Assorted Links

1. Video of Notre Dame coach Frank Verducci coaching up the line. (H/t Blue Gray Sky)

2. Blue Gray Sky then explores the "sprint" or "stretch" run play.

3. Pro Football Reference blog compares AFL and NFL drafts.

4. New Detroit Lions' coach Jim Schwartz refuses to read books written by women. I recommend Margaret Atwood.

5. Creative types flocking to the internet, where fame can be instant but fleeting.

What is old is new again

Look like the bunch formation to anyone else? That's from Percy Duncan Haughton's 1922 book, Football and How to Watch It.

H/t CoachHuey.

Breaking down the Oklahoma State offense

...over at Dr Saturday. Check it out here, and feel free to ask questions either here or over there. (I am more likely to see it here, though.)

Smart Links 7/30/09

1. T. Kyle King has an interesting response to my incoherent musings on business and life in college football.

2. Dan Shanoff really doesn't believe Brett Favre.

3. Blutarsky is bringing the Mummepoll back. Get ready.

4. Steve Kragthorpe is determined to purge the University of Louisville of all things Brohm.

5. Captain Leach doesn't twitter, and reiterates his support for a 64-team college football playoff. I will say this: there would be some wild football, with every game a do-or-die. Some frantic, last minute wildness, every week. It might be infeasible, but the more I hear this idea the more I think it does sound fun.

6. Best thing you'll see in awhile.

7. USC's use of coaching consultants is questioned.

8. Finally, I'll be traveling today, but check out Dr Saturday as I should have a post up there later this afternoon, fitting in with the Doc's Big 12 week.

Assorted links

1. Above is Joe Paterno's diagram and coffee. Read all about it. (Ht Black Shoe Diaries.)

2. Why do players hold out of training camp? And what agency is doing all this holding out?

3. And the cat came back, thought he was a goner.

4. “No one should feel sorry for Bob,” said Kansas Coach Mark Mangino, a former assistant at Oklahoma under Stoops, “because he doesn’t feel sorry for himself.”

5. "These camps run by schools and their coaching staffs have become critical components in the recruiting process, allowing coaches to measure heights and weights, get 40-yard dash times and meet players up-close before deciding whether to offer a scholarship."

The quarterback

Some things never change.

The quarter[back] is, under the captain, the director of the game. With the exception of one or two uncommon and rare plays, there is not one of any kind, his side having the ball, in which it does not pass through his hands. The importance of his work it is therefore impossible to overstate. He must be, above all the qualifications of brains and agility usually attributed to that position, of a hopeful or sanguine disposition. He must have confidence in his centre himself, and, most of all, in the man to whom he passes the ball. He should always believe that the play will be a success.

That is Walter Camp, in his 1893 book, American Football.

Saban on Tebow, the Gators' O

[Excerpts from Nick Saban's transcript at the SEC media days. Thanks to deaux of CoachHuey for the pointer.]

On Tim Tebow at the next level . . .

Q. As somebody who has coached in the NFL, I was wondering what your take is on Tebow’s NFL prospects? Do you think he’s talented enough to warrant a top 10 pick?

COACH SABAN: Well, you know, I don’t think it’s fair for me to judge that because I can’t really judge who the other guys in the top 10 are. Being involved in the draft before, if you’re not involved in the total body of work, it’s very difficult to make those kind of predictions.

But I will say this: I think Tim Tebow is an outstanding quarterback, an outstanding leader. I have no questions about his ability to throw the ball. He made some outstanding throws in good coverage in critical times in our game last year in the SEC championship game. So I have a tremendous amount of respect for him as a quarterback, as a leader, as an athlete, in every regard. I think he is a winner. I think he will be a winner in the NFL.

But I think everybody needs to understand that the NFL struggles to evaluate people who don’t do in college what they look for guys to do in the pros. And I don’t think they should be criticized for that. It’s a difficult evaluation when you play a little different kind of offense. I think Florida has a great offense. I think it’s very difficult to defend. I think they do a great job of executing it and coaching it. So I’m not being critical.

But it is different. And that makes it more difficult. You know, a general manager sent me a letter saying, How are you learning all the spread quarterbacks, how the dynamics of the critical factors of the quarterback position have changed because this offense has changed, what are you doing differently to evaluate quarterbacks, because we’re having a more difficult time evaluating players that play in that offense?

It affects everyone. The quarterback, as well as the left tackle. If somebody told me we don’t know how to evaluate this guy because he’s never played in a three point stance because he always plays in a two point stance because they’re no huddle, and they’re always in a spread. So it’s every position that is different from what they would like to see because they have a defined prototype they would like to evaluate toward. When you play in a different type of offense, it makes it more difficult to evaluate.

I don’t think anybody is disrespecting him, I guess is what I’m trying to say. I think it’s just a little more difficult to try to evaluate.

On the "Spread" offense . . .

Q. Talk about the impact of the spread offense on defenses in college football.

COACH SABAN: Well, I just think that it’s very difficult to defend. I think when the quarterback’s a runner, you create another blocker, or a receiver that you have to cover. So that kind of creates another gap on defense. And I think that that’s very difficult to defend.

But I think it’s like anything else: the multiples of what you have to defend are what make it more difficult to defensive players. Just like in the old days when they used to run the wishbone. When you had to play against the wishbone, that was really different. So it was difficult to get the picture and look of what you needed to do to get your team prepared to be able to play against it.

I think to some degree the spread offense is the same way. A no huddle offense is the same way. How do you get a scout team in practice to be a no huddle team to get any kind of execution so that the defensive players start to develop the mentality they need to be able to change their routine and play without a huddle?

So I think the concept of the spread offense is outstanding because it makes the quarterback an 11th gap on defense, I always say. If you only had to defend that all the time, I think we could all get a little better at it. It’s the multiple of the different things you see throughout the season that make it more difficult.

On the disruption of an inexperienced QB . . .

Q. From a defensive point of view, when you’re facing a quarterback that doesn’t have much experience, how do you try to take advantage of that? At the same time with an inexperienced quarterback this year, how do you try to guide him through games until he gets that experience?

COACH SABAN: Well, you know, I think that everyone develops at a little different pace and rate, depending on their ability to learn the knowledge and experience, how they learn from their lessons. And I think specifically in our case Greg McElroy learns very quickly and has had some experience. But I also understand that until he makes plays in the game, he’s not gonna fully have, you know, the trust and respect of all of his teammates, even though they really, really like him and they really like him as a leader.

I think the biggest mistake you can make in development of any new player, young player, inexperienced player, is give him too many things to do, and increase the multiples of the kind of mental errors that they can make.

I think that it depends, from a defensive perspective, who the guy is that you’re trying to defend. If he’s a smart guy, if you try to pressure him, you may enhance his chances of making plays because he understands it, he sees it, and his reads actually become a little easier.

If you try to play all coverage against him and don’t pressure him and he’s a good runner, he may hurt you with his feet.

So I think to really answer that question effectively, you’d have to know the specifics of who you were trying to defend.

On the Bluegrass Miracle, I missed out on the relevance of this question . . . (Video below)




Q. Can you tell us a little bit about the 2001 game between you and Kentucky and talk about the last play specifically.

COACH SABAN: Well, what I remember, most people don’t remember the little things and the details of why things happen sometimes, but there was about a 30 mile an hour wind that day, and we were fortunate to be able to game manage to get the wind in the fourth quarter by the way the coin toss went and all that stuff. We practice these two plays every Thursday at the end of practice. I forget the exact seconds, but we ran the first play because we could stop the clock and gained about 15 or 20 yards. Hit Michael Clayton on an in route, then had to go up top.

But the ball sailed and almost went 70 yards in the air because we had a big wind. The Kentucky players actually misjudged the ball. That’s what created the tip. Devery Henderson was the key running guy that’s supposed to play the tip. And it just worked out that way.

But what I remember the most from it was not that play. I’ve always been told by mentors, that the worst thing your team can do is play poorly and win. And we played poorly that day and won. And we got our rear ends kicked in the worst defeat in all the time I was at LSU the next week because of that. That’s what I remember the most.

So you didn’t expect that answer, did you (smiling)?

Blitz-master Jim Johnson dies

Jim Johnson, Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator extraordinaire, has passed away due to cancer. Johnson coached some great defenses, and of course his legacy will be carried on by guys like Steve Spagnuolo who learned under him.

Johnson was a 4-3 guy, and while his protégés took many lessons from him, he will be remember for his aggressive, blitzing defenses. Spagnuolo is more of a zone-blitz guy, but Johnson was always willing to play man defense and blitz safeties and linebackers from anywhere. Indeed, as I've mentioned before, Johnson essentially put the first nail in Steve Spurrier's coffin when his Eagles defense blitzed Spurrier's Redskins -- fresh off a thirty-point game in their opener -- into utter oblivion. From then on, every coach in the league had that tape to put in. Johnson figured out exactly what protections Spurrier was using, and dialed up the right blitzes. But Spurrier was hardly alone in being schooled by Johnson.

He will be missed.



UPDATE: Brophy passes along some great game film (below), and Rock M Nation tips me off to this.

The business and life of football

College football is big business. The highest earning school, the University of Texas, pulled in over $120,000,000 dollars last year (in all sports). Ohio State and Florida finished close behind, with over $117,000,000 and $106,000,000, respectively. This money, of course, drives the product on the field: more money means more resources to recruit good players, and more money to pay (presumably) good coaches. For example, the list of the top earning schools contains few surprises: the SEC has eight teams in the top 25, while the Big 10 and Big 12 both have six. The Pac-10 has but three, and the ACC has only one (Duke, obviously for basketball), and the Big East has none. Notre Dame is the lone outlier (and it is hardly an outlier considering it has its own TV contract).

This influx of money is directly related to how much the coaches get paid. Look at this list of the highest paid college football coaches (slightly out of date, for example still lists Tommy Tuberville, Mike Belotti, and Phil Fulmer):



So which conference has the most economic weight? It appears that the victory for now goes to the SEC:

According to figures presented by [Clay] Travis, SEC total football revenue for the 2005 season hit just in excess of $350 million. Those funds are largely a result of ticket sales and officially licensed merchandise. To put the SEC’s earnings into context, its total revenue was $73 million more than brought in by the Big 10 Conference, which includes schools in the midwest and stretching into the northeast.

And the rich is only going to get richer: the SEC has of course signed a mega-TV deal will only expand its monetary base and brand exposure.

Chicken or the egg, money or culture

The SEC has, I am fairly convinced, the "best" football in the country. Now, "best" is a loaded term. I use it here to refer to the most heated competition among the best assortment of players and the best coaches, in the aggregate. Pete Carroll at USC probably runs the best program in the country, and his program also year-in and year-out has the best players of any one program. The Big 10 and Big 12 both have outstanding coaches and schools, and quite often matches the SEC in terms of draft picks (I also do not buy the "speed in the south" myth). Indeed, the best championship game of this decade took place between a Big 12 school (Texas) and a Pac-10 one (USC). But, week in and week out, the SEC puts out the best consistent product.

One of the theories for why this might be -- and it is very difficult to argue that the SEC does not have excellent coaches and players -- is that "the south is just different," and that there's a "culture of football." I do buy this -- I'm from the southern states -- but that alone cannot explain things. As the Gainesville
Times reported:

It’s a scene that plays out regularly in the fall. Masses clad in team colors descend on college campuses to join in the ritual of cheering on their favorite school in a mass of excess that includes tailgate parties, lavish recreational vehicles and oversized flags with the school crest flying as far as the eye can see.

"There’s just something majestic about it, said Gainesville native and Ole Miss graduate Tharpe Ward. "I grew up on college football and I just love the sport, tailgating, and everything that goes with it."

The reasons most fans give for throwing themselves into college football revolve around the fact that its an escape from day-to-day pressures of the real world, while getting to act like a 21-year-old again at the place where they once studied.

Fans spend big money to get all the necessities for the optimum game day experience: grills, satellite dishes, generators, big screen televisions and all the home decor to bring the best memories of the school’s football past within arms reach in the form or pictures and paintings. Time is prioritized with football at the top of the list. Weddings, birthday parties and vacations come secondary to making it on campus for the big games.

That is all true, and I will have more to say on that in a moment, but the spirit and culture cannot explain it all. Indeed, Michigan, Ohio State, and Texas arguably have better football "cultures" than any individual sports program in the south.

In this limited context, therefore, I am a materialist: the SEC has better football simply because it has more money, and it has shared that money among its different members (all SEC teams get a slice of everyone's bowl game money). Indeed for years Kentucky took slices of Florida's, Georgia's, and Alabama's bowl money, while it fed some of that back into the pot come basketball season. It still strikes me as wild that South Carolina can finish in the top 10 of all sports revenue earners, ahead of every single Big East School and every ACC school except Duke.

The one troubling wrinkle to me is that, yes, you get money by being able to have legions of fans who will pay for tickets 80,000+ stadiums, along with everything else. And yet, the south -- and the midwest for the Big 10, and southwest for the Big 12 -- which are unequivocally the most football mad areas of the country, also happen to be among its least educated and poorest. I don't know why this is. I mean, I suppose a proper metric would just be to evaluate percentage of recreational or entertainment expenses as a proportion of total income or total expenses, and then just see if the southern, midwestern, and southwestern states spend their money on football while people on the coasts or elsewhere spend it on other entertainments that could, roughly at least, be substituted for one another.

It just is strange the consider the hoopla surrounding the recent SEC media day in light of the fact that the south is being hit worse than any other area (sans some of the most overpriced real estate markets, i.e. New York, San Francisco, etc). And the fact that the SEC brings in more money than any other conference despite servicing the poorest (relatively) area of the country. (I am well aware that many who spend this money are displaced southerners who live elsewhere; I am one of them.)

I don't have a firm answer. Maybe it is just cultural. I do stand by the statement that the SEC is simply the best in the aggregate and over time because it has the most money to spend on its resources and coaches. But football, like most sports, does occupy a strange spot in our culture.

But, if football merely occupies a vacuum that could have been occupied by something else, then lucky for these regions that it is football and not something else. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in euologizing his friend, Ring Lardner, a baseball writer, lamented that baseball was but “a boy’s game, with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master.” In Fitzgerald's view, that limited Lardner's potential as a writer. Fortunately, in football, by contrast, the possibilities, narratives, complexities, and legends are boundless -- and it enriches us as we, maybe so, enrich the business of it.

Responses to responses about David and Goliath Strategies

Tomahawk Nation responds to my earlier post on David & Goliath Strategies. See parts one and two of TN's responses. (See also my post on conservative and risky strategies and kurtosis.) Both pieces are well worth the read (I am a supporter of anything that combines football and six sigma). But a couple basic thoughts:

First, I completely agree with the idea of reducing variation, particularly negative variation. That really is the genius of Bill Walsh's passing game: what he brought to the game was a reduction of risk related to passing. Passing had been the quintessential "underdog" or David strategy; he reduced risk so much it arguably stopped being a David strategy and became a dominant one.

But I'm not sure if I agree with this:

Think of UF. To me, the Urban Meyer offense at Utah is a prime example of a David strategy. As he moved to Florida, he helped a Goliath school with Goliath resources begin to think like a David. People said that his offense would never work in the SEC, the QB would get killed, defenses were too fast, etc. But Meyer knew that his approach took advantage of a weakness in defenses, and if executed properly wouldn't be nearly as risky as people thought. Think back to the Ole Miss game from 2 years ago (the game that might have won Tim Tebow the Heisman). When the basic structures of the Meyer offense failed to work against the Ole Miss defense (Goliath being unable to hit David with his sling), and Ole Miss still allowed UF to stay in the game (Goliath managing to fight to a draw with David in a slingshot battle), UF was able to run Tim Tebow left/Tim Tebow right to win the game (Goliath is able to fall back on his superior size and strength combination to win the battle). . . .

...Gladwell highlighted the press in basketball as an example of a David strategy. Why is this a David strategy? Because Goliath doesn't focus on beating the press as much as David focuses on executing it. Because it takes Goliath out of his comfort zone. And honestly, because frequently the top point guards in the country have a certain level of confidence/cockiness in themselves that makes them want to beat the press by themselves and not rely on their teammates. The goal of the press is also to force the ball into someone's hands who is not used to handling the ball-- an inefficiency in Goliath's approach. This is how a team can use the David strategy to capitalize on an advantage. It's a risk, but if executed correctly it's not just a risk for the sake of being risky.

But is that really a David, or underdog strategy? Or is it a dominant strategy? I.e. better no matter who you are? One of the reasons I wrote my post was that I thought Gladwell confuses this point too, and I also concede at the end of the post that one conceptual difficulty is that some strategies are better for favorites (Goliaths conservative, low variance strategies), some solely for underdogs (risky David strategies), but some strategies are simply better no matter who you are (dominant), or inferior (punting on first down).

The things Tomahawk Nation is focusing on are, to me at least, dominant: better matchups, an unusual strategy the favorite is not ready for, etc. Admittedly, Gladwell confuses these two concepts -- or at least doesn't tease them out -- but I do think it's important.

To better illustrate what I mean, Advanced NFL stats showed that David strategies are often beneficial for underdogs even when they are basically inferior overall. In other words, even if a strategy would result in fewer expected points, it still would benefit the underdog because it still could get lucky. As ANFL explains:

Here’s why underdogs should play aggressive and risky gameplans. Take an example where one team is a 7-point favorite over its underdog opponent. Say the favorite would average 24 points and the underdog would average 17 points. With a SD of 10 points for each team, the underdog upsets the favorite 31.5% of the time. The favorite’s scoring distribution is blue and the underdog’s is red.



But if the underdog plays a more aggressive high-variance strategy, increasing its SD to 15 points, it would upset the favorite 35.3% of the time.



Note that I haven’t increased the underdog’s average score in any way, just its variance. The increase in its chance of winning results due to more of its probability mass moving to the right of the favorite’s mean score of 24. In fact, the higher the variance, the wider the probability mass will be spread. Consequently, more mass will be to right side of the favorite’s average score. But more mass will also be to the left, meaning there is a higher risk of an embarrassing blowout.

Even if employing a high-variance strategy is non-optimum, it can still help an underdog. In other words, even if an aggressive gameplan results in an overall reduction in average points scored, it often still results in a better chance of winning.

Yet would there be any reason for a Goliath to use this strategy? No, not at all. All it would be doing is inviting variance that would result in a few more upsets, and in fact might make the team worse (though could give the illusion of success because, again, of its high variance, resulting in a few high-scoring output games).

This is the biggest problem with the example TN uses:

Goliath University believes in the old Big Ten philosophy, 3 yards and a cloud of dust. Let's say they've even perfected their approach to the point that they can get exactly 3.3333 yards every time without ever turning the ball over. There is no risk involved and they know exactly what they are going to get with every play. Per play, they expect to get around .23 points. In true Goliath fashion, however, they run a quick, no-huddle offense in order to maximize the number of trials on the field. Over the course of the game this translates (assuming about 100 plays per game) to about 23 points and let's say a little over 30 minutes T.O.P. They'd win most of their games, but they'd lose any game where their defense gave up 24 or more due to random variation in the amount of time their opponent held the ball.

Goliath State University instead takes a more wide open approach, similar to Tulsa's offense. They throw the ball a lot more often, and go downfield more frequently as well. There is a lot more uncertainty associated with this approach, as there are many possible outcomes to their plays. However, through the strength of their preparation, they have a 50% chance of completing any given pass. Each of their 5 options (4 receivers and a QB run) has a 10% chance of success.

* If the QB runs, there is a 70% chance he will gain 4 yards, a 25% chance he will gain 14, and a 5% chance he scores
* Receiver A is running our deep fly, and there is a 50% chance he gets a 40 yard completion and a 50% chance he scores
* Receiver B is running the post, and there is a 80% chance he will get a 14 yard completion and a 20% chance he scores
* Receiver C is running the out, there is a 95% chance he gets 7 yards and a 5% chance he scores
* Receiver D is running the drag, there is a 95% chance he gets 4 yards and a 5% chance he scores

The expected point value of this play is:

.5*.1*((.7*.23+.25*1+.05*7)+(.5*3+.5*7)+(.8*1+.2*7)+(.95*.5+.05*7)+(.95*.23+.05*7)) = .468 expected points per play

Again, this is simply a better strategy, which is different than being a David strategy. Risk does not automatically equal David, and very conservative does not equal Goliath. Sometimes there is still better or worse.

To be fair, there is some indication in the TN pieces that this comes through. It repeatedly discusses the need to reduce the riskiness of these strategies "through film study, personnel decisions, and practice." Again though, I would argue that (a) these extra resources are themselves often a Goliath strategy (this becomes evident at high school for sure, but also in college with big differentials in resources, film equipment, practice materials, etc), and (b) practice and preparation is the quintessential dominant strategy -- it neither favors the underdog nor favorite, it's just a good idea!

The upshot is that these are two very good pieces, and well worth the read. I just want to emphasize my earlier point that I am using David and Goliath strategies in a very specific way, and one that differs slightly from Gladwell (it may not even be correct, it's just how I am using it). A true "David strategy" is one that, by definition, would not be good for a Goliath, because it is riskier. I used the example of extra fake punts, onside kicks, going for it on fourth, trick plays, etc. Relatedly, some Goliath strategies are low variance but that doesn't mean they have to be literally three-yards and a cloud of dust.

But the important point that TN clearly does get is that, Goliaths may nevertheless act suboptimally, and it is the underdogs and Davids that might discover the better, dominant strategies. The dominant ones will be adopted by those Goliaths (think of the spread of the spread, with its ability to push boundaries while keeping risk low), and others, though derided mightily as "gimmicks," simply might be appropriate for an underdog. It's not always easy to tell the difference, but this is an idea definitely worth continued exploration.

Smart Notes and Links 7/28/09

1. Brett Favre is not happy about this and will unretire to prove it. A commemorative decoration (ht Maize 'n Brew, via sconnie.com):



2. How science can save you from choking. This new bit from Jonah Lehrer is a nice complement to my earlier post on football decision making and the brain.

Kenny Perry could taste history. He had a two-shot lead with two holes to go at the 2009 Masters - all he had to do was not make any big mistakes and he would become, at 48, the oldest Masters champion in history. For three days at Augusta, he had played the best golf of his life: on the first 70 holes, he made only four bogeys. But then, at the 71st hole, everything started to fall apart. . . .

We call such failures "choking", if only because a person frayed by pressure might as well not have oxygen. What makes choking so morbidly fascinating is that the performers are incapacitated by their own thoughts. Perry, for example, was so worried about not making a mistake on the 17th that he played a disastrous chip. His mind sabotaged itself.

Scientists have begun to uncover the causes of choking, diagnosing the particular mental differences that allow some people to succeed while others wither in the spotlight. Although it might seem like an amorphous category of failure, their work has revealed that choking is triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much.

The sequence of events typically goes like this: when people get nervous about performing, they become self-conscious. They start to fixate on themselves, trying to make sure that they don't make any mistakes. This can be lethal for a performer. The bowler concentrates too much on his action and loses control of the ball. The footballer misses the penalty by a mile. In each instance, the natural fluidity of performance is lost; the grace of talent disappears.

Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has helped illuminate the anatomy of choking. She uses golf as her experimental paradigm. When people are learning how to putt, it can seem daunting. There are just so many things to think about. Golfers need to assess the lay of the green, calculate the line of the ball, and get a feel for the grain of the turf. Then they have to monitor their putting motion and make sure that they hit the ball with a smooth, straight stroke. For an inexperienced player, a golf putt can seem unbearably hard, like a life-sized trigonometry problem.

But the mental exertion pays off, at least at first. Beilock has shown that novices hit better putts when they consciously reflect on their actions. The more time they spend thinking about the putt, the more likely they are to hole the ball. By concentrating on their game, by paying attention to the mechanics of their stroke, they can avoid beginner's mistakes.

A little experience, however, changes everything.

3. "SEC offers great drama, even football." The Big 10 media day, however, does not live up to its frat-guy, party school reputation. (And this gets a link solely because of the Dr. Octagon reference.)

4. Can NCAA athletes be denied access to agents? I don't have a ready answer to this question, though read up about it here. (Ht Dr Saturday.)

5. Monte Kiffin would like to remind you again that he will outwork you. You know, just in case you forgot.

6. An inviting summary:

With the ESPN cameras gone and prize money drying up, the glory years of the Lumberjack world championships appear to be long over.

7. Back when I wrote this, I got a fair bit of heat and disagreement:

Hello! Plaxico Burress is going to jail. . . . [T]he NFL community -- and not just fans -- seem rather blind to the reality that Plaxico faces gun charges with a mandatory minimum sentence and the prosecutors do not appear interested in granting him grace, and so he is going to serve some real jail time. Who he signs with is rather beside the point.

Well, it appears to finally be sinking in. The NY Times reports:

Manhattan's district attorney says he wants former Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress to serve time in prison, the New York Post reported. Robert Morgenthau told the newspaper that Burress, who shot himself with an unlicensed gun in November, was willing to agree to spend a year in jail, but prosecutors insisted on two.

''We've always taken the position that he's going to have to go to jail, whether by trial or by plea,'' Morgenthau told the Post for a story in Monday's edition.

Again, remember that this gun possession charge Burress was hit with has a two-years mandatory minimum. Sure, he can plead for less, but this doesn't seem a particularly difficult charge to prove: he brought the gun into the club and shot himself. That makes this next bit a bit strange to me.

Brafman [Plaxico's lawyer] had previously said he no longer thought the matter would be resolved through a plea agreement and that prosecutors would take the case to a grand jury. He also said Burress would plead not guilty if the case went to trial.

Again, not sure what a not guilty plea would get Plax.

Smart Links and Notes 7/27/09

1. ESPN's Bruce Feldman asks a panel "What makes a great college coach?" (Insider required.)

"He must be able to develop players. Good X's and O's can only put players in a position to succeed; they must also be taught the tools to actually do so. This requires that the coach be a great teacher of technique, drive, and desire (and if he is head coach he must be able to teach his players and his coaches those things as well), and to be a great teacher the players must also know that he cares before they will listen. Styles may differ -- compare Pete Carroll to Bear Bryant -- but the players must be willing to run through a wall for their coach."

That's my answer. Other contributors Feldman asked included former GA coach Jim Donnan, Rod Gilmore of ESPN, Jim Hofher Delaware's OC, and Phil Steele ("My No. 1 judge of a coach is how often they outperform my magazine's expectations."), among others.

2. Brophy chimes in with more on the "robber" coverage, as a jump-off from my recent bit on Va Tech's D for Dr Saturday. He includes some classic coaching tape of Virginia Tech vs. Syracuse in 1998 (McNabb was QB for the Orangemen).



3. The Blue-Gray Sky breaks down -- and is down on -- Notre Dame's use of the draw play. They do a nice job, but I'm confused why they are so down on the draw play. Michael points out that the play's average in 2008 was 4.9, which was down from a high of 5.3 yards per carry in 2005. That's true that it was down, but that's still a pretty good average for a team that averaged a paltry 3.27 yards per carry. (And if you take Jimmy Clausen's 54 "carries" for -74 yards out of the equation, ND still only averaged 3.92 YPC.)

Notre Dame's problems with the rush appear to be two-fold: one, they just need to get better at blocking up front, and maybe BGS is right that just committing to the inside zone or some other play will make them better; and second, the pass game is not as dangerous as it was, as in 2005 Brady Quinn averaged an impressive 8.7 yards per pass attempt (unadjusted). If I were them I would focus on a simpler base of run plays: four or five at the max. Anyway, check out the original post.

4. I agree with the Senator: The Tebow-gate vote scandal was anti-climactic (Spurrier: Uh, I didn't care enough to do it myself and someone else either got cute or lazy and I never looked. In fact, I never look.) As I take the Senator's point to be, do we care if coaches don't really bother with these things? I sure don't. I always figured the "Coaches poll" -- in its various forms -- basically just stood for "someone over there at the coaches office and/or athletic department of that school," and that was good enough for me. It's more of an issue of who else you'd want to ask.

5. File this in the category of strange ideas: Zach Zaremba wants Southern Cal to switch to the spread offense.

The Trojans have the athletes to run this prolific offense, so will they get behind the eight ball, or follow suit as so many teams have already done and install the offense of the 21st century?

Powerhouses such as Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Michigan, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Florida and West Virginia have made the switch. When will the mighty Trojans?

Uh. There's more there, but the argument seems to be that USC isn't scoring as many points as, say, Oklahoma or Florida, and they haven't won a National Title in four years. But that doesn't make much sense: USC lost to Oregon State last year, in a single defensive breakdown, and Stanford the year before, in just a fluke game (many spread offenses have had similar breakdown games). Relatedly, this really can't be an issue of being wide open enough, as USC throws the ball plenty and does -- contrary to what the article says -- use four and five receiver sets (though not with the frequency of a team like Florida).

The other reason of course that USC hasn't won a title game over the last four seasons (aside from facing Vince Young), is that the Pac-10 has let USC down: Florida, which won two of the last three titles, had a loss each season, and LSU lost two games. It's a strength of schedule thing.

Anyway I'm getting off topic. The article is weird, and based on an equally weird premise: "The spread offense is the most popular offense in football today." That, to me, is a good reason not to run the spread. Look, the issue with pro-style offenses versus spread offenses is that spread offenses, where the quarterback is a dynamic runner, can get an arithmetic advantage. But that doesn't make dropback passing obsolete; if your guy is Peyton Manning or Tom Brady -- or the college equivalent, like Leinert or Carson Palmer were -- then you are more than dynamic enough. It's not easy to find guys with that kind of passing ability, but USC definitely can.

What makes a good running back? How do you evaluate how good a team's run game is?

The pro-football reference blog recently mentioned something I found fascinating:

What about rushing? . . . .In modern times, most RBs have a median carry length of three yards. I suspect that’s been the case for the majority of RBs for a long time. LenDale White and his 3.9 YPC last season? Median rush of 3 yards. Adrian Peterson and his 4.8 YPC? Median rush of 3 yards.

I think this has powerful implications. If most runningbacks tend to have the same median rush, then those who are more effective -- and hence have higher averages -- would be almost exclusively based on their big-play ability. (That big-play ability could still come in different forms, i.e. the guy who consistently can turn five yarders into 15 yarders, or the guy who can break every 10th or 15th rush into a 50 yarder.)

But this would imply that the powerback, or at least the powerback who is not considered so explosive, is overrated. (Earl Campbell could run you over and break off big gains.) The point is just that the premium would not be on the player's results on the average plays, but instead on the longer ones. Some of this too can be the surrounding cast. Indeed, as Homer Smith has said, a runningback who gets 130 yards on 20 carries plays in a better offense (either because of him or for whatever other reason) than a guy who gets 145 on 35 carries.

But this does all assume that average yards per carry is the most important stat. I'm not sure all would agree that it is. (In fact, I think the PFR Blog folks might not agree, as they ranked runningbacks and included their total carries and pure total yards as a key factor.) I'm not convinced that more carries means a better back or better running game, as that depends on the game situation (does the team get a lot of leads?) and also that the play-calling is optimal. I can also buy that on 3rd and 3, or third and goal, the point is to convert, not to help the average.

Yet then how else can we evaluate running backs, or even a running game more generally? A perusal of the best offenses and running games in college tends to show that the best all have high yards per carry; not too many BCS teams have averaged fewer than 4.5 yards per carry, and several have averaged well over five yards per rush attempt (including sacks, which count against the run game total in college).

So I'm opening the floor to better ideas. IF yards per attempt is the best metric (for either an individual back or a team's run game), and IF the median truly is right around 3 yards for great and average backs alike, then the difference between good and mediocre runningbacks and rushing teams would seem to be wholly in the explosiveness of the upper 50% of plays: a good team or player can rip off big gains, and turn big gains into touchdowns, while the average plays for both is about the same. (And maybe negative plays are overrated.)

But I'm interesting in everyone's thoughts on this question. How do you evaluate the running game?

What I'm reading

1. 2009 Coach of the Year Clinic Manual. Nothing revolutionary, but some good stuff. Chip Kelly of Oregon has a good article (which is actually available here), as does Monte Kiffin, now of Tennessee (about his famous "Tampa Two," of course). Paul Johnson of Georgia Tech has a good one too, which includes this gem:

We give teams that play that kind of front [i.e. try to read the A-back's block to give them cues on what kind of blocking scheme Georgia Tech is using to block the various defenders "assigned" to the different possible ballcarriers in the option] something a little funky. When they play the eight-man front on defense, they tie the safety and outside linebacker to the release of the playside slot. They tell the linebacker if the slot runs straight up the field, the strong safety takes the quarterback and the free safety runs for the pitch. If the slot arcs, the linebacker stays outside on the slot and the safety runs the alley for the quarterback. That is not a bad way to play and is probably smart. If we find them doing that, we automatic with a safety call. We run the slot on the inside release, but he passes the linebacker and blocks the safety. [In other words he basically fakes blocking one guy and blocks a different guy, though it is subtle and designed to defeat what the defenders were taught all week to look for as a blocking tendency.] The defense has two defenders on the quarterback and no one on the pitch. We did that a bunch against Georgia in our last regular season game.

Yup. The insight here is that it's not necessarily that Georgia didn't know the option, it's that they maybe overthought the whole thing, trying to guess and calculate what was coming when. Sometimes the answer is just to keep it simple, read and react, and play football.

2. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace. The guy could write.

3. Harper's Magazine. Just got a subscription.

4. The Most Of P.G. Wodehouse (Collection of P.G. Wodehouse stories). Another guy who could flat write. Many of these stories are ridiculous but that's often where their fun lies.

5. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, by David Wessel (the Wall Street Journal's economics editor). It's not out yet, but looks good, and I will be reading it. I've avoided most of the new books on the economic collapse, but it appears this is the one to read (at least so far). I've also always enjoyed Wessel's work.

Deconstructing the Virginia Tech defense

Find it all over at Dr Saturday, where I wrote another guest post. And thanks again to the Doc for the invite. I plan on putting up an expanded, more wonky version in a few days, but for now check it out.

Old school

Check out the videos on the University of Minnesota Libraries' tribute to the old Memorial stadium. Besides, who says the shotgun spread is new? Watch the highlights of any of the championship teams, including the 1940 one. You'll see lots of Notre Dame Box type sets, with lots of shotgun, faking, sprint out passing from the 'gun, etc. Looks pretty similar to what I see these days.

Smart Links - July 23, 2009

1. What am I missing? Everyone is obsessed with finding out who didn't vote for Tebow as first-team all-SEC. It's also a rule that you can't vote for your own guy. Then why isn't the answer that Urban Meyer voted for Jevan Snead? I mean he lost to him and is apparently barred from voting for his own guy. (I also don't know how the not-voting-for-your-own guy rule is compatible with having unanimous selections. If you think your guy is the best, do you just leave the spot blank rather than fill in someone else there?) Again, I must be missing something pretty fundamental here. [UPDATE: As several readers pointed out, "unanimous" equals everyone but your own coach, and Spurrier has admitted that he was the one who didn't. (Though he blames an assistant.)]

2. College Football Playoff Act of 2009, H.R. 390. University of Illinois law professor Christine Hurt (an alumna of Texas Tech and U. of Texas), writing on the legal blog the Conglomerate. Her post, reprinted in full:

In reading all the legislation during the 110th and 111th Congress that contain the word "windfall," (everybody needs a hobby) this definitely wins in the surprise category.

The College Football Playoff Act of 2009 was introduced by Joe Barton (TX), and it has been referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Now, before you start to wonder where Congress gets the power to redesign NCAA football, note how the legislation works. "A bill to prohibit, as an unfair and deceptive act or practice, the promotion, marketing, and advertising of any post-season NCAA Division I Football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system."

Hmmm. Next we have the MLB change the name of the World Series unless they actually invite other countries to participate.

So, where does windfall fit in here? In the findings, of course:

Congress finds that. . . the colleges and universities whose teams participate in the post-season football bowls experience significant financial windfall including increased applications for enrollment, recruiting advantages, increased alumni donations, and increased corporate sponsorship that provides s competitive advantage over universities whose teams are ineligible or statistically at a disadvantage from the BCS bowl competitions because of their conference affiliation.

Well, I'll let you quibble with this silliness, but this legislation, even if it passed (which it won't), wouldn't make the NCAA create a playoff. The BCS championship bowl would just have a different name. And it doesn't matter because Texas Tech isn't ever going to make it to the bowl no matter what the name is. You could call it "Bob" or even the "Texas Tech Red Raider Champions of the World Bowl," and Texas Tech would still never make it all the way. OK, that was an aside.

3. SEC media day. Just follow @edsbs on twitter. Thank me later.

4. ESPN will now let its reporters talk about the Ben Roethlisberger case.

5. Michael Vick, underrated? Brian Burke on the NY Times Fifth Down Blog.

6. The Senator asks: How far can the spread, spread? Good stuff, well worth it.

7. More from the NY Times on the O'Bannon vs. NCAA infringment case:

O’Bannon left U.C.L.A. in 1995. Does the N.C.A.A. have the right to continue to make money off O’Bannon and his teammates without compensation?

“Is that part of what an athlete’s grant-in-aid is about?” asked Richard M. Southall, the director of the College Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina. “You’ve left the plantation and now 15 years later you have a wife and children and the plantation still owns you, no matter what.”

College merchandise licensing is a $4-billion-a-year industry, and the N.C.A.A. has cornered the market. An N.C.A.A. business partner, Thought Equity Motion, has called the N.C.A.A.’s video content archive “one of the most unique and valuable content collections in the world.” . . .

The N.C.A.A. has had a sweetheart deal for years — using players’ likenesses, selling jerseys with popular players’ numbers and using athletes as uncompensated on-campus entertainment. Of course, athletes and their parents have had their own sweetheart deal, choosing colleges for sports and not for an academic fit.

There is not a lot of sympathy these days for athletes’ woes — at any level. The perception is that scholarship athletes and their families receive a pretty good deal. Yes, the hours are long and daily practices make this a rigorous part-time job.

“The general thinking among the public is that, ‘It could be a heck of a lot worse — you should be just be thankful for what the school has given you,’ ” Southall said. If that means eternal rights to your image, then so be it.

And the public does not care.

Just wait. Come September, college football stadiums from Harvard to Southern California will be filled with fans. Fans do not worry about steroids or licensing issues; they just want to be entertained.

O’Bannon’s case and the others raise an old but still unanswered question: Who protects the college athlete? In the N.F.L., a players association protects players against owners. In major league baseball and the N.B.A., unions look after the players’ interests.

Not so in college.

The N.C.A.A. describes itself as “the organization through which colleges and universities of the nation speak on athletics at the national level.” The N.C.A.A. tries to act as mother, father and paternalistic overseer who supposedly knows what’s best for the young athlete.

But don’t count on it.

Every year, beginning in their freshman season, scholarship athletes are compelled to sign mountains of forms.

How many athletes or parents or guardians read the forms? How many challenge the athletic department? College administrators and coaches pay lip service to “educating the kids,” but how many insist that their new recruits know exactly what they are signing?

More to the point, how many recruits — and parents of recruits — have the nerve to tell Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski or Tennessee’s Pat Summit that, based on a lawyer’s advice, they are not signing anything granting a release of their image.

All involved usually are too filled with gratitude and ego to consider reading between the lines.

“Until someone says something, stuff can go on,” Southall said. “Nobody wants to be the athlete who’s blackballed. Nobody wants to be the test case that’s thrown out.”

Ed O’Bannon wishes he had raised the question and resisted 15 years ago. Perhaps as a result of his suit, future athletes won’t have to.

Again, I think even if the NCAA loses they will just get the players to sign a waiver of their rights as a condition of getting the scholarship.

Is the NCAA infringing the rights of its current and former players?

The plot thickens: Former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon has now sued the NCAA over what he asserts is the NCAA's infringing use of his likeness in its various materials, including NCAA basketball video games. This case, unlike maybe Sam Keller's, is the real deal: Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Hausfield LLC are serious law firms, and the suit is a class-action suit, meaning that they are looking to join as many other former athletes as possible. And one twist does make this case more sympathetic, in that O'Bannon is a former player, no longer on scholarship, who continues to have his likeness used in subsequent editions of the video game through the "All-time" team features. He's not just suing about the use of his likeness when he was in college under scholarship.

Not that I'm convinced that makes any difference. The bottom line is that everyone owns their own name and likeness, and any use of that name or likeness without permission that is infringing -- particularly for commercial use -- is impermissible. Now the question is what is infringing, and the NCAA simply maintains it hasn't infringed on anyone's rights. It hasn't yet had to explain why, though frequent arguments are that the kids are already compensated with scholarships or that the likenesses in the games aren't infringing enough -- you know, that Florida QB #15 that runs like a rhino and throws 50-yard bombs could be anybody. Neither is persuasive.

The first looks just about foreclosed. Recently a federal appeals court decided that NFL Films infringed on John Facenda's distinctive voice when it used clips in advertisements for EA's Madden football. Facenda of course had that booming voice, and he had signed a contract with NFL Films. But in signing a contract didn't mean he waived all his rights for all time. Instead, as the Court said, "Facenda consented to participation in films documenting NFL games, not an advertisement for a football video game." The same might be said of the NCAA's scholarship athletes.

And the second is not how it works. You can infringe on someone's publicity rights without saying them by name; the question is basically whether the whole thing passes the smell test. For example, successful plaintiffs in publicity rights cases have included Muhammad Ali (who sued Playgirl magazine after it published a drawing of a naked guy resembling him with "The Greatest" written under it), Vanna White (an advertisement by Samsung showing a robotic blonde woman turning over a Wheel of Fortune display), George Wendt and John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff and Norm on Cheers (animatronic likenesses of Cliff and Norm were placed in airport bars). On the other hand, the unsuccessful have been Joe Montana, who sued regarding the use of his image after having won the Superbowl, as that was merely the recording of an historic fact, and baseball (again!), which sued a company that made cartoonish, spoof baseball cards. The court there ruled that the baseball cards were sufficiently a parody of the players such that a suit wasn't permissible. (No word on whether that defense would remain for players who receive absurdly low ability ratings in EA's NCAA Football.)

One irony here is that the sports leagues -- usually always on the same side -- are now put on opposing sides with the simultaneous rise of these fantasy baseball challenges. In these cases, Major League Baseball and its players union have sued proprietors of fantasy baseball leagues, arguing that a player's name followed by his historical stats constitutes an infringing of publicity rights. These suits have not fared well, but they provide a nice contrast with the NCAA's position, which is that recreating the image and likeness of current and former athletes is not infringing.

So what would happen if the courts ruled against the NCAA? I'm not sure how damages might work, but I would guess the NCAA would try to get its future players -- i.e. 17 year old kids -- to sign waivers of their publicity rights, forever. (Kind of like Facebook does for any photos you upload there.) But you also might get antitrust issues with, say, forcing all the various Universities to take on this policy, or then enforcement issues when, say, some WAC school offers its recruits the opportunity to play for them without having to sign away their publicity rights. It's an interesting mess.

That's a good trade

The NY Times's Fifth Down Blog has swapped out KC Joyner for Advanced NFL Stats' Brian Burke, who will be guest-posting there this week. I'll take that bargain any day.

Q&As with spread gurus and those entrusted with stopping them

ESPN is doing some kind of spread week, and they have posted a bunch of Q&As with coaches from around the country chiming in on the spread, what they do, and how to stop it. There's some chaff but also some good stuff, so I thought I'd provide the excerpted highlights (with links):

• Paul Johnson on his spread-option:

How similar is what you do to what Urban Meyer and Rich Rodriquez do?

PJ: I think it's very similar. . . .

Why do you think then, that most college football fans, when they think of your offense, probably don't automatically think of what Urban Meyer and Rich Rodriquez do?

PJ: Because one is under the gun and the other is under the center.

That's it?

PJ: Yeah, and most fans, quite honestly, couldn't tell you what plays they ran out of the gun. It's like anything else -- if you're successful and you have big plays, then it's great. If you're not moving the ball and you're not scoring then it's no good. If you look at last year with what Rich did at Michigan, it's the same offense they ran at West Virginia, but it was a learning process, different personnel and they didn't have near the success. In fact they had very little success. But nobody was questioning whether it would work or not. As soon as we have one game where we don't score 30 points, boy it's like, I told you this wouldn't work, everybody figured it out. That's what drives you nuts.

• Arizona's offensive coordinator Sonny Dykes (formerly of Texas Tech):

How about with receivers? Does the spread require different things out of them than if you were lining up in a pro-style set?

SD: Yeah, definitely. The quarterback and receivers have to spend a lot of time getting on the same page. If you run the ball, guys are going to try to sneak more guys in the box. When they do that, you need to find a way to get the ball on the perimeter, whether it's throwing the [bubble screens] or whatever, to try to get the ball away from the guys packing the box. When you're doing that, it looks like an easy throw, but it's something that requires quite a bit of timing and work between quarterbacks and wide receivers. If you're going to spread it out and do that, your quarterback and receivers have to spend a lot of time developing a feel for each other. . . .

One way guys recruit against spread teams is they tell recruits that if they play in a spread offense they are not going to get the respect from the NFL in the draft. What do you say to that?

SD: It's weird. Remember [the University of] Miami was one of the first teams running the one-back and running a spread offense with three receivers on the field? They were doing it with guys like Bernie Kosar and Vinny Testaverde and all of those guys were getting drafted. Back then, Miami was using it as a real advantage -- hey, we're spreading the field and throwing the ball. That's how you get into the NFL. What's happened is the spread has changed and there are a lot of different kinds of spreads. You've got what Penn State was doing last year which is more traditional type stuff. And then you've got the stuff that is way out there, the run-and-shoot stuff, what Tech's done. I think anytime a quarterback can drop back and throw the football, that's important. All that does is make him better, whether he does it under center or out of the shotgun. I don't see how a quarterback can be faulted when he takes a snap, avoids a rush, shuffles in the pocket, goes through reads, finds a receiver, throws an accurate ball and does all the things you have to do to drop back and throw. I don't see how he becomes a better quarterback by being under center and handing it to a running back. There's been a little bit of a knock, but I think that's just because of the personnel. If you're Texas Tech, you don't have to recruit 6-foot-6 quarterbacks who can stand in the pocket and throw the ball. And those are the guys the NFL is always going to like. Now, some of those guys don't work out and guys like Tom Brady do, who's not very big and doesn't have a particularly strong arm. They're just good players. Whether it's college or pro, the important thing for a quarterback is just finding a good fit.

• Tulsa's offensive coordinator Herb Hand:
  

How hard is it for a receiver to learn a spread offense with so many different options going on?

HH: I think it's a lot simpler because what you're trying to do is you're trying to create one-on-ones. And I know that you're trying to do that in about every offense, create one-on-ones. But in the spread, because you have people spread out so much, it's a numbers game ... So, in most spread offenses, the beauty of it is that it creates a lot of one-on-one opportunities for wide receivers. That's all a guy really asks for.

• Mississippi State's Dan Mullen, formerly of Florida:

What type of player are you looking for at the skill positions?
Dan Mullen: The first thing we look for is a guy who's multi-talented, a guy that can play a crossover position or hybrid position. You want a receiver who can also line up at tailback or a tailback who can flex into the slot or move up to the fullback position. Guys who have multiple skills make it hard for defenses to match up on you. . . .

When you have several of these hybrid players, why does it make it so difficult for the defense?

Dan Mullen: One thing we're hoping to get to here at Mississippi State is where you don't have to change personnel groupings very often. Everybody has the same skill set, which makes it harder for the defense to pick up on what you're doing. You don't have to substitute to run different things.

• Missouri offensive coordinator David Yost:
  

How much has the talent you guys have accumulated over recent years provided you the opportunity to make your offense different from one season to the next?

David Yost: Coach [Gary] Pinkel is a very direct guy and he thinks things through and doesn't fly by the seat of the pants. And that's the beauty of this offense.

When we had [former Missouri quarterback] Brad [Smith] we ran him more. Then we got Chase Daniel in here who could run the football, but also could also lead us to more passing because of his talents. That helped us transform our offense into more of a passing philosophy.

At one time when we had [tight ends] Chase [Coffman] and Martin Rucker, we were running a lot of two-tight end offenses. Then we had a set of receivers, but not necessarily ones that would be as suited to running the spread. Then, we started recruiting guys like Jeremy Maclin and stopping using as much two-tight end sets.

Now, after losing Coffman and Maclin, we'll be a little thinner at wide receiver this season. Because of that, we're kind of adjusting what we're doing. We'll be using three wideouts and our tailback more as a rusher and a receiver.

We feel our offense gives us a chance to get our best 11 players on the field. And we can do things differently depending on the personnel we have on hand.

Defending the spread

• Virginia Head Coach Al Groh:

How do you prepare for it and what's your philosophy in going against it?

Al Groh: . . . .One of the things we have observed is that defensive teams have to be willing to take some risks in order to take the initiative back. When you're so spread out, and one of the features of the spread, and the spread offense is just a formation. Having been in conversations with people, the two things I noticed is, last year Missouri finished fourth in the country in passing and Oregon finished fourth in running. Both are called spread offenses. The word spread is no longer associated with specific plays. It's simply a formation that spreads the defense from sideline to sideline and in doing so creates some natural spaces in the defense. It's harder to go from far away to attack the offense and you leave yourself vulnerable to certain things. By the same token, what we're observing is defense are afraid to take any risks. They just stand there and they're a standing target.

What we do like about being in the 3-4 defense is the flexibility it provides because defense, so much these days, that fourth linebacker as opposed to a fourth defensive lineman in the 4-3, gives us significantly more options. What defensive coaching is now, no matter what the system, you have to find some ways to adapt to what the other team is doing. We think this gives us the ability to adapt and react. You'd like to be on the attack defensively and set the tone, but to a degree the offensive will always control that. You have to be able to adjust and adapt.

How different is what Georgia Tech does? It's the spread option. How does that make it a little more difficult to prepare for, or does it?

AG: They are in their own way, yes, they fall under that umbrella because while the plays are different, it's out of sync with what teams face on a repetitive basis. That's the only time that most teams see that offense every year. There's no accumulated familiarity by the coaches or players going against it. That's a big part of the difficulty of playing against that or any offense that isn't common to what the defenses generally see. There's different plays, but it accomplishes similar things.

You guys beat them last year. As a coach, you get it. But how do you get your players prepared for it in what, five days, when they never see it?

AG: You're exactly right. One of the things we thought that was very important in the presentation of it was to demystify it for the players. In some cases, players can get frustrated. For example, this Wildcat formation that's gaining some notoriety. Really, in a lot of ways, it's a reduced down spread. It's spread out, but a lot of times it's with a player back there getting the direct snap who's a real good runner, but is not a passer. Actually, in talking with the Patriots last year, and all of a sudden it got sprung on them by Miami. In doing so, the unfamiliarity of it really threw them off during the course of the game and they could never quite get it back and in talking with the coaches there, they had issues during the game with getting the players settled down because there was still a mystique to what they were up against. From that point on, they had a detailed plan, and the next time they played against it from other teams as well as the second time they played Miami, they fared much better. You've got to demystify these unique offenses for the defensive players.

How much has it helped you as a defensive coach to understand it and scheme for it because [new offensive coordinator] Gregg [Brandon] is on your staff now and that's the way he's thinking?

AG: Very much so. It's helped us to establish a significant period of experimentation. We put some things out there and run them, and we really haven't tried to defend our team so much as let's just run our stuff and see what we like and what we don't like. It has certainly been helpful to us in that degree. . . .

Do you think there's any benefit to preparing the guys for the NFL to run one particular offensive scheme or another?

AG: Not really. I think that if the players are well-trained fundamentally, those are the things that carry over from league to league. The fundamental skills of how to execute their job, how to defeat the player across from them. It's highly unlikely that most players are going to go - with only 32 teams in the NFL - it's highly unlikely they're going to go to a system that's exactly like the one they came from. They're going to have to make some adjustments system-wise. The big thing is they have the fundamental background that can translate to any system. If you can block guys in one system, you can block them in another. If you can beat blocks in the 3-4, you can beat blocks in the 4-3. If you get blocked in the 3-4, you're going to get blocked in the 4-3.

Makes sense. Why do you think more ACC teams haven't caught onto this?

AG: It gets trendy within leagues. What you have to go against, whether it's offense or defense, you have to prepare for those things. You kind of become influenced and spend more time looking at those things and become influenced by those things. And of course a lot of it has to do with the philosophical backgrounds and beliefs that coaches bring with them. And really your background, too. At a point, sometimes what you know how to teach best, what you know how to utilize during the course of a game is the best for a particular team as opposed to something that is intriguing, but when certain things happen during a game maybe you just don't have the wherewithal to make those in-game decisions because you don't have enough familiarity with the system. Therefore, a team would be better off with something they're really fluent in.

Do you think your players will be more comfortable playing Georgia Tech the second time around?

AG: They should have a certain element of confidence. Their circumstances should be a lot more positive than if we would have given up 40 points. Then you have to come back the next year and convince the players we can really do this. 'Well wait a second, last year we were completely bamboozled by it and we haven't played against it since.' Yeah, I think we don't have to overcome that type of situation to start with, but no matter what, they run those plays every day. Their opponents, and this is the value of being a little bit out of the norm, whether it's with your offense or defense, their opponents only practice against those plays for a week.

• Cal defensive coordinator Bob Gregory:

I remember in high school preparing for wishbone teams: It was pure assignment football. Is it like that preparing for a spread-option vs. a typical pro-style, multiple offense?

BG: Yeah, it definitely is. In the old days, you had three backs in the backfield and everybody was doing option defensive assignments and concerns. It's the same kind of deal. The quarterback can carry the ball. He can hand off. He can motion a guy around to be the pitch guy. It really is the same idea. You've really got to make sure you stop all those elements. And then they throw in the no-huddle with it, which most of them have, and that can slow you down a little bit more. So we talk about that with our guys -- it's assignment football. You can't be quite as reckless, unless it's third-and-long and then you can get into your normal blitz stuff.

More than a few defensive coordinators have said that when you have a running quarterback, it stresses a defense and makes it difficult to match up. Is the spread not effective when the quarterback is not a good runner?

BG: I don't think it is as effective. I think when you've got a guy like [Jeremiah] Masoli at Oregon -- or a Dennis Dixon -- man, that makes it even harder. If a quarterback is not a great runner, you don't have to worry about him keeping it. And even if he does keep it, he's not going to gain a lot of yards. You can kind of load up in the one aspect, whether it's defending the ball inside or the pitch guy coming around, you don't have to worry about the quarterback. But if the guy can run, it adds a whole different dimension to it and makes it more difficult. . . .

How about blocking assignments: is that an adjustment also?

BG: Yeah, because so much of it is lateral. You really don't see the downhill, power running game that you see with most two-back teams -- power with pulling [linemen], lead plays, that kind of thing. So much of it is lateral, with guys moving in one direction and the back has the ability to really cut back and wind it back. You've really got to be conscious of not running so far out with the offensive line -- the term we use is "getting washed." Sometimes you see a back cutting all the way back and part of that is a defensive line over-pursuing and getting washed past the holes and the gaps up front so a back can stick it back. It's tough stuff and it is different. A good offensive line, like Oregon, that is big and strong and moves well, can really work guys past that initial point of attack and a good back can just break it back against the pursuit of the defense.

• Pittsburgh defensive coordinator Phil Bennett:

First of all, what is the challenge like when you're going up against a spread offense?

Phil Bennett: I played for a guy at Texas A&M, Emory Bellard, who invented the wishbone. With option football, everybody says it's an equalizer. I think if you have that quarterback, then the spread can be an equalizer.

I think it equalizes the field. I know as a defensive coach, it can take the aggressiveness out of you, because you have to be so concerned with assignments, just like the option. I was nervous last year when we played South Florida and Matt Grothe, and then obviously West Virginia. Our ends are big get-off, speed guys, and it really makes your ends go into a different mode. I don't think with the spread, in the run game, that you ever just really have to mash a guy. If you've got a body on body, then it becomes assignment football. But then you work on it so much that it can take a little bit of aggressiveness out of you.

How do you go about avoiding that?

PB: One of the things I try to do is, I try to treat it like the option in the run game. I want obviously a guy on the outside end and an inside-out guy on the quarterback. In the passing game, the thing I think is the toughest is the play-pass, because you're geared up to stop the run. I watched West Virginia against North Carolina, and they were so geared up to stop the run that Pat (White) threw for 330 yards, and it was off of play-pass.

I go back to our disaster game last year against Rutgers, where I had our guys so steered in on the run the week before against Navy. That's the thing the spread does to you. Your front guys have to still be aggressive, and the secondary still has to play pass. I was very pleased in our last home game against West Virginia, because our secondary, instead of getting so caught up in the run (played the pass). And we let our front go. And that's the thing I think you've got to do.

And of course the other thing is down and distance. Just like against the wishbone, if you get a down and distance on a spread team where the play-pass is taken away, then you've got a great advantage. The other thing people don't talk about in college is hash marks. You look at every spread team and watch them, and they have tremendous tendencies when they're in the middle of the field and then tremendous tendencies when they're on the boundary. . . .

Do you think that, in general, defenses are catching up to the spread?

PB: You know, as soon as you say that, somebody will tear you up. Now, with the original spread teams, people are starting to say, hey we've seen this. I think we played (against) regular personnel, out of 880 snaps last year, I think we played 90 snaps. And the rest was one back and either one tight, three wides or even four wides. Everybody is so multiple and they're doing variations of the spread. Iowa came out against us, and they had two tights, two flankers, and lo and behold guess what they did? They flexed them out and ran the spread out of it.

I think the more you can focus on something, week after week, people will get better answers. The other thing is, there's a premium on skill players on offense. The thing the spread does is, it creates matchups. And if you got a 4.4 (40-yard dash) wide receiver against a 4.8 linebacker, that's a great matchup. You've got to be able to swarm the ball, and you can't have too many of those matchups.

• South Carolina defensive coordinator Ellis Johnson:

There are so many versions of the spread offense. What do you think when you hear that somebody is running the spread?

Ellis Johnson: Everybody just refers to it in general as the spread, but it all starts with the quarterback and whether he's a good runner. If they run the quarterback, it's a whole different animal.

What makes it a different animal?

Ellis Johnson: If the quarterback doesn't run much and it's never more than the quarterback and the running back in the backfield at the same time, it doesn't present as many problems unless they've just got so many great athletes that you can't match up. But you've got problems with any offense that has that many great athletes. The quarterback being able to run presents that extra challenge back there that almost makes it seem like you're trying to defend a 12th man.

How have your triple-option roots at The Citadel helped you in defending the spread?

Ellis Johnson: One of the things that helps me when I'm drawing it up on the chalkboard is that everybody was running the option and the veer back in the 70s when I was coming up through coaching. I understand the loaded option with the extra blocker back there. A lot of younger coaches don't understand it, and obviously a lot of players don't. It's very difficult to get taught and understood how these things work.

How does your strategy change when you're going against a spread offense?Ellis Johnson: The thing we try to do is mix up our fronts as much as possible and keep the perimeter reasonably simple. If you blitz too much, it can be disruptive. But it's not going to be sound against option assignments. And reading linemen becomes extremely important. When they get in the shotgun and the quarterback's back there beside the running back, as the ball is traveling back to the quarterback, you really don't get any flow in the backfield, so you need to be heavily keying on the linemen.

• Northwestern defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz:

How has the spread offense changed the way you put together your game plans?

Mike Hankwitz: It has changed things because in the past, you wanted to feel like you could be more proactive and try to dictate. You could stack up against the run and force teams to throw, or you could stack your coverage and dare 'em to run. The spread does literally what it says: It spreads the field, forces you to spread your defense out more and especially with the quarterbacks that can run and throw. There's all different types of blocking schemes in the spread, aside from just the zone read.

So how do you counteract all of that?

MH: We try to see what the strength of their attack is. Is it the running game? How good is the quarterback in the run game? Is he a better runner than passer? If he is, then we'll commit more to the run and try to make him beat us throwing the ball. Or if they're a better passing team, then we will play more coverages and try to make them beating us running the ball. The third element when they spread you out is the unscripted, the improvised plays with the quarterback scramble. You're spread out and you're trying to rush the passer and play coverage and all of a sudden, the quarterback that can take off and scramble, it's not easy to plan for that all the time.

How much more time do you devote to the quarterback run now versus 15 years ago?

MH: Teams ran the triple option, and you had to be sound in your schemes and then you had to have the players who had discipline to take their assignment and not let somebody run free. The passing attack off that was minimal, but now, with the spread, you have that option aspect where you have to defend the different components of the run game: the read zone with the running back, the quarterback keeping it off the read zone and then bringing a running back in the backfield and bringing him out on a pitch. The bubble is another variation of it. [The receiver] becomes the pitch man. And then you have the jail-break screens, you have draws, running back draws, quarterback draws. It's more difficult to defend all that stuff.

You mention how dictating on defense was easier before. Has the spread allowed offenses to dictate more often?

MH: It makes it a lot harder on a defense to dictate or take away certain things, just because they've spread the field and they are doing more things. The offenses are trying to keep the defense from dictating to them. And then the other big part of the spread is the audible aspect of it, the coaches changing the plays. They're going no-huddle, they have more clock to work with and then they'll go up and show a formation and go through a cadence and try to get the defense to tip its hand. Then, they'll go back and change the play and try to get in a better play from what they've seen. You used to get some of that against passing teams. They would keep you from trying to substitute, but that was still relatively one-dimensional. You had some good one-back teams that could run and pass, but you didn't have to worry about the quarterback and the option.

• Texas Tech defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeil:

When you arrived in Lubbock in 2000, Leach was the only coach in the conference running the spread. Now, seven of the teams run the offense as a base set. Did you ever expect it to be this widespread?

RM: I've definitely seen things evolve. The yards per game and points all have increased. I think it's because we've seen a development in the training of quarterbacks and offensive players through seven-on-seven camps and the like -- particularly here in Texas. Now, everybody is trying to get their wide receivers and running backs into space. And we're trying to do what we can to stop them.

Because of the way scoring has mushroomed in the Big 12, are you changing the way you judge the success of your defense?

RM: You've seen things evolve. Obviously, yards per game and points have increased. It's not three yards and a cloud of dust like it was when I was playing. We all realize these quarterbacks are pretty good and these offenses can move the ball. What we have to do is be patient and innovative with how we try to counteract their schemes. Points will increase, but maybe now we need to look at stats like third-down conversions and turnovers to determine how effective a defense has really been.

How much of a philosophical change has it been after the mushrooming of these spread offenses since you started your coaching career?

RM: When I started back at East Carolina with Pat Dye, I grew up facing the wishbone all spring and all fall. That was the offense that everybody was using and that caused problems. You saw more of a power game. Then, you saw people start using the West Coast offense to try to throw the football.

I miss those days, but I know the spread defense is here to stay for a while because of the development of the athletes to fit those offenses. I know everybody in our state (high school players) is out throwing the football, so the passing quarterback is out there. The receivers are out there, too. The guys that used to play basketball are all becoming wide receivers. I think the spread will be here for awhile, so both sides will have to keep developing.

Smart Links - July 21, 2009

1. Ben Cahoon gets all Tyrone Prothro on things. Great catch from the Montreal Alouettes' Ben Cahoon. Love the CFL's motion and super spread with the 12 men -- nothing like four wide while still two-backs in the shotgun. (Ht Shutdown Corner.)



2. "Out of the Blue." A documentary about the Boise State team that wound up upsetting Oklahoma. Quite good.




3. Three plays that shocked the world. Always worth a repeat view.



4. Brian Cook wants to pull his eyes out. ESPN's Lester Munson gets all hysterical and apocalyptic about the Supreme Court's upcoming decision in the American Needle case. The question involves whether the NFL -- composed of 32 different franchises under one umbrella -- should be treated as a "single-entity" for purposes of some of the anti-trust laws. If the NFL the Court deems the NFL a "single-entity" rather than a joint venture (as the lower courts did), it will be immune from some of this anti-trust liability. Munson thinks the world is ending; Cook takes a slightly more reasoned and calm approach, noting that the Supreme Court's ultimate decision is far from knowable (likely at this point even by the Justices). I'm with Brian, and for more insight check out SCOTUSBlog's explanation of the legal issues involved.

5. "A Beautiful Mind." Profile piece by Rob Moseley about Oregon's Chip Kelly. A good, thoughtful piece. Kind of buys into the "coach as genius" meme -- football is pretty simple, and players can always make you look smart -- but a good read.

6. Dutch Meyer on the spread:

In an interview Sammy Baugh gave to the Washington Post, years after he’d gone on to a Hall of Fame NFL career with the Redskins, one can even see a little of Dutch Meyer’s influence on today’s West Coast Offense:

“Dutch Meyer taught us. All the coaches I had in the pros, I didn’t learn a damn thing from any of `em compared with what Dutch Meyer taught me. He taught the short pass. The first day we go into a room and he has three S’s up on a blackboard; nobody knew what that meant. Then he gives us a little talk and he says, `This is our passing game.’ He goes up to the blackboard and he writes three words that complete the S’s: `Short, Sure and Safe.’ That was his philosophy — the short pass. “Everybody loved to throw the long pass. But the point Dutch Meyer made was, `Look at what the short pass can do for you.’ You could throw it for seven yards on first down, then run a play or two for a first down, do it all over again and control the ball. That way you could beat a better team.”

Courtesy of Richard, one of the blog readers, and I believe the write-up is by the inimical coach Hugh Wyatt.

7. Dan Shanoff on the inevitability of ESPN's taking over local sports coverage. Also check out the front-page NY Times article he addresses.

8. Why are we so fat? Elizabeth Kolbert weighs in (zing!) in the New Yorker, and Jonah Lehrer tells us that our brains are biologically wired to prefer more calories over fewer, even when the taste is the same. (P.S. That's not a good thing.)

Nevada's "Horn Play" from the pistol

I wrote a brief overview of the Nevada Wolfpack's pistol offense for Dr Saturday. One interesting play that I didn't have the space to mention was their "horn" play, which is kind of like a combination between the old counter-trey and the pin-and-pull version of the outside zone.

The mechanics are fairly simple. They always run it to the tight end side. The playside of the line (the side the ball is going to) basically alternates between "down blocks" and "pull blocks": the tight-end blocks down on the defensive end, while the tackle pulls and kicks out the outside linebacker; and the playside guard blocks down on the defensive tackle or nose guard, while the center pulls and leads (called a "fold block") up to the linebacker. On the backside, the line essentially steps down and seals off the pursuit.

In the backfield, the quarterback reverses out and the runner takes a few counter or delay steps before starting to the playside.

The idea is to get some misdirection but not to use full pullers like on counter-trey; that way the linebackers freeze and don't flow so fast to where the run is going. Relatedly, they get good angles on the playside with all the "down blocks" and kickouts. The runner can either cut it inside the tackle behind the pulling center, or between the tight-end's down block and the tackle's kick out, or take it completely around end. Below is a video clip of Nevada running this play. (And check out the effort the center gives, even if he doesn't actually block anyone.)

ESPN actually does pretty decent job discussing the spread

ESPN's Mark Schlabach has a piece up today on the rise and ubiquity of the spread offense, and it is probably one of the better pieces I've seen from them on it. Now, Schlabach does seem to draw a line from Mouse Davis of run & shoot fame through current spreads like Urban Meyer's, but he doesn't carry this too far:

Even now, Davis wonders why it took college football coaches so long to adopt the principles of his offense, which was predicated on spreading a defense so wide that it created vertical seams for both runs and passes.

"I think it took coaches a while to find out how really tough it is to defend four-wide and how difficult it is to defend with either run or pass," Davis said. "The spread offense is now more of an option orientation by a lot of teams. A lot of them are running our same routes, but they don't read them as much. A lot of them are more run-oriented."

In many ways, the spread offense is still evolving. Coaches often see something they like from another coach's offense, then add their own wrinkles, plays and formations.

"You steal what you steal and put your own stuff in it," Davis said. "It's all interwoven some way."

When Rich Rodriguez took his spread offense from West Virginia to Michigan, a reporter from a Detroit newspaper called Davis. Rodriguez had told the reporter that he'd stolen much of his offense from Davis.

"He didn't get his stuff from me," Davis told the reporter. "I don't know where he got it from, but he got it from somebody else."

There are plenty of versions of the spread offense to imitate. The spread offenses at schools such as Texas Tech, Missouri and Tulsa are built around high-percentage passing games and often rely on quarterbacks and coaches to make the right decisions at the line of scrimmage. Spread offenses run by teams such as Michigan and Oregon are run-oriented attacks built around slot receivers, tailbacks and dual-threat quarterbacks.

"The bottom line is every spread offense is different," Nebraska coach Bo Pelini said last year. "Florida's spread offense is different than Missouri, and Missouri's is different than what Kansas is trying to do."

I think that's right: we have had spread rumblings for at least half a century if not further back -- from Dutch Meyer's TCU spread, Tiger Ellison's and later Mouse Davis's run & shoot, the Jack Neuimeier/Jack Elway (and John Elway) one-back spread, to the Hal Mumme/Mike Leach Airraid, and the assorted spread-to-runs of Rodriguez/Meyer/Walker et al. -- but there was, for a time, an almost complete banishing of the spread from college ball, and the spread's return has resulted in the (re)birth of a thousand offenses, each with their own spin on an old concept.

And this diversity, even within the spread, is one of the reasons that college football is so fun. Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp echoes what said earlier when contrasting college offenses from those in the pros:

"The hardest thing for your kids is to adjust every week," Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp said. "Back in 1985, every team lined up with two backs. Now everybody is running something different. That's why you see a lot of points scored now."

Now, on Rodriguez and the spread

Several readers (including by email) have told me they thought I was not unfair to Rich Rodriguez in my recent post about Randy Walker's effect on the rise of the spread. First, I didn't write this intending to dig Rodriguez or take anything away from him. I've written continuously about what an innovator he was (and is), and as I wrote in my piece for Michigan's Maple Street preview guide, I think Rodriguez ought to be able to turn the Wolverines around. In other words, I think he's a very good coach.

My point was simply that Walker made an important contribution. And keep in mind that the spread of the spread, so to speak, has in many ways been an interesting two-way dialogue between high schools and college -- and only now is the NFL listening too. True, when Rodriguez came out with the zone-read people came from all over to study it from, but Walker and Kevin Wilson really put their stamp on it and showed the way for coaches less inclined to be "spread guys" how to adapt their traditional offense to the new-fangled sets. And I do think it true that, until teams like Northwestern got going, Rodriguez hadn't quite focused on developing the shotgun run game into a robust "system."

At Tulane, the offense had the zone-read elements but Rodriguez and Tommy Bowden still considered themselves kind of pass-first guys; Shaun King threw for 3,495 yards and 38 touchdowns. His big innovation at the time was in throwing the 3-step quick game from the shotgun. It sounds quaint and kind of weird now, but at the time people really didn't think you could do it because of timing issues until they saw Rodriguez do it (along with Joe Tiller at Purdue). Indeed, no less a passing guru than Norm Chow, while he was still at BYU, visited Rodriguez to learn this funky technique, and for the first time in his career taught his quarterbacks to throw the three-step game from the shotgun. (And the BYU offense, which had slowly begin to wilt in the late '90s, saw a brief resurgence before Chow left for NC State and used the same techniques there with Philip Rivers.) These were heady days.

Moreover, in Bowden and Rodriguez's their first year at Clemson Woody Dantzler split time with Brandon Streeter, an incumbent fifth-year senior who was not mobile (he averaged 0.9 yards rushing on a meager 42 attempts). See the highlights below.



And in any event I wasn't saying that Clemson was some kind of disorganized mess when Rodriguez was there, just that, understandably, these were the early days of the spread, so a few big ideas were most of what you needed. As teams caught on Rodriguez stayed a step ahead, again, with the aid of Rick Trickett at West Virginia, an excellent offensive line coach. (Note that with Trickett the focus of the zone read changed from the inside zone to the outside zone, a subtle switch for the average fan that derived from the ideas and philosophy Trickett learned from Alex Gibbs, the Denver Broncos' famed line coach.)

All I was saying is that Walker played a very important role in this development. As Urban Meyer has said, back in those days the spread coaches were a small fraternity and they liked to swap notes. Rodriguez hit everybody over the head with his ideas, and then later, once guys like Meyer and Walker had put in full seasons running the stuff, they got back together and talked about what worked and what could be better. (And to one of the commenters who said that they never heard of anyone visiting Walker, that is just wrong: Meyer has said repeatedly that he visited Walker to learn what they were doing at Northwestern.)

So anyway, I don't think giving credit to one guy should be interpreted as taking anything away from another. These were some dramatic years for the spread, those years from 1997-2002 or so. A lot happened, a lot was learned, a lot was tried, and there were a handful of guys there at this birthing of a new style of offense. Rodriguez might be the father, but Walker helped pour the baptismal water.

Smart Links and Notes - July 20, 2009

1. Pistol meets flexbone? Last week I wrote a guest bit for Dr Saturday on Nevada's pistol offense, and I indicated that there were a lot of ways you could go with the pistol set. Nevada's offense is generally a mix of traditional power schemes with the spread zone and veer stuff, but that's not the only option. A reader passed along some video of Muskegon HS (MI), which runs the flexbone (similar to what Paul Johnson does at Georgia Tech) from the pistol set. As a result their shotgun is a bit shorter than Nevada's and the back lines up closer -- the mesh point in the veer all happens a bit faster. Worth taking a look.



2. Tebowliscious. Tebowlitude. sporting savant Dan Shanoff has launched a new blog that will be all-Tebow, all-the-time. Introducing, the TimTeBlog. Enjoy.

3. Rules, rules, rules. I recently mused about the differences in offenses between college and the pros, and Doc Saturday also recently chimed, in wondering why more teams don't use the triple-option, following the lead of the academies. There's much more to say on those topics, but one thing I didn't hit on much is the difference in rules at the various levels. One reason that the flexbone and the option offenses have been successful in college is that, in college, you can cut block downfield. In most states, cut blocking is illegal. (Texas being a notable exception.) See the video below.

Another notable rule that, in my view, limits the incentives for pro teams to be spread is the different rule for the ability of linemen to go downfield on screens. In college and high school, linemen may go downfield and everyone, receivers included, may block defenders right away, so long as the ball is throw behind the line of scrimmage. This leads to some pretty dynamic screen games, which is one of the advantages of being a spread team: you have lots of options for throwing quick screens, jailbreak screens, bubble screens, and even your more traditional ones to the runningback often work well because the defense is expanded out -- you can turn a regular play into a kickoff return. Indeed, screens are still probably the best weapon against the zone blitz.

In the pros, however, linemen may not release downfield on any pass until the ball is caught, and receivers too may not begin blocking until then either or else they will draw a penalty. Now, some teams like the Patriots have found ways to integrate the screens, but it is pretty evident that you can't run these plays as effectively if your linemen can't get downfield quickly and your blockers have to dance and shadowbox for a few counts before they actually start blocking somebody. A play like the TD below to LSU's Early Doucet, with linemen ten yards downfield by the time he catches the ball, would be called back in the NFL.



NFL teams have learned how to push this a bit, but it is still a rather important limit.

4. Juice Williams for Heisman? Bruce Feldman recently discussed Heisman hopefuls other than the "Big Three" (Tebow, Bradford, McCoy), and one name came up that caught my eye: The Illini's Juice Williams. Now, the idea that the owner of the largest noggin in college might win its most prestigious award might sound ridiculous to anyone has, you know, actually seen him play, I have thought about this and find the Juice-for-Heisman argument a legitimate one. One, his stats last year actually were not bad: 3,173 yards, 57.5% completion percentage, and 22 TDs, to go with 719 yards rushing. He did throw 16 picks, but the other thing you notice from the stats is that they definitely trend upward; he has a chance to be decent next year. And Feldman is right that Illinois has a chance to actually upset some of the other teams in the Big 10 -- the conference does not look to have any dominant teams. And, finally, as Phil Steele pointed out, the Illini's poor record seemed somewhat out of whack in light of the stats they put up; Steele pointed out that teams in similar positions tend to bounce back the next year as their won/loss record regresses to the mean. So who knows?

5. Urban Meyer, Tebow, and film study. From an old Q&A between Pete Thamel and Tim Tebow:

Q. Let’s start from the top. How much film did you watch in high school?

A. I was blessed to be at a high school where I had a good high school coach who knew football. We did watch some teams on film. I think it gave me an advanced knowledge of coverages and stuff coming into college. Still, you’re not prepared to come in here and to be able to read defenses and watch film correctly; not just watch as a football player and be like, ‘Oh, nice play.’ But you’re looking at technique and how you would play against them and all those types of things. That’s what I didn’t know and that’s what Coach Mullen has done such a good job of teaching me. In high school I did watch film, but it wasn’t with the same knowledge and diligence that I do now. . . .

Q. Coach Mullen was saying that it’s a three-step process. He watches all the games to get a feel. Then he watches the cut-ups for specifics. Then he re-watches the games to piece it all together.

A. Yeah, most of the time I do it all with him. As far as when we’re game planning for a team like we are right now. Like he was saying he watches it. Watches games to get a feel and then you splice it up and look at all the cut-ups. Then you watch all that. Then you have a good feel for them. Then you put all that back together. Then you can say, ‘This is low defense. This is under G. This is one-hole. This is why they’re doing this, because there’s a tight end on the ball. They’re doing this because there’s an extra slot.’ You can really get a better feel for it like that. If you just start with cut-ups, you wonder how this relates to a game. He’s got a really good method of doing it, obviously, with his success over the years. I try to follow it and learn and do what he does.

And this part sounds to me like a guy who has a reasonable shot in the pros as a quarterback:

Q. I imagine the translation now compared to your freshman year is drastic in terms of how you process things in your mind.

A. Yeah, I can process things a lot more. In a situation like this, my freshman year, I’d be trying to locate. Let’s look at this. (Tebow uses the laser pointer and points to the film he’s watching.) We’ve got a shade 5-9, is it under or are they calling it over to the boundary. The Sam is here, so I know that it’s field under. I know they’re calling the strength of the field, even though it’s double tight. Now I can do it so much quicker. It’s just boom. You see it and you know. It’s quicker, you process things quicker. You don’t have to think, you can just react. Especially the teams that bring pressure a lot and disguise it well. That stuff has gotten so much easier. The teams that do it well as far as changing their calls, disguising blitzes their defenses and bluffing. That has gotten a lot easier to pick up on. You can play fast and you can make a guess and you can go with that. If it’s not there, and you make a wrong call, you still have the ability and knowledge, ‘O.K., I thought it was no-deep and made a no-deep call and they bluffed out of it, all right, where’s my check down, let me go to it now.’ That type of thing. Instead of making the wrong call, and saying, ‘Oh shoot, let me make a play panicked.’ Now I really just know where to go. That’s something I thought I did a lot better in the L.S.U. game this year. That was one of my best times doing that. When they did something like that, this is where I’m going if they come or if they don’t come. Sometimes you’re having two thoughts in your mind. Depending on what’s going to happen.

5. Quick hits. How many wins does it take to secure an NFL playoff berth? ... The Senator takes on everybody's (least) favorite columnist, Stewart Mandel ... Wages of Wins recommends Playbooks and Checkbooks: An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports, but Residual Prolixity is not as impressed. ... Sports is in a slump, likely due to mental fatigue ... Is new Detroit Lions' coach Jim Schwartz focusing on the wrong defensive metrics?

5. Good web hosting service? The launch of smartfootball.com is nigh, as the overhaul of the site's design is almost done, as is the transition from Blogger to Wordpress. A question for web-savvy readers, though: Can anyone recommend a good (and cheap) web hosting service? I obviously want something affordable, reliable, and steady. My traffic numbers are okay but not ESPN.com levels, though I am wary of getting only the lowest bandwidth and and crashing out on peak days. This site obviously has a lot of graphics and that tends to inflate my bandwidth as well. Any advice would be appreciated.

Of Graham Harrell and Kafka

Texas Tech's Graham Harrell has signed with the Sasketchewan Roughriders. Harrell, of course, was undrafted, and had a "tryout" with the Browns that resulted in no contract being offered. He has since languished, and this seems the best bet he has. I can sum my feelings up on this, thusly: I'm not really sure I want to live in a world where Jared Lorenzen (currently of the ArenaFootball2 Lexington Horsemen) can flop around the NFL for four seasons while Graham Harrell has the door slammed in his face.

Harrell's experience here reminds me of a story by Kafka. In honor of Harrell and the Captain (who I believe is a Kafka fan), here is a very slightly paraphrased version, adapted for Harrell. (Original here.)

Before the NFL

Before the NFL sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from Texas who asks to gain entry into the NFL. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometime later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” The gate to the NFL stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try going inside in spite of my prohibition. But take note. I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I cannot endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the NFL should always be accessible for someone who has thrown for over 15,000 yards and 130 touchdowns, he thinks, even if he did play in a Mike Leach system.

But as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and what it was like to throw to Michael Crabtree and what it was like to beat Texas on the last play and whether Mike Leach is really that weird and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet.

The man, who has trained vigorously for his journey, tries out with everyone to win over the gatekeeper. The latter observes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am doing this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this first one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the NFL. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud; later, as he grows old, he only mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has also come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the NFL. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things considerably to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know now?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the NFL,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Former Northwestern Coach Randy Walker's effect on the spread

A question so good it deserves a full-post response. From reader Tom:

Q: "[D]id [Randy] Walker run the zone-read at Miami (OH), like when he upset the Wildcats their Rose Bowl year, or was it something he introduced in Evanston?"

The short answer is no, he didn't become a "spread guy" until he was at Northwestern. But the details are the fun part. Rodriguez invented the zone-read. Some others have said they dabbled in it before he did, but all signs point to his having invented it while at Glenville State. Rodriguez had been a four-wide spread guy with the zone run game, and it just kind of happened.

Walker, by contrast, had run traditional offenses at Miami of Ohio and early in his tenure at NW. In 1999, Walker's first year with the Wildcats, the offense was bad and the team went 3-8. He, along with his longtime assistant Kevin Wilson, who is now the offensive coordinator for Oklahoma under Bob Stoops, visited Rodriguez and Tommy Bowden at Clemson and Mike Martz at the Rams. I believe they got a little bit from Martz in terms of general theory, protections, and the like, but the lasting impact was Rodriguez.

This was because what Rodriguez showed them was less a new way to attack the problem of good defenses but more just a new way to think about attacking the problem. Rodriguez showed them the shotgun and the zone read stuff they were doing at Clemson and had done at Tulane, but the reason it clicked for Wilson and Walker is that they realized that they could run all their old stuff -- the zones, the power, counter, option, etc -- all from spread sets.

And this was probably the great leap forward for the spread. Indeed, if you look at what Rodriguez was doing at Clemson, a lot of it is there in terms of the zone read, but a lot of it too was just Woody Dantzler running around. It was Walker that took the idea of "spread-to-run" and "zone-read" and systemized it. Again, Rodriguez had been a spread-to-pass guy originally, who just had this one really big idea for the run game. Walker and Wilson brought to it the traditionalist tinkerer mindset, as guys who had been coaching power, run-first football for years and were experts at blocking schemes, defensive fronts, and the like.

It was this marriage of the grand-new spread ideas with an old school attention to detail that helped Northwestern go 8-4 and beat Michigan in 2000, and it is this that guys like Urban Meyer and half the high school coaches in the country learned the bread and butter from. And Rodriguez's sharing with Walker had a kind of pay-it-forward effect to him, as he then began seeing how he could improve his spread-to-run offense, which became more solidified and systematic while he was at Clemson and particularly when he was at West Virginia, with Rick Trickett as his line coach.

This is why Walker deserves as much credit as Rodriguez for taking the spread mainstream. He showed how coaches could pretty much do what they already did -- and apply the lessons they'd already learned -- to a new environment, and to new success.

The Nevada Pistol offense over at Dr Saturday

At the Good Doctor's invitation, I guest-posted today over at Dr. Saturday on the Nevada "Pistol" offense, as part of his "Mid-Major" week.

Check it out here, and enjoy.

Former NFL runningback Travis Henry gets 3 years in federal prison for drug dealing

Henry's story is a tragic one:

A federal judge Wednesday sentenced former NFL player Travis Henry to three years in prison for financing a drug ring that moved cocaine between Colorado and Montana. Henry, 30, of Frostproof, Fla., was arrested by federal drug agents last October — just a few months after the running back’s release from the Denver Broncos.

He pleaded guilty in April to a single count of conspiracy to traffic cocaine. In handing down Wednesday’s sentence, U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull in Billings also gave Henry five years of probation and recommended he enter a 500-hour drug treatment program.

Completion of the treatment program could knock off up to a year from Henry’s sentence. His attorney, Harvey Steinberg, said that with additional time off for good behavior Henry could be out of prison within 16 months.

Henry has said that at the time of his arrest, he was struggling to keep up with child support payments after fathering at least nine children with nine women. But Cebull said it was Henry’s addiction to marijuana that destroyed the his career and ultimately landed him in federal court.

“This is a unique case in that you’re a unique individual. You’re a heck of a football player,” Cebull said. “You are not unique in this sense: your drug habit.” Cebull and the defense described Henry as a minor player in the Denver cocaine ring and said he had been ensnared in the conspiracy by a friend....

Defense attorney Steinberg had asked for leniency and said Henry turned to cocaine trafficking out of desperation. He said Henry went into a “downward spiral” after losing $40,000 in drug proceeds that were stolen from a house in Billings.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thaggard argued for a sentence of at least 33 months. “Mr. Henry did have it all, in a sense, and he lost it. That’s unfortunate,” Thaggard said. “The bottom line is this was a significant conspiracy to move a substantial quantity of drugs.”

A lot of people complain about the inconsistency in these sentences between guys like Henry and Vick on the one hand, and Dante Stallworth -- who is already out of jail -- on the other, keeping in mind that only the latter recklessly killed a human, not that the other two have not committed serious crimes. But the thread is easy to explain: Henry and Vick were sentenced in federal court, where the sentences are almost uniformly harsh (think Bernie Madoff receiving a sentence four or fives times his life expectancy). And, under the advisory Guidelines, there is some, but not a ton, of wiggle room.

Stallworth on the other hand was sentenced in state court, where the rules vary and all bets can be off. Part of the chagrin by people complaining about the inconsistency is the unreasonable expectation that sentences will be consistent across the country. Yet maybe that's not so unreasonable, and our sentencing should be brought into line.

The one counterpoint is Plaxico Burress, who faces a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in a state proceeding (whether he believes it or not). But again this is just another brand of the same problem: the harsh and high mandatory minimum sentences, that themselves can create inconsistencies. Plaxico faces years of jail time for carrying a gun (something many people believe is a fundamental individual right), while Stallworth is in and out in the blink of an eye after killing someone while engaging in maybe the most fatal and reckless behavior around: drunk driving.

I note this because if there is any good that can come from these horrible stories about people like Travis Henry going from NFL player to penitentiary all-star is that maybe people can begin to understand why these strange inconsistencies exist. It took me quite some time to see them.

Fran Tarkenton on quarterbacking

Click the image to enlarge it.



Courtesy of Bill Mountjoy.

Smart Notes - July 14, 2009

1. More on Bill Walsh, the single-wing, and the wildcat. From ESPN the Magazine:

Howard Cosell wrote, in his 1991 book What's Wrong With Sports, "One thing I have found very interesting in my conversation with (Bill) Walsh is that he regretted he never tried the single-wing formation with the 49ers. He felt that Steve Young could have run the formation to perfection, and that the league's defenses would have had a difficult time stopping the old formation."

Walsh was most likely correct. Even the great Vince Lombardi warned of a possible single-wing resurrection.

"What would happen if someone came out with the single-wing offense?" he asked. "It would embarrass the hell out of us."

2. We want to be different, so we went to the spread? I like Dan Mullen, but isn't this a bit weird, if not, you know, anachronistic? From the Clarion-Ledger:

STARKVILLE — On the billboards that promote Mississippi State football season tickets in coach Dan Mullen and the spread offense's first year, the theme is "Spread The Fun." On the television ads, Mullen is diagramming a play on a white board when he looks over his shoulder and says, with an admirable bit of acting skill, "this is gonna be exciting."

These slogans are no accident.

And this goes beyond merely Mullen. For as much as MSU athletic director Greg Byrne was enamored with Mullen when they met last Dec. 9, there was something else at work.

In the days following Sylvester Croom's forced resignation on Nov. 29, the Mississippi State administration entertained a question bigger than just which coach they could hire. Surveying a century's worth of mostly mediocre football seasons in the ultra-competitive Southeastern Conference, they wondered how best to break the trend.

The conclusion? Be different on offense.

And then - just as much as many schools pick a coach and then learn later what offense he'll run - State all but picked an offense, then went to find a coach to run it.

"We wanted to be unique," Mississippi State athletic director Greg Byrne said. "We wanted to be something that our kids and our fan base would be excited to be a part of." . . .

"We wanted to find the right fit for Mississippi State," Byrne said. "Now, we were definitely interested in finding someone who had a very good offensive pedigree. And one that we felt would be able to highlight an area that we felt like we needed improvement." . . .

"That style of play is as much marketing as it is a concept for offensive football," Stricklin said. "When you have the choice to turn on TV and watch a game, and there's a spread team on one channel and two offenses that's more traditional on another channel, more people, if you don't have a feeling for either team, are going to watch the spread team because it's fun to watch." Later, Stricklin smiled when he admitted this: "Winning's a great marketing tool (too)." . . . .


In the meantime, before that first win or loss, State hopes that Mullen's hire is more than just a way to win games.

It hopes that it's a way to change the program's fortunes, in 2009 and beyond.

"We feel at Mississippi State, we need to be a little bit different," Byrne said. "And this gives us the opportunity to be a little bit different."

Again, I like Dan Mullen, but this is a very strange article to me. The administration basically went out to hire an offense and found a man, versus the other way around. Second, they did so as much for marketing purposes as for anything to do with the football bona fides. And third, like an investor who wanted to get into the market for "flipping houses" in 2006-2007 or into that "dotcom thing" in late 1999, their choice for "being different" was the spread, a philosophy that peaked as a way for underdogs to surprise favorites at least three or four years ago, if not further back.

I do think Mullen can be successful there, but I predict that the offense will be pretty mediocre this fall, if not bad at times. You just can't get a jump on people by being spread anymore -- it's just not that different considering what Florida, Auburn, and others around the country do -- and Mullen will have to build success the old fashioned way: by recruiting players and teaching them well. I think he can definitely do it, but I don't think there will be sudden manna from heaven in the way of fast and easy scoring this year as a byproduct from "being different."

3. More on Monte Kiffin preparing for SEC defenses, including the spread:

Monte Kiffin was watching video of prospective recruits this winter when he got an inkling of what he was up against as a college defensive coordinator. The more he watched, the better he understood why spread-option offenses have become so threatening to college defenses.

It's not just the option. It's the overhead support as well.

"I could not believe it till I started watching all the tape," said the longtime NFL defensive coordinator, who will command Tennessee's defense this fall. "The high school coaches have progressed so much in the passing game." . . . .

And as teacher and schemer:

Joe Barry knows what the rest of Tennessee’s new defensive coaches found out a few months ago: Interviewing for a job with Monte Kiffin is a unique experience to say the least.

“It was grueling,” says Barry, whose father Mike is a former offensive line coach at Tennessee. “It was like no other interview that I’ve ever been a part of.”

Kiffin put Barry in front of a dry-erase board, and then put him through the paces.

“He said, ‘OK, all that stuff that you were just going through on the grease board, how are you physically going to teach Derrick Brooks to tackle?’” Barry said. “Monte was going to be able to see, No. 1, if I knew what the hell I was talking about, but No. 2, he was going to see if I could truly coach, if I could truly teach.”

Barry passed the test and spent six seasons working for Kiffin in Tampa Bay. As it was for others who spent time working with Kiffin, Barry’s tenure in Tampa Bay was more than just a master class in coaching defense. It was a daily lesson in how to teach, something Kiffin places a premium on when it comes to assistant coaches.

“There was not one day in six years where I didn’t wake up and come to work and get better as a coach,” says Barry, who is back in Tampa Bay after a stint as the Detroit Lions’ defensive coordinator. “It’s because of Monte, obviously his knowledge, but his personality. He was very demanding. A lot of times when you say that about guys, they usually do it by being a jerk. Monte did it in such a way that you had so much fun that you didn’t know you were working harder than you’d ever worked before in your life.”

. . .

Although Kiffin downplays his role in the spread of the Cover 2 defense, many consider him to be one the best defensive minds in modern football.

“People had played Cover 2 for quite a few years,” Kiffin says, pointing out that the Minnesota Vikings ran it when Tony Dungy was defensive coordinator under head coach Dennis Green. “Tony left (Tampa Bay) and Jon Gruden came in, and we won the Super Bowl. I think that if we don’t win the Super Bowl, they probably don’t call it ‘Tampa 2.’ I didn’t invent the Cover 2. I don’t want people to think that.”

Kiffin’s wrinkle in the Cover 2 was often dropping the middle linebacker into coverage. But others aren’t as modest when it comes to Kiffin’s impact on the game.

“It’s a universal defense,” says Tampa Bay quarterbacks coach Greg Olson. “When people think of ‘Tampa 2,’ they think of Monte Kiffin. There’s very few guys in the NFL or in college football that actually have come up with a scheme that was so successful it carries over to other teams or that they actually have their name associated with it.”

In Tampa Bay, that reputation only grew. The Buccaneers finished in the top 10 in the NFL in total defense and points allowed in 11 of his 13 seasons. And in 2002, Kiffin’s defense led the league and helped the Bucs win the Super Bowl with a 48-21 victory over the Oakland Raiders, who had the league’s top offense that season.

Yet minutes before the Super Bowl kicked off, Kiffin was tweaking his gameplan, making a few minor adjustments.

That’s classic Kiffin, says Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, who spent five seasons with Kiffin as an assistant in Tampa Bay including 2002.

“If you’re kicking the ball off at 1 o’clock on a Sunday, you’re going to be in the shower with Monte at about 10:30 thinking about potential adjustments and things you could make changes to,” Tomlin said. “His mind is always working. He’s always trying to get better. He never breathes a sigh of relief.”

(Ht RockyTopTalk.)

Jay Cutler vs. Kyle Orton vs. Rex Grossman, by the numbers

KC Joyner, of Scientific Football fame and currently guest-blogging at the NY Times Fifth Down Blog, continues to ruffle feathers. He claims that former Broncos quarterback Cutler will be equally mediocre or worse than the two previous Bears QBs, Kyle Orton and Rex Grossman. Joyner:

Alex from Chicago asked how well I thought Jay Cutler would do with the Bears this year. I told him: “I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again — Cutler will make Bears fans remember Rex Grossman. He’ll make just as many crazy passes but won’t suffer the Grossman fate because Chicago’s fan base is so in love with him that they will forgive the nutty throws he makes in ways that they never forgave Grossman.” ....

Now I understand that fan scrutiny comes with the territory, so I don’t mind that, but what I don’t understand is why those fans are treating Cutler differently than they did either Grossman or Kyle Orton.

Grossman was on fire during the first part of Chicago’s Super Bowl season, and yet as soon as he had the bad game against Miami, it seemed the entire city turned on him. It didn’t go that much differently for Orton. He had a tremendous start to the 2008 season, but when he struggled down the stretch, the populace seemed to say goodbye and good riddance without much of a second thought.

I also don’t understand why there seems to be such excitement about Cutler. Yes, he threw for over 4,500 yards last year, but that was in large part because he put the ball up a whopping 616 times. His 9.8 vertical YPA was lower than that of 19 other QBs last season, and his 4.6% bad decision rate (a bad decision being a mistake by the QB that leads to a turnover or a near turnover) was easily the worst of any QB. He was also the offensive leader for a team that blew a three-game division lead with three games to go. . . .

The only reason I can come up with as to why Bears fans are reacting like this is that the quarterback position has been such a headache for them over the years that they will do just about anything to make it go away. If that means ignoring Cutler’s shortcomings so that at least one off-season goes by without having to wonder if their quarterback’s play will measure up, they’ll do it just for the temporary peace of mind. I do admire that kind of team passion and loyalty, but I’d admire it a bit more if it were done by hoping that Cutler could improve his game rather than by backing his mixed bag of performance history.

Note that he conflates two comparisons, and it's unclear what he's saying precisely. One is that Cutler is the better quarterback, but it is Chicago and thus his success will be pretty much on par with what the other Chicago QBs did. The other is that Cutler is simply no better of a quarterback than Grossman or Orton, and it only appears that way because he threw the ball so much.

My favorite passing stat is yards per attempt, because it sweeps in both completion percentage and the yards gained on the completion; I think it reflects the trade-off between pushing the ball downfield and taking the easier completion for less yardage. I like to adjust it, however, to account for interceptions: I subtract 45 yards for every interception thrown, as that is the basic estimate of how much field position/value you lose. No stat is perfect, but I like this one a lot.

• In 2008, Jay Cutler threw for 4,526 yards on 616 attempts. He also threw 18 interceptions. Together, that gives him an Adjusted Yards Per Attempt of 6.03.
  
  
• In 2008, Kyle Orton threw for 2,972 yards on 465 attempts, along with 12 interceptions. Together, his Adj. YPA was 5.23.
  
  
• In 2006, the year the Bears went to the Super Bowl, Rex Grossman threw for 3,193 yards on 480 pass attempts. He also threw 20 interceptions. Together, his Adj. YPA was 4.78.

Again, this is just one stat, but I think it's a pretty good indicator, and Cutler far and away scores the best. And, ironically, he does so despite so many more pass attempts: YPA tends to trend back down once a passer goes beyond being mostly a play-action type guy as a play off the ground game, like Ben Roethlisberger has been for much of his career.

Relatedly, let's take Advanced NFL Stats's "Air yards" stat, which calculates yards per attempt without reference to yards after the catch -- yards gained by receivers after they catch the ball. (This stat tends to both measure a QB's ability to complete downfield passes, as well as their propensity to check the ball down to a runningback. Young quarterbacks tend to score most poorly on the list because they struggle downfield and dump the ball off quite a bit.)

Cutler comes in at 7th in the league at 4.3 yards per attempt (again, just "Air yards"), while Orton is 29th with 3.3. In 2006, Grossman's was 3.9, and, in 2007 on much less work, it was 3.5. For comparison, Brady and Manning have spent most of the last few years hovering between 4.9-5.2 (though Peyton dipped to 4.3 this past season).

Having looked at these stats, I think the question is why does KC Joyner think Cutler will be no better than Grossman or Orton?

Smart Links and Notes - July 13, 2009

1. Camera angles. Doc Saturday muses about crappy camera angles in football broadcasts. Money quote: "Video games got [it] right immediately."

2. Of video games and publicity rights. Speaking of Doc Saturday and video games, he was one of the first that I saw to publicly censure the NCAA over its chintzy policy allowing game-makers like EA Sports to include things like "Florida QB #15," complete with all the relevant physical attributes, in its NCAA Football games without compensating the players in any way. The Louisville Courier-Journal's Eric Crawford joins the debate, with what I thought was a nice anecdote:

One of my favorites is an old version of EA Sports' NCAA Football. I like to be Michael Bush, because the former University of Louisville star, in this game, is Superman.

He can do anything. Bounce off tacklers. Run over them. Run through walls of defenders.

Almost every time I play, I think about that moment when Bush went down against Kentucky in the first game of his senior season. And it occurs to me that even while the real Bush was struggling pretty seriously with recovering from that broken leg, little cyber Michael, courtesy of EA Sports, just kept running.

And then there's this: While Bush's financial future was very much in doubt as he sweated his way back through rehabilitation, little cyber Mike kept drawing royalty checks for the NCAA, which has a rights deal with EA Sports.

Fortunately Bush's bounced back (think too of Willis McGahee's horrendous injury, or, say, Tyrone Prothro). One sticking point though with the analysis. Crawford repeats a supposed "problem" with paying players a licensing fee: what to do about the best players (i.e. most highly marketable) versus the bench-warmers? Crawford offers another solution: put the money paid into a trust that is there for players who graduate. I like that idea, and I also don't see why you have to grant the licensing fees based on who is the best player or not.

Sure, EA really just wants Reggie Bush or Tebow, not the benchwarmer on USC's or Florida's roster, but the NCAA, the Universities, and EA should just negotiate a flat fee for use of the whole roster (though giving some players an opt-out, which could create issues). The important point is that the players get something, not that Tebow or Bush gets more than their backup. Plus, if you do the trust idea contingent on graduation, then the player can actually help his teammate who might not have a pro-future when the all-star goes to the NFL: his money remains in the trust, thus enlarging the share for the others.

In any event, what makes this so bizarre is that if you used literally anyone else's likeness, besides an NCAA athlete, the company would have to pay. Yes, companies would be most likely to use a famous person, but it is not permissible to use a person's likeness or identity to promote some other product without their permission. The state of the law isn't quite uniform apparently, but

The Right of Publicity prevents the unauthorized commercial use of an individual's name, likeness, or other recognizable aspects of one's persona. It gives an individual the exclusive right to license the use of their identity for commercial promotion.

Unless of course you're an NCAA athlete.

3. Football Outsiders: Contrary to popular wisdom, Rex Ryan and the Baltimore Ravens "rush" four or fewer players 64% of the time. Yet they nevertheless rushed (i.e. blitzed) five or more "far more than the average team."

4. Trojan Football Analysis continues its wonderful series on Chip Kelly's Oregon rushing attack. The series: Chip Kelly's comments on his run game, inside zone, outside zone, fly sweep, counter, and video of the counter. (Also see this three part bit on a possible midline option or "mystery play" from Oregon: one, two, and three.) For a preview of what you'll find at TFA, check out the cutups of Oregon's offense below.



5. Why is there so much holding in football? It's an issue of the risk of having a penalty called on your holding versus what you have to gain (avoiding a sack, big run play, etc). Money quote: "The bottom line is that the probability of detection at which committing holding is worthwhile is when it is about 4/5 the chance a pass rusher will get a sack if he beats his blocker."

6. Blutarsky chimes in on Spurrier, in response to my recent post on the Ol' Ball Coach. Make sure to check it out due to the good comments (no, I'm not referring to my own).

7. You're watching inferior football and you don't even know it, says Residual Prolixity. Bonus: RP reviews The Pro Football Chronicle: The Complete (Well, Almost) Record of the Best Players, the Greatest Photos, the Hardest Hits, the Biggest Scandals & the Funniest Stories in Pro Football by Dan Daly and Bob O'Donnell.

8. Rollbamaroll reviews The Junction Boys.

9. Who are the most influential sports columnists? Dan Shanoff culls the list from Mediaite's new "power grid" feature.

10. Oldie but goodie: Roger Ebert ripping Jay Mariotti for quitting his job at the Chicago Sun-Times over getting passed over for a column idea.

11. Happy birthday to Mr. Orson Swindle of the Sporting Blog and Every Day Should Be Saturday. The internet does thank you. I started blogging before EDSBS, but without Orson and several others, I might not still be doing it. (Plus go buy the Gators Gridiron 2009, of which he was the editor and I a lowly contributor.)

12. Why aren't people complaining yet about inflated sports salaries?

13. Michael Lewis on AIG: Thank you, Joe Cassano.

14. Economic Principals: "Now We May Perhaps to Begin?"

15. A fitting end. How is it possible for a man to look perpetually uncomfortable yet still we want to hang out with him? So it goes with Mike Leach. (Ht Dawgsports.)

Monte Kiffin goes back to class

To work on how to stop the spread. Sounds almost like Kiffin has been reading this site -- and it certainly sounds like David Climer, for the Tennessean has. The Climer for the Tennessean reports:

Monte Kiffin schemes to slow down Florida offense

Word has it that defensive guru Monte Kiffin is spending a few days in Tampa where he has visited with old friends and compared notes with members of the Bucs coaching staff. . . .

In particular, Kiffin continues to explore ways to counter some of the unique offenses Tennessee's Vols will face this season. Foremost among them is Florida's lethal spread, with Tim Tebow pulling the trigger.

Those who know Kiffin say he has spent considerable time analyzing ways to deal with the divide-and-conquer formation as well as the Gators' across-the-board speed. At UT, it's Job 1.

For all he has accomplished over the past 26 years in the NFL, this is a new test for Kiffin. Just because he developed the Tampa-2 scheme that is all the rage in pro football, that doesn't mean he has an answer for all the questions Florida's offense poses.

Consider this, then, the education of Monte Kiffin. By following his son, Lane, to Tennessee, he has gone to college to get his doctorate in defense.

And he appears to enjoy the challenge. There's something to be said for old coaching dogs and new tricks.

The NFL is a one-size-fits-all league. Everybody uses the same basic offensive scheme, albeit with a few variations here and there. Occasionally, somebody will come up with something new under the sun — Miami's Wildcat formation was all the rage last season — but it doesn't take long for the rest of the league to catch on.

College football is different. Florida runs the spread. Georgia uses a pro set. Vanderbilt runs some option. As a defensive coordinator, Kiffin must adjust from one week to the next. [Editor's note: Exactly!]

Like he says: "I don't think you can blink or show weakness."

The toughest thing for the 69-year-old Kiffin is to adjust his teaching style to a different classroom. In the NFL, he had unlimited access to players. He could keep them in meetings as long as he wanted. Practices were as long or as short as necessary. It's a full-time job for player and coach alike.

The college game is different. Hands-on time with players is limited. You have a 20-hour work week. And believe it or not, players actually go to class.

"You don't have as much time to work with the kids," Kiffin said.

Too, there is a disparity of talent. The NFL salary cap can level the field. In college ball, the rich get richer via superior recruiting. . . .

Thus, all the coaching expertise in the world can carry you only so far. Just because Kiffin can scheme up a way to get an outside linebacker a free shot at Tebow, that doesn't mean Tebow is going down.

In short, if your X's aren't as big and athletic as the other team's O's, you're in for a long afternoon.

This is also why, for all of Lane's insanity, Monte Kiffin remains a coaches' coach, a favorite among the cognoscenti. He was already a defensive god -- Pete Carroll said he visited him every year and that Kiffin taught him all he knew, and even high school coaches said much the same thing. He just exuded a love for football and an incredible knowledge of it.

Yet here has taken a complete switch by going to the college game, and has had to give himself a crash course in what other teams do. (I would recommend that he compare notes with people other than just the Bucs, but he'll figure it out.) Will his defense work in the SEC? Well there's lots of questions, talent foremost among them. But the point is he's eating it up. He loves the challenge. And that is fun to see.

Ht Blutarsky.

Bill Walsh (in 1984!) on the single-wing in pro-football

Blutarsky nails it, per usual. He digs out an incredibly apropos quote for the times from Paul Zimmerman's New Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football, published in 1984. The quote is relevant given the rise of the wildcat, which is itself just a variant of the old single-wing with some of the modern shotgun spread elements, including the jet sweep.

… To someone who’s never seen the single wing, believe me, it can be a thing of beauty… In college it’s been abandoned, and why I’ll never know, because it seems that some of those nifty running quarterbacks would be just right for the run-and-pass tailback duties…

In the pros, its drawbacks are obvious. Your passer couldn’t take the pounding.

“I’ve reflected on the single wing,” [Bill] Walsh says. “Those blocking schemes would just chew up NFL defenses. You could double-team every hole and trap at every hole. You’d have six men blocking three. Plus you’d have the power for the sweeps.

“Joe Montana might be able to play tailback, to run and pass, but you wouldn’t let him do it unless you had another Joe Montana to spell him…”

How friggin' smart was Walsh? His issue is he just liked passing too much to do it. And hey, people couldn't figure out his offense then; the story might be different today. Again, hat tip to Blutarsky.

Was Spurrier's offense a failure in the NFL?

Or was it the man that failed?

I vote the latter. Yet, the story to this day, as reflected in some of the (very thoughtful) comments to my recent NFL Offense piece, is that Spurrier's offense failed in the NFL and that this is a significant data point in the storyline that "college offenses don't work there." But I find very little to support the broad form of this statement, and certainly I don't find it very generalizable to what people usually think of when they talk about "college offenses."

First, a modest defense of the efficacy of Spurrier's offense in the pros. He did not set any records in his two years in the NFL. His teams went 7-9 in 2002 and 5-11 in 2003, at which point he quit. His vaunted offense consistently finished in the bottom third of the league in every major category, usually ranked between 20th and 25th in categories like points, total yards per game, passing efficiency and yards per attempt, rushing yards per attempt, and so on. (Source: Pro-Football Reference.) Yet does that make his offense a complete failure? Or just merely weak? And what of the players he used?

Consider two teams whose offenses finished in this same territory in this past 2008 season, with offenses ranked in the bottom third of the league: the Pittsburgh Steelers and, lo', Washington Redskins. The Steelers were 20th in points, 22nd in total yards, and 24th in yards per play; the Redskins finished 28th in points, 19th in yards, and 23rd in yards per play. Now neither offense is considered elite, but neither offensive coordinator has been filed with the epitaph that "their system does not and will never work in this league." They just need to get better, no? (The Steelers' offensive weakness was obviously offset by a great defense, and some of it too was caused by an unexpected in the running game.)

Moreover, the NFL puts a premium on players, who did Spurrier have running his schemes in the Pros? Try these names:

Quarterback: 2002 - Shane Matthews, Danny Wuerffel, and Patrick Ramsey (rookie); 2003 - Patrick Ramsey and Tim Hasselbeck (yeah, the other Hasselbeck).

Runningback: 2002 - Stephen Davis (who missed four games) and Kenny Watson; 2003 - Trung Canidate and Rock Cartwright.

Receiver: 2002 - Rod Gardner, Derrius Thompson, Darnerian McCants, and Chris Doering; 2003 - Laveranues Coles, Rod Gardner, Darnerian McCants.

Seeing this list, wouldn't the bigger surprise be that the offense did in fact finish higher than bottom third of the league? Indeed, NFL films, in its typical chicken-salad-out-of-chicken-scraps season review tried to turn Gardner and Thompson into some kind of modern day Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, as the video below shows:



But a more realistic appraisal -- and a bit of history (Thompson was out of the league by 2004, and the other leading receiver besides Coles, Darnerian McCants, was out of it by 2005 -- reveals something altogether different. See the below "highlight" video of some of Gardner's best dropped passes:



Of course both Stephen Davis and Coles were legitimate players and did not help much (and Davis apparently felt unwanted or incorrectly used), but without a quarterback the rest is moot, and you're not going to win many games with a combinations of Matthews, Wuerffel, Ramsey, and Hasselbeck at the helm. Indeed, no one else has won with them. The problem was that Spurrier tried to.

The second point is that, even if you call Spurrier's time in the NFL a total bust, offense and all, it's just not a great example to use in the general argument about "college offenses" not working in the pros. When people have that discussion they are usually talking about why an option-based or a spread offense won't or can't work there. But what is Spurrier's offense if not pro-style? He relies exclusively on a dropback passer, he frequently uses a fullback, and the routes he uses came from the NFL. Insofar as his offense had some kind of unique element (at least for its time), it was that he let his receivers read coverages on the fly and adjust their routes accordingly -- a technique more complicated and thus more appropriate to the advanced NFL. See the below diagram of Spurrier's variation on "smash," whereby the receiver can run a curl underneath the cornerback against cover three, or will break for the corner if the cornerback stays close to the line.




Moreover, his offense was largely based on a very pro-style dichotomy: his base run play was the lead-draw, which allowed his linemen to largely pass set and his QB to get a look at the defense. The basic diagram of the play is below.



And if the defense came up on him he went to play-action off of a lead-draw look. This was ingenious, because he could both show a run play yet his linemen could pass-set and his quarterback could get a look at the defense downfield. See one of his most common plays below, where combined with the lead-draw were routes where the receivers also adjusted their patterns on the fly based on the coverage.



Focusing so heavily on the lead-draw and fake lead-draw also gave him the advantage of setting up his normal dropback plays as well. Check out the highlight video from the 1996 SEC Championship for some good examples.



And compare all this with what Urban Meyer does at Florida now. That is what people mean when they say "college offense." And if they don't mean that they mean the option of a Nebraska or what Paul Johnson does at Georgia Tech. Regardless whether you buy those arguments, the success or failure of Spurrier's drop-back and play-action pass-based offense seems wholly irrelevant to the discussion.

Then why did he fail? As I indicated at the beginning, to me, it was not the offense, it was the man as head coach. Being an NFL head coach is about many things, but calling the plays is a very small part of it, and it is a part that can be (and maybe should be) delegated to someone competent. As stated above, the talent situation was a huge mess and was in total flux, with a bunch of Florida cast-offs (I loved Chris Doering and Wuerffel in college but come on), several high-priced busts (Chad Morton?), and no quarterback to speak of. These are faults that reflect on the man, but not necessarily on the schemes. And really, the narrative is that the schemes probably got too much hype all along, as is common. (And keep in mind that Joe Gibbs won only six games in 2004 and only five in 2006.)

They were ingenious but that is different from him being a genius, and of course he had the talent at Florida to make it go. He also, it must be said, arrived at the right time in history when the spread and pro-style offenses had really just begun to supplant an older, earlier way of thinking, especially in the SEC. But in addition to the lack of institutional advantages for Spurrier in the Pros as opposed to his time at Florida, he also lacked the preparation to make it go. I don't know about discipline and all that, but there were enough stories of the franchise's disorganization to affirm that he did not have a handle on the bundle of intense personalities that makes up any NFL team, and certainly did and continues to make up the Washington Redskins in particular.

Yet there was one scheme criticism that got much play that was in fact true: his inability to gameplan pass protection. Spurrier won his first NFL game against the Arizona Cardinals where his offense scored 31 points, but in his second, against the Philadelphia Eagles and blitz-happy defensive coordinator Jim Johnson, he was fundamentally outcoached on the way to a 37-7 blowout. And that was the beginning of the end.

But he was not outcoached in some fundamental "college offense won't work in pros so there" way, but instead he fell victim to the 80/20 principle I talked about: Spurrier ran a pro-style system, and if you're going to do that in the pros you better be ready for the meat grinder that is their film study. Johnson, a wily guy who has been around the block a few times, devised one blitz after another that got to the core of Spurrier's protections and never let him out. (Incidentally, this gets to one of the common criticisms of my NFL bit, which was that I couldn't be serious saying that the NFL wasn't complex. But I never said that; I said it was bland yet, within that blandness was incredible complexity on the micro scale. A lot of college guys have said if you introduced more macro variation you could reduce the micro complexity -- i.e. a million blitzes you have to gameplan for -- but that's something for later.)

So what's the verdict? Spurrier failed, but it was not his "college offense" that let him down, it was the man, his overall lack of control of players, his roster management, and his own coaches, and in no small part the inadequate planning that went into his "pro-style attack."

The NFL Offense: What is it? Why does every team use it? And how does it differ from college?

I am frequently asked why I don't more often discuss NFL offenses. Haven't many of these college gurus been chewed up by the NFL? Didn't the NFL "prove" that the run & shoot can't work? Isn't the NFL football's highest level, and doesn't it therefore have the most money and resources, the best people, and shouldn't the result then be that NFL football is the most strategically interesting?

Yes and no. There's several reasons why I devote less space here to what NFL teams do than for college teams. Far and away the most significant reason though, is that, somewhat counterintuitively, NFL offenses are surprisingly bland and homogenized. Not entirely, but as a rule of thumb, 80% of what NFL teams do on offense (or defense, really too) is extremely straightforward to the point where every team runs the same stuff. And the list is not that long. In an appendix at the bottom, I have cataloged basically the entire set. Most notably, the whole NFL's entire run game amounts to about four or five plays: the inside zone (also known as the "tight zone"), the outside zone (also known as the "stretch play" or the "wide zone"), power, counter, and some kind of draw, particularly the lead draw. No matter what cosmetic deceptions you see when you watch an NFL game (and remember, these cosmetics are supposed to be good enough to fool the opposing coaches who have studied film all week), you're seeing the same plays over, and over, and over again. There is some admitted monotony to this. Indeed, after today, having sketched out a great deal of this 80% of the NFL's offense, there won't be much need for me to come back to what a specific NFL teams do.

But what of all those stories of Jon Gruden or Andy Reid getting only 45 minutes of sleep a night (and of course sleeping in their offices), and all the film study, 500 page NFL playbooks, and lengthy gameplans buttressed by exhaustive statistical analyses. This is the other 20%, which often is interesting. But it is interesting in a very specific way -- within the framework of the basic, repetitive concepts that compose the other 80%. NFL coaches are understandably obsessed with "matchups," a word favored by every football talking head. The coaches spend an incredible amount of time focused on how to get this receiver to go against that safety, this blitzing linebacker against that tight-end, or this pulling tackle against that defensive end. It's an evolving, repetitive, circular, intensive battle.

Yet is of limited ongoing or generalizable significance. Let's say an NFL coach wants to run the counter trey, which is a run play where one lineman pulls and traps (i.e. blocks from the inside out), and another blocker (either lineman or tight-end) leads (i.e. goes up into the crease and looks to hit a linebacker). He might alter the assignments, or use a particular motion or shift or formation, because he wants the kick-out block to go against a certain guy and the lead against another. And, if successful, you, as spectator, probably won't notice what he did: the coach wasn't looking for a pancake block, just "success," which might be as simple as the blocker's getting in the way enough that the runner could get four yards. This "matchup" isn't always as dramatic as you might think. This does not demean its importance, but, from my perspective, does not always lend itself to lengthy, repeated examples.

Moreover, getting into this minutiae requires a great deal of digging and backstory. What have these teams done in the past? Who is injured this week? What is the history between the opposing coaches? I have discussed some of this type of thing before, for example, here. But again, this great complexity ironically flows from a rather bland and homogenous set. The NFL appears populated by eternal, diligent tinkerers rather than broad thinkers.

Television's role

There's a final reason, however, that I don't routinely get into detail with NFL offenses: I'm not convinced the NFL wants anyone to. Whether a marketing decision or one to placate paranoid franchises --word is guys like Mangini are exceptionally controlling of the flow of info, including requiring people to burn and destroy film or handouts -- NFL films does not actually make this footage available, and most of what it shows are such extreme close-ups that it is impenetrable from a strategy perspective. Part of the theory is undoubtedly the desire to overcome the fact that it is marketing a sport where all the players wear masks, something the NBA and golf and most other sports don't have to deal with.

Unfortunately, the result is that it's impossible to get a sense of what is going on during a play: the quarterback releases the ball, the ball floats magically in the air, and the receiver appears like an apparition out of nowhere to catch it. And the practical questions remain. What coverage were they in? What route did the receiver run? What complementary routes did the other receiver run? Who rushed the quarterback? Who picked up those rushers? It's impossible to tell. Take the clip below of the 49ers's dramatic, waning minutes victory over the Bengals in Super Bowl XXIII.



There's a couple of times where you can get a sense of a route or two, but there's not one play where I could (a) diagram the play in its entirety, i.e. all the receivers, or (b) more importantly, tell you what exactly the defense was doing, particularly the secondary. On the big pass to Jerry Rice over the middle, it's clear he ran a dig route, but it's not clear why he was so open. And then the voice-over goes so far as to tell you the actual name of the game winning touchdown play, yet could you tell me what any of the receivers besides John Taylor did on the play? Wouldn't the coverage on Jerry Rice, who would up MVP of the game, have been relevant as to why Taylor was so open? (Both Bill Walsh and Joe Montana later diagrammed the play in their books; there was actually a problem with the playcall as meshing with the formation.)

Fine, that's NFL Films. But what about watching the game on television? Yes, you get some replays, but generally it is not much better. You're lucky if you see the linebackers. Homer Smith once gave advice to people who watch football on television: Don't watch the ball, watch the defense -- you'll never miss where the ball winds up going. Yet he admits that with modern angles this advice is often impracticable. Ironically, too, the NFL, with more money (and likely its intent to market personalities) affixes its camera angles tighter than do college broadcasts My sense is that many college games can only afford a couple of cameras, so they pick a couple that can get a flavor for more of the field. The NFL instead overdoes it.

Why so simple?

That 80% of every NFL teams' offense consists of the same bunch of plays run over and over, combined with the inadequate broadcast techniques that robs the viewer of the ability to decipher the minute game-within-a-game adjustments that are going on, helps explain why it is not always worth it for me to discuss with great specificity what each NFL team does. But that still doesn't answer why NFL offenses are like this. (Defenses have the same issue of 80/20 blandness, though they will sometimes give incredibly exotic looks solely due to the freakish nature of some of the players. NFL cornerbacks can constantly play "press-bail" -- meaning they can show bump and run and yet be able to "bail" and play deep if necessary -- because they are so athletic, and I've seen guys like Ravens safety Ed Reed do miraculous things like line up directly on the line of scrimmage over a tight-end and then at the snap retreat and play deep half-field safety on the opposite side of the field. Other than the kind of stuff that you can only do if you've won the DNA lottery, NFL defenses all tend to be the same as well.)

Theories abound to explain the phenomena. Ones often trotted out: NFL coaches are closed minded; they don't understand the option/spread/wishbone/etc; the speed of the game is much greater than it is college; it's all some sort of conspiracy; and, finally, we have it all backwards, and this NFL-homogenity is actually somehow better, we're just missing it.

These can be dealt with in short order. The NFL has the most money and pressure at stake, and coaches have little job security. There is no reason for them to be so closed minded. And they certainly do understand the option. Many have coached at other levels before, and, though they might not be experts, it doesn't take long to explain how the option and the spread work and why they have been effective. The conspiracy stuff is bunk, and I think it can't be argued that the NFL is not homogeneous or monotonous, and, in theory at least, more diversity would be better, no? Most of the NFL offense defenders argue that the players make it worthwhile to do this, or the passing game is what makes it all necessary, or there is some hidden meaning we're all missing. (This argument is more common than might be initially guessed, and usually takes the following form: "The NFL is better because all that stuff is just a bunch of gimmicks," with "gimmick" being the derogative catch-all term for anything that breaks out of the 80% mold delineated in full below. As described below, one unfortunate plank of this argument is the reliance on the idea of "ideal" football.)

The speed argument is more difficult to discard, though I think for now we can ignore it. On the one hand, the idea that the defense is faster suddenly dooms all these schemes common to college seems bizarre considering that the offensive guys are (or should be?) faster too. Thus, relatively, there is no speed advantage. On the other hand, if NFL players are all both bigger and faster, then in practical terms the field itself has shrunk, even if the players are relatively the same. Yet on the other, other, hand, with more straight ahead speed and better quarterbacking, teams can better stretch the field vertically. On the whole, unless someone wants to do some real studies, I find this rather inconclusive.

There are three arguments that I think do help explain the NFL 80/20 blandness. Note however that not included in this list is the meme popular among the NFL itself (and those announcers!) that what they do is simply "better." The problem with this idea is that "better" begs too many questions: Better than what? Better how? Better as a professional offense with professional players, or better for high school players too? What is better considering that there is time to integrate any concept you want into your playbook? Isn't the "better" thing then just the more time and resources you have? So I leave this aside.

The three are:

• Coaching incest. The NFL fraternity is too incestuous, and thus they don't get out of their comfort zone enough and don't seriously engage with what is going on elsewhere.
  
  
• Lack of incentive to experiment.Related to above, but the idea is that, post free-agency, there is little reason for NFL coaches to "think outside the box," and when they do and fail, they will be ridiculed and fired. For example, Marv Levy famously went to the Wing-T offense with the Kansas City Chiefs in the late 70s and early 80s, and was promptly fired.)
  
  
• The quarterback obsession. The money and necessity involved with NFL quarterbacks has so come to dominate the thinking and strategy behind the sport that it hampers both experimentation but literally what they have time to do. If you ask an NFL coach what he spends his time on, or why they don't use more run plays, and he will likely tell you that they spend all their time on pass protection and protection schemes, and this cuts down on what else they can do.

I think all three of those ideas have some merit. The incest idea sounds a little odd, but then you remember that the vaunted "Wildcat" offense was brought to the NFL by David Lee, former quarterbacks coach at Arkansas.

The second I think is underrated but important. Lost in the debate about who is more innovative, the NFL or college or high schools, is their institutional capacities. It doesn't surprise me that the most sophisticated zone blocking techniques or pass protection schemes -- or even five or seven-step drop pass patterns -- are usually developed in the NFL. The margins are quite thin there because the personnel is so good and every team has a salary cap. This stuff is their bread and butter, and they will constantly tinker with it.

But what incentive does an NFL team have to just say "screw it, I'm going to do something weird." Very little. Even the moribund Detroit Lions don't really have this need; the Miami Dolphins went from worst-to-playoffs, though with a little help by being different. Different helps but we're not talking about extremes.

In college or high school, however, you have teams that are completely downtrodden, as in winless in years downtrodden. There is no reason in these scenarios not to experiment. Of course, everyone knows that Rich Rodriguez's "zone read" offense was born at Glenville State where he said his entire goal was "just to get a first down." There are a lot of really bad Division I programs, but even more bad or obscure small colleges, and thousands more high schools. Indeed, for all the talk of the "Wildcat" as a "college thing," it really was a high school thing. Gus Malzahn ran some similar stuff while a high school coach, and insofar as Houston Nutt and others had their input the shotgun jet-sweep offense which the Wildcat is but one strand of is something that has exploded at high school level but hasn't really made its way to major college football. NFL coaches would do well to keep their eye on the lower levels to see what broad, new, general ideas spring forth. (A final X factor is the issue of practice time: Major D-1 colleges have just about the least practice time at any level, and high schools of course have to spend so much time teaching fundamentals that strategy is secondary. As a result there is what I call variation by hedgehog, meaning that you get variety by having a bunch of teams focus on one or two things they do really well, compared with the NFL where teams try to do a bit of everything.)

Finally, this third issue cannot be discounted. Bruce Arians, now offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers and former quarterback coach for the Indianapolis Colts, once did a bit on defeating the zone-blitz. His basic thought was about protecting the passer: the importance of planning for the zone-blitz and protecting the quarterback at all costs. Then, at the end he wrote: "P.S. If your quarterback doesn't make $48 million then don't forget the lead option."

Coming from an NFL guy, that's damn near heresy. Of course the quarterback he was referring to was Peyton Manning (though I haven't seen Roethlisberger run any option either), but here's the thought, expanded out. Yes, quarterbacks are incredibly important, and must be protected. You have to spend a lot of time focusing on this protection, getting it right, and calibrating your matchups on top of it all when you have freaks of nature as pass rushers. (I wrote a lengthy article about pass protection here.) That's fine, do what you have to do to protect those guys.

But what Arians hinted at is something a lot of coaches believe: instead of focusing all your energy on trying to scheme your way out of all that crazy, myriad blitzing from everywhere that causes you to drop everything week to week and focus solely on that to the detriment of the run game, then why not focus on what might deter that kind of blitzing in the first place? Like option, or certain spread sets, or other things that college teams do a pretty solid job of right now. Sometimes, rather than bang your head against the wall, there's a better way.

Now this gets into the question about letting some team hit your quarterback, and involves other questions beyond the scope of this article. No one thinks running the option with Manning or Brady is a good idea, and their passing skills are so good that it probably wouldn't be worth it anyway. But is great passing ability exclusive of great running ability? And if it is not, then does running the option significantly increase the risk of injury? How much worse can it be than David Carr being sacked countless times in a season, mostly by being hit from the blindside mid-throwing motion? I'd probably rather be hit while running the ball than like that.

The wildcat and beyond

This is where the wildcat stuff becomes intriguing. The theme for this offseason seems to be that every team is studying the wildcat or looking to install it. There's strategic reasons for this and there's practical ones.

The strategic reason is that the arithmetic doesn't lie: When you run the ball and your quarterback stands there just watching the play, his defensive counterpart can assault the runner. And even if his counterpart holds back, the runner's counterpart remains unblocked; you win games by getting the defense to commit two players to one of yours and thus gain an advantage. The wildcat -- as with the triple option or shotgun spread offense where the quarterback is a run threat -- does this. That's why I predicted back in September 2008 that the wildcat would not be "gone within a week" as several commentators so confidently explained. Indeed, it appears to be gaining momentum.

The second reason is practical. The colleges the NFL drafts from are producing these kinds of multi-skilled players, and NFL teams ought to be able to employ some of them in these schemes without having to risk their $48 million quarterbacks as the bait. E.g., Pat White. That's why this concept has potential for growth, and NFL coaches seem to embrace it now. (How bizarre though that they seem to be embracing this one rather specific branch off what is a much wider and older tree of single-wing/spread/option football. Maybe its apparent newness allows them plausible deniability about having ignored what has been put to good use for decades.)

I will have a future post delineating how I think the wildcat will be used and expanded upon this fall. Unfortunately, I don't see the storyline being quite so rosy as the NFL finally breaking down and going all out with Eric Crouch types at quarterback. I can safely predict that some of the teams that are discussing their wildcat will be completely inept with it: they will do things like going five-wide with their quarterback split out, their runningback or wideout alone in the backfield, call for no motion or faking, and then expect him to plunge into the line for some kind of great effect. That team, its coaches and its fans, will declare the Wildcat a bust. Some other team, maybe the Dolphins again, will expand the package and see success with it. But then what? The worst case -- though possibly the most likely -- will be this:

The offense will fade from prominence, and will be relegated to NFL Films productions about the "WACKY WILDCAT" days of yore, where they will show somebody running free downfield while they speed up the footage and play Benny Hill music. Then they will show a clip of someone stuffing a particular play, and the voice-over will announce that the Wildcat, like all other gimmicks, was figured out and defeated. The NFL types will nevertheless congratulate themselves for having discovered it in the first place. Someone will be called on air to talk about how it was a travesty of the game, in some bizarre platonic ideal sense.

But there is a slight counter narrative. One is that the wildcat, as some kind of hype-machine and maybe even explicit look will die down, but the concepts will infiltrate the NFL and it will finally, and slowly, co-opt ideas that have been successful in every level of football elsewhere. Some will still deride the flashes as gimmicky, but seeing as that most didn't understand it to begin with, most probably won't even notice. Take a look at the clip below: the Ravens, using Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith ran the zone-read, and the highlight guys began a small war on what to call it. (Smith also takes a rather bizarre inside angle with his run.)



Conclusion

Time will tell where all this goes. For now, however, I expect the NFL Offense to remain as indicated, with just a flew flashes of the wildcat and other similar elements. But maybe with more, and cheaper, players who can execute these schemes the NFL will be forced to adapt them to its own ends. And maybe that will even help protect its quarterbacks.

APPENDIX - The NFL Offense

Formations may differ, as will motions and a few little quirks, but basically this is what every single NFL team does. They might have a wrinkle or two per week; they might adjust the formations so they get their Pro-Bowl receiver running the route they want; they might run each play from everything from a three tight-end set to a spread formation; but it is all there. It is a partial sketch below. There are some I have diagrams, and with others I have links to old articles either instead of or to supplement the diagrams.

(1) Run game


- Inside Zone, a.k.a. "tight zone"



- Outside zone, a.k.a. "wide zone" or "stretch" (either regular blocking (shown below, diagram courtesy of Trojan Football Analysis) or "pin and pull")



- Counter



- Power



- Lead draw (draw play with a lead back)



(2) Quick passes

- Hitch

- Fade/stop, fade with an out, and double slants



- Stick (more to come on this concept)

- Spacing


(3) Dropback passes (including play-action)

- Curl routes



- Smash

- Post/Dig, a.k.a. "NCAA Pass"



- Flood/sail



- Four verticals (trips and regular), also lots of deep comebacks off the four verticals to the outside guys (either by call or read)

- Levels

- Three-verticals (either with corner routes or go routes)



- "Mills," a.k.a. Cover 4 beater



- Shallow series (for more on the drag and drive series, see here, and for a comprehensive look at the shallow stuff Mike Martz ran with the Rams, see here)



- Seam and square-in/other downfield passes like double-post



(4) Movement passes

- Bootleg. Everybody runs the same bootleg passes, one with the fullback faking the counter and running to the opposite flat, and the other the basic one with one guy to the flat after a count as a blocker and another dragging behind him.



(5) Screens

- Slow screen to RB and TE. Also will use double-screens or read-screens with the slow screen combined with either a sail or drag type route

Happy Fourth

Happy Fourth of July to all. Football might be America's game, but that presumes the existence, and continuity, of these United States.

The Declaration that this day commemorates swiftly and elegantly set forth this country's promise. On its fiftieth anniversary, two signatories, Adams and Jefferson, died quietly in their homes, their lives forever exemplifying our country's both great and contradictory narrative. (See this recent NY Times "picture essay" of Jefferson.) The Declaration of course begins:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This luminous promise has not always been kept. That is one reason why I always think it best to, whenever we think on the Fourth and the great Declaration, consider Lincoln's words about this promise from the vantage point of "four score and seven years" later:

. . . . [O]ur fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

. . . . It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Happy Fourth.

Football, decisionmaking, and the brain

One of the many reasons that football is the greatest of all games is that it encompasses every type of decision we humans are capable of. There are the carefully planned decisions coaches make leading up to a game: Who should start? What will our opening plays look like? How can we defend against this scheme? There are snap, in-the-moment athletic judgments: Who has the ball? Is the receiver open? Is the hole inside the guard or outside it, where will the running crease be? And there are what I call "golf swing decisions," which combine the reflective moment with the snap-athletic judgment: When should I snap the ball to time up with the motion man, while still getting off a good snap? I need to blitz through the A gap between guard and center, but what if they are in a slide or gap protection scheme and close that off? Should I try a rip or swim type move? I'm receiver and need to run an out route, but when if the cornerback comes up and jams me and I need to run a go route, how should I use my hands, eyes, etc?

Football shares the need for snap, athletic judgments with most other sports, like basketball or soccer. But it is unique in that every four-to-six second contest is preceded by a complete stop where everyone has some time to collect their thoughts -- or to heighten their anxieties. Baseball has some of this, insofar as pitchers have to think about the type of pitch they want to throw and where, but even if batters could get a handle on the pitchers' rhythm, the human brain cannot rationally break down what a throw is when it is coming in at 90 miles per hour -- it must be an instinctual swing-or-don't-swing response.

In a later post I plan to break down more of the cold, rational, time-intensive decisions and where those decisions break down. I'm interest in which decisions are "predictably irrational," and can they be fixed? Also, what heuristics do coaches and sometimes players use that correctly and incorrectly inform them? But today I limit myself to the raw, instinctual, athletic intelligence that football players must possess or be gone.

Athletic intelligence

Very rarely does a football player use their "rational brain" during a game the way solving a math problem would. Jonah Lehrer, in his book How We Decide, tells a story about Tom Brady. He describes Brady's mindset as an elite quarterback in the pocket which -- especially considering that quarterback is considered maybe the "most intellectually demanding" of all sports positions -- is surprisingly instinctual and unthinking. He drops back and scans his receivers. He gets to one and simply lets the ball go. Brady is asked: "Why did you throw it to that guy?" He replies: "I just felt like he was open." That's it. That's it?

Yes. There really can't be much to it than that. A QB might have an idea of where he might throw it, as his rational brain can do some early legwork, but the ultimate decision is by the emotional, reactive parts of his brain. (Lehrer and others get into the neuroscience of this, which I am not equipped to discuss.) The brain, getting some kind of positive feedback, tells the muscles to release the ball. And how could it be otherwise? These decisions happen much too fast for any person to coldly and rationally walk their way through it. The quarterback must simply know.

(Note that this is not saying that emotional or instinctual intelligence is better than rational intelligence, or vice versa. It is that some situations call for different types of decisionmaking. Indeed, my general assumption is that attempts atrational decisionmaking is usually better (which is in fact not always true), but many times, including in sports, there is no time for some sort of reasoned analysis. Contra this post then with Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.)

This need for amazing decisionmaking that is nevertheless largely reactive is one reason why it is so difficult to evaluate quarterbacks -- or any player. You only get so far by asking Tom Brady "why did you throw it to him" when his answer is "I felt like he was open." And that's with quarterbacks: obviously safeties on defense, or linebackers, or linemen, runningbacks, all rely more or less on this raw emotional intelligence rather than something coolly rational. How do you measure that kind of instictive, non-descriptive intelligence? Yet if a guy doesn't have it, he'll just kill your team with bad "decisions."

Yet what does the NFL use to evaluate its players' intelligences? The Wonderlic Test. Having just seen the above discussion, where not even Tom Brady's athletic intelligence is necessarily rational or describable in the way a mathematician's or philosopher's is, how useful can this test be? Yes, it can help eliminate some total knuckleheads, in that NFL players must learn large playbooks (and in college must be able to stay eligible lest the idea of student-athlete be completely severed), but most of what makes them elite or not is based on how they react.

When a linebacker just knows that a play-action fake is indeed a fake, or that the runningback still has the ball after misdirection from a wide-receiver faking a reverse, he uses very little if any of the skills tested by the Wonderlic. Yet I do sympathize with the NFL: how else can you test this stuff? But what if having a really high rational intelligence not only didn't help or didn't test what made a player good or great, what if a heightened analytical ability made a player worse?

Eli and Peyton Manning and David Foster Wallace

This is where the "golf swing" intelligence can come in; it's also often called "paralysis by analysis." Think about getting ready to swing a golf club while a friend or pro tries to coach you up. "Keep your arms straight." "Turn your hips." "Keep your head down." "Keep the club face square." "Choke down on the club." "Loosen your grip." "Bring your arms through before you start moving your shoulders, but keep your head down." "Keep the club face square but also rotate your wrists so that you finish with a good rotation." Etc. A friend of mine told me that he had one such session, where a pro told him about ten things to do before he swung the club, and then just sat there a minute before swinging. The pro said, "What are you thinking about?" His reply, "All the stuff you just told me."

Now here's a fact you may not know.

Question: Which Manning brother had the higher Wonderlic score?

Answer: Eli. By a long shot.

Peyton's score was perfectly respectable: a 28, higher than average for his position in fact. Eli? A 39, which put him in the 99th percentile of all NFL players -- as well as the 99th percentile of all two-million test takers. As Charlie Wonderlic said of Eli's score, "There's not a job on the planet that requires a person to score at that level." But who would you rather have making decisions for you on gameday? I thought so. Of course, Eli has improved, but there's no question that Peyton is the more consistent decisionmaker. Indeed, all too often Eli looks uncomfortable, like he has overthought the whole process of "just throw the football to the open guy." (Tom Brady, who scored a 33, is also not known as a hyper-analytical guy, though some of that is hearsay.)

And again, this is quarterback, supposedly the marquee thinking-man's position in all of sports. Obviously defensive backs and tight-ends don't need the same level of analytical ability as quarterbacks do. And yet, after games, what kind of questions do reporters ask? You got it: "What were you thinking out there?" "What did it feel like?" And the answers are almost always completely banal (and where they are not they are probably fake): "I just take it one play at a time. Keep doing my best. Focus on the basics, you know." "I'm just really happy. It feels great to contribute. We've all worked really hard."* Really, of what use is it to ask Santonio Holmes what was going through his mind when he leaked out to the corner of the end zone and made a miraculous, extended catch to win the game? "You know, I had been thinking about this great Henry James novel most of the time, but I regained focus when I saw the ball's trajectory and calculated that, based on its particular rotation speed -- as far as I could detect -- I should place my hands in a particular way and I also calibrated my feet so as to minimize the chance that if I slipped I might get any white ink on my shoes so that the ref might call me out." Uh. Holmes was plenty eloquent after the game, but the bottom line is: the ball was in the air and he made a fantastically athletic play. Any analysis might have been counter productive.

The late David Foster Wallace discussed this in a review he did of a biography about tennis prodigy Tracy Austin. I think it well sums up the dilemma that players, coaches and fans have in trying to understand athletic genius, which not only might be distinct from rational genius, it might be the antithesis of it.

It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of [an athlete's] narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other. Anyone who buys into the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach's diagram of a 3-2 zone trap . . . or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a court's corner at high speed fro seventy-eight feet away with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching? . . . .

It is not an accident that great athletes are often called "naturals," because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. . . . They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all. . . .

This is, for me, the real mystery -- whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir [or descriptive post-game interview]. . . . It may be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it -- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

This seems backed up by experience. Great players do not always make great coaches (or announcers), and often the "smartest" kids are "dumb" athletes. I will finish (for now) with a quote from a friend who is a high school coach, which I think for now provides about as good a summation as any of the awkward interplay between thinking and doing, "such that agent and action are one":

Give me the 2.5 GPA kids. I'll take them all day, everyday. Smart enough to know what's going on, too dumb to know when something is going to hurt, and not smart enough to remember what hurt last time.

*FN: These quotes are also roughly paraphrased from Wallace's fantastic essay, but since it's all so common anyone who has ever seen a post-game interview could fill these in.