playing through injuries for the same reason that a track sprinter would. Quarterbacks provide a good example, in that they can play through a lot of injuries but certain injuries -- to the shoulder, hand, etc -- are debilitating and can often render a QB inoperable.

Runningbacks are a unique case. It often depends on the type of runner and the type of injury. An injury affecting explosiveness is significant no matter what; other bruises and various other problems might not have as much of an affect. Even hand injuries can depend on the type of running back -- is he a prominent receiver out of the backfield?

But, alas, not a mention of this. Just "this guy is tough" and "that guy spends a lot of time in the tub."

Smart Notes - December 14, 2008

1. Tom Osborne: Enough Spread, Let's See Some Option

Tom Osborne recently opined on the state of football offenses. And keep in mind that, not only did the guy win multiple championships at Nebraska, his offenses also scored points. Indeed, while much has deservedly been made of Oklahoma's terrific multiple pro-style up-tempo offense, in 1995 it was Nebraska who averaged over 52 points a game en route to a title. Including OU this year, only five teams have averaged over fifty points a game for a season since 1945. So Osborne has a unique perspective on football offenses, the spread, and what could be next.

“You know, people are really obsessed right now with spread offense,” Osborne said. “And I think there are a lot of real great features about it. But I think you’re going to see a team jump up and do really well at something that’s different. For a long time, Oklahoma had a real advantage because the only time you saw the wishbone was the week you played Oklahoma. It was so different from what you were doing.

“Now, although those spread offenses are giving people trouble, you still see it week after week after week. So, as time goes by, defenses are going to get a little better at playing it. I don’t know that anybody will ever shut it down, but they’ll play it better. And then you’re going to see something like what (former Navy coach) Paul Johnson is doing down there at Georgia Tech.” [Flexbone Triple Option]

“That’s something that’s so much different than what anybody’s seeing,” Osborne said. “He’s going to make some waves. He’s taking what they’ve been doing at the service academies for years. And now he’s got bigger linemen. And more speed. Now he can recruit kids he probably wasn’t getting at Navy.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be that type of offense. But there’s going to be somebody who’s going to start doing some things that people just aren’t seeing all the time. And that’ll maybe start another wave of innovation and some different things happening.”

A few points. First, Osborne's description of the spread belies some of the ambiguity behind the term -- he likely has not read my most recent piece on it -- and it's obviously a truism that you can no longer get the advantage of being different if you're doing what everyone else is. Second, Osborne is absolutely right that there are huge advantages to be had by running something that your opponents only see once a year. At one time, this was the spread. Now of course, that's no longer the case.

That point can't be overemphasized though. Every offensive scheme must be able to do a few things: must have ways to get the ball to your playmakers; must be able to get the ball to different guys when the defense wants to take your best players away; must have schemes and counters that attack the defenses you will see, both in terms of fronts and coverages; and it must be able to do all those things without overwhelming your players with information. Easier said than done. It's an added, but not necessary perk if your opponents are not used to seeing it.

And Johnson, at Georgia Tech, has a special perk with his flexbone: normally, if you do something your opponents are not used to seeing, then you too are not overly familiar with it. That is how it was with the early spread teams. Johnson, by contrast, has used his offense for decades and knows all the adjustments and changes. When Georgia Tech ran all over Miami and Georgia, a lot of it came in the second half. Often, it seemed like the defense had two guys defending, say, the pitch guy, or the quarterback, and none on the guy who wound up running for a forty-yard run. The reason for that was because Johnson knows how to vary his blocking and assignments to take away the guy responsible for those players. So when announcers like to say that you play "assignment" football to stop the option that is only partially true. If you do, Johnson figures out who is "assigned" to his guys and blocks them, and then lets the reads take care of themselves. So this is where execution and soundness of an offense meet uniqueness.

But my last point is that I'm not sure if Osborne's narrative is exactly right. It's true that, to some extent, football is cyclical. But it's not exactly cyclical. Defenses do not completely forget; with the internet, they absolutely cannot forget: the answers are all out there. The single-wing stuff is back, but it's also different. In the old-old days, the centers who did the shotgun snaps did not really know how to snap the ball with their heads up, so they were ineffective blockers. So now, with the wildcat and other single-wing variants, the center is now an equally effective blocker.

But the meta-narrative here is passing. Again, this point can be overstated, as passing was not invented in the last two decades (Joe Namath had a 4,000 yard season with the Jets), but there's clearly been a synthesis. I think that it will be unlikely that teams will be completely unable to throw -- or run -- with consistent success. Now, that does not mean the type of "balance" usually spewed on TV (equal carries, equal yards, etc) as I have well documented that the better approach to balance is a somewhat game-theoretic one. But both Florida's and OU's offenses are examples of ones where they use advanced and time-tested concepts -- spread, play-action, quicks, multiple-formations, etc -- to put maximum pressure on the defense. As a football pragmatist, I think that these types of offenses will continue to set the standard. Unlike Osborne, I think using what once was, alone, will not work, without the added ability to pass or evolve.

2. Malcolm Gladwell's "Quarterback Problem"

The famous (or infamous) Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, The Tipping Point, and now Outliers, has a very interesting new essay in the New Yorker. The point of the article is about how we could be better at selecting teachers, because we now know that being a good teacher is all about making a connection with kids (who are not always easy to read) and these are skills not easily taught, evaluated, or identified. To illustrate the problem of identifying good future teachers he uses the problem of identifying successful NFL quarterbacks, focusing on a scout's attempt to evaluate Mizzou's Chase Daniel.

But then Shonka [NFL talent scout] began to talk about when he was on the staff of the Philadelphia Eagles, in 1999. Five quarterbacks were taken in the first round of the college draft that year, and each looked as promising as Chase Daniel did now. But only one of them, Donovan McNabb, ended up fulfilling that promise. Of the rest, one descended into mediocrity after a decent start. Two were complete busts, and the last was so awful that after failing out of the N.F.L. he ended up failing out of the Canadian Football League as well.
The year before, the same thing happened with Ryan Leaf, who was the Chase Daniel of 1998. The San Diego Chargers made him the second player taken over all in the draft, and gave him an eleven-million-dollar signing bonus. Leaf turned out to be terrible. In 2002, it was Joey Harrington’s turn. Harrington was a golden boy out of the University of Oregon, and the third player taken in the draft. Shonka still can’t get over what happened to him.
“I tell you, I saw Joey live,” he said. “This guy threw lasers, he could throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had the intelligence.” Shonka got as misty as a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound ex-linebacker in a black tracksuit can get. “He’s a concert pianist, you know? I really—I mean, I really—liked Joey.” And yet Harrington’s career consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and down the field. “How will that ability translate to the National Football League?” He shook his head slowly. “Shoot.”
This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.

And, if we focus just on football for now, this is an amazing thing. No position is paid more highly in the NFL than quarterback, and no position is more integral to a team's success. And no position receives more scrutiny. And it's a total crapshoot. The studies have been done, and draft position -- the best marker of what the expectations levels are for a quarterback -- has absolutely no bearing on how successful a quarterback winds up. This is scary. It's scary enough for football -- all that money and time spent on what is basically a futile endeavor -- but, as Gladwell points out, it's scary for society that we have lots of jobs where we don't know how to pick how people will be successful.

Now Gladwell's explanation is likely imperfect (he clearly has not read my articles, particularly when he talks about the "spread" that Mizzou runs), though it hits at the general truth: the only way to evaluate how good a quarterback will be in the NFL is to see them play in the NFL. And even then sometimes the light just goes on for certain guys after a period of mediocrity. It's just so hard to say. With baseball, as Moneyball showed, you can model the game to at least tell you a great deal of what you need to know. It's a game largely about hitters and pitchers. We may not know everything, but it gets us far to the end. But football is too complex. Players can't be evaluated solely on statistics. And the traditional scouting method, some kind of gestalt impression where you say "ah he looks good" has been proven unreliable.

We know that Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf were seen as the undoubted 1-2 picks. Many liked Leaf better. We know Leaf completely failed while Manning has had remarkable success. Do we even know why, exactly though? A fair but unscientific pop psychology hypothesis is that Leaf was too mentally unstable: he had all the physical tools but few of the emotional and mental ones. But isn't it obvious that NFL quarterback is only a partially physical game? I always thought of evaluating quarterbacks as a threshold approach: the guy has to be able to do certain things, to make certain throws, but after that, the physical qualities diminish. Whether a guy throws a deep out with "zip" or as a "laser" is irrelevant if he lacks knowledge, awareness, and a sense of timing.

And do we even know if that hypothesis was right? What about those five guys from 1999? How do you explain Akili Smith and Cade McNown who were apparently dead on arrival? Tim Couch seemed to just fumble through mediocrity into eventual oblivion, but those two guys were right there and had unbelievably short careers. Physical? Mental? Mental in what sense? Couldn't learn the playbook? Couldn't handle the pressure? No timing? No support from teammates? I haven't a clue. I don't know how you glean lessons from those evaluation failures.

A college quarterback joining the N.F.L., by contrast, has to learn to play an entirely new game. Shonka began to talk about Tim Couch, the quarterback taken first in that legendary draft of 1999. Couch set every record imaginable in his years at the University of Kentucky. “They used to put five garbage cans on the field,” Shonka recalled, shaking his head, “and Couch would stand there and throw and just drop the ball into every one.” But Couch was a flop in the pros. It wasn’t that professional quarterbacks didn’t need to be accurate. It was that the kind of accuracy required to do the job well could be measured only in a real N.F.L. game.
Similarly, all quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when the economists David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores—which are routinely leaked to the press—they found that Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game.
We’re used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors. We now realize that being a good doctor requires the ability to communicate, listen, and empathize—and so there is increasing pressure on medical schools to pay attention to interpersonal skills as well as to test scores. We can have better physicians if we’re just smarter about how we choose medical-school students. But no one is saying that Dan Shonka is somehow missing some key ingredient in his analysis; that if he were only more perceptive he could predict Chase Daniel’s career trajectory. The problem with picking quarterbacks is that Chase Daniel’s performance can’t be predicted. The job he’s being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won’t. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft—that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance—and how well he played in the pros.

Indeed, as we have seen with guys like Brad Johnson or Matt Cassell, apparently playing in college is not even as important as some other, less tangible, factors. As Gladwell points out:

The entire time that Chase Daniel was on the field against Oklahoma State, his backup, Chase Patton, stood on the sidelines, watching. Patton didn’t play a single down. In his four years at Missouri, up to that point, he had thrown a total of twenty-six passes. And yet there were people in Shonka’s world who thought that Patton would end up as a better professional quarterback than Daniel. The week of the Oklahoma State game, the national sports magazine ESPN even put the two players on its cover, with the title “CHASE DANIEL MIGHT WIN THE HEISMAN”—referring to the trophy given to college football’s best player. “HIS BACKUP COULD WIN THE SUPER BOWL.” Why did everyone like Patton so much? It wasn’t clear. Maybe he looked good in practice. Maybe it was because this season in the N.F.L. a quarterback who had also never started in a single college game is playing superbly for the New England Patriots. It sounds absurd to put an athlete on the cover of a magazine for no particular reason. But perhaps that’s just the quarterback problem taken to an extreme. If college performance doesn’t tell us anything, why shouldn’t we value someone who hasn’t had the chance to play as highly as someone who plays as well as anyone in the land?

One answer is that ESPN the magazine is a hyperbolic and bizarre magazine, but there were actual scouts quoted in that article. The view seemed to be that while Chase Patton is not good enough to beat out Chase Daniel, he is instead good enough to be drafted ahead of him. In any event, this is a problem that affects all professions, and all stages of life. We know that what makes someone good in one level cannot be evaluated until you get to the next. Chase Daniel is an excellent college quarterback, and all the debate about the NFL around him is really unfair and beside the point so long as he in college, as it is with Tim Tebow. The answer is no one knows how good these kids will be. It's no referendum on them, nor their spread offenses or coaches, but just different circumstances.

Eventually, I suppose, scouting will finally more approximate a science. But right now, we know, that scouts and NFL teams literally do not know what they are doing when they throw money at guys. Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco look excellent, but they just as likely could have been Ryan Leaf or Cade McNown. This year Green Bay drafted Brian Brohm from Louisville early in the draft and Matt Flynn from LSU in the seventh round. Right now, Matt Flynn is ahead of Brohm on the depth chart: he just beat him out in camp and pre-season. No one could have foreseen that until they all got there. Brohm will be fine, but the Packers both were hurt and helped by their own incompetence at evaluating quarterbacks: they seem to have overvalued Brohm and everyone else undervalued Flynn.

Midway through the fourth quarter of the Oklahoma State–Missouri game, the Tigers were in trouble. For the first time all year, they were behind late in the game. They needed to score, or they’d lose any chance of a national championship. Daniel took the snap from his center, and planted his feet to pass. His receivers were covered. He began to run. The Oklahoma State defenders closed in on him. He was under pressure, something that rarely happened to him in the spread. Desperate, he heaved the ball downfield, right into the arms of a Cowboy defender.

Shonka jumped up. “That’s not like him!” he cried out. “He doesn’t throw stuff up like that.”
Next to Shonka, a scout for the Kansas City Chiefs looked crestfallen. “Chase never throws something up for grabs!”
It was tempting to see Daniel’s mistake as definitive. The spread had broken down. He was finally under pressure. This was what it would be like to be an N.F.L. quarterback, wasn’t it? But there is nothing like being an N.F.L. quarterback except being an N.F.L. quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice. Maybe that interception means that Daniel won’t be a good professional quarterback, or maybe he made a mistake that he’ll learn from. “In a great big piece of pie,” Shonka said, “that was just a little slice.”

UPDATES: 3. Florida Cut-Ups

Someone passed along some Florida TV cut-ups, broken down by concept. (Again, no blame for music selection.)



4. Pete Carroll - 60 Minutes

Not much to say about this, except that it is inspiring to a nearly unbelievable degree. Do yourself a favor and watch it.

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.)