Rick Neuheisel talks about the "Spread Offense"

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

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

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

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

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

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

(H/t: TeamSpeedKills and Bruins Nation.)

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

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

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

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

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

Neuheisel's points

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

A Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot - Part 1

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

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

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



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

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

Philosophy and tenets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrap-up

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

The Lions' new coach Jim Schwartz: football pragmatist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Schwartz. As the New York Times reported:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winning football games on Mondays through Saturdays

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck to Jim Schwartz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brees-Tiller-Chaney clips:



Painter-Tiller-Zaunbrecher



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

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

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





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

No Such Thing As Platonic Ideal Football

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

The Platonic-Idealists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Football, Luck, and Noise

I received a surprising amount of pushback via email regarding my last post about Texas Tech and the Hot Hand Theory. At first I was confused, but then I realized that many readers do not share a rather fundamental assumption I hold about football: an incredible amount of the game is determined by "luck." Now, when I say luck, I do not mean fluke events, or the ol' bounce a da ball, or things like that. What I mean is that almost any and every outcome in football is not set in stone, but rather, there is some probability that the outcome will be X, another probability that the outcome will be Y, and maybe even a chance that it will be Z.


Theological questions aside, I really think this is a rule of life and not just football. But the point is that at no point in a football game, be it success of a play or even a determination of what the other side is actually doing, do you have fixed answers. Instead, you have probabilities, and even then your probabilities are merely estimates of the actual probabilities. So when I talk about "coolly flipping coins," I mean that everything is probabalistic. Just like when Michael Jordan went to the free-throw line, no matter what any sports writer tells you, he is never destined to make the shot, or destined to make the game-winner. Tiger Woods is never destined to hit the putt, and Tom Brady or Peyton Manning were neither destined to win the Super Bowl or hit any particular pass.

Instead, it was merely "highly likely" that each was going to do those things, because each is very good at what they do. But at no point is anything determinate.

Indeed, one of the criticisms of my post was that the probabilities dramatically increase regarding offensive success because you gain more information as time goes on. But that argument doesn't hold water. If Michael Jordan can only max-out his free-throw percentage to a point, then there is no way to max out offensive production in football when at all turns you have a human (or group of them) making choices on the other side in ways that shift your probabilities. That is a far too nebulous cloud to assume certitude.

And any playcaller will tell you the same thing. As Norm Chow says, you are never quite sure what coverage they are in, but instead you take pieces of the field or pieces of the defensive front and attack those, and therein lies success. Mike Leach does not even require his guys to memorize coverages in the sense of "Hey they are in Cover 4!" Instead, they group them into things they can recognize and they probe areas. But at every stage, things are probabalistic. I've even discussed the notion that a purely random approach to offensive and defensive calls might even be optimal.

When I made the point about the hot hand theory, part of it was about how you cannot always extrapolate how good an offense is versus a defense just because they scored on a drive, or even if they scored a lot in a half or game, because the standard deviation is too high. Some people argued that things would even out over the course of a game; I think that is sort-of true, but I still think the variance is higher than they account for. But that's an empirical question we can solve later.

But another (amazing) site, Advanced NFL Stats, made the point about the difficulty of extrapolating skill levels from even successful outcomes:

Consider a very simple example game. Assume both [Pittsburgh] and [Cleveland] each get 12 1st downs in a game against each other. PIT's 1st downs come as 6 separate bunches of 2 consecutive 1st downs followed by a punt. CLE's 1st downs come as 2 bunches of 6 consecutive 1st downs resulting in 2 TDs. CLE's remaining drives are all 3-and-outs followed by a solid punt. Each team performed equally well, but the random "bunching" of successful events gave CLE a 14-0 shutout.

The bunching effect doesn't have to be that extreme to make the difference in a game, but it illustrates my point. Natural and normal phenomena can conspire to overcome the difference between skill, talent, ability, strategy, and everything else that makes one team "better" than another.

And adding support for my argument about the high degree of variance, Advanced NFL Stats went on to try to nail down exactly how much in the way of outcomes can be attributed to skill versus luck in the NFL. You can read the details of the explanation there, and NFL teams obviously are closer in relative skill levels than most college teams, but the results are nevertheless striking:

...By comparing the two distributions, we can calculate that of the 160 season outcomes, only 78 of them differ from what we'd expect from a pure luck distribution. That's only 48%, which would suggest that in 52% of NFL games, luck is the deciding factor!

There might yet be more to it than these calculations, but the point is that variance is high in outcomes in football games. This is not to say that skill is unimportant, but the lesson is instead that you cannot merely look to actual statistics and actual outcomes to determine who is the best. Football games are tests of ranges of probabilities put up against one another:

Will all eleven players execute their assignments; will the quarterback make the right reads; will the coaches accurately assess the opponent's schemes; will the sun shine in the receiver's eye; will the ball become sweaty where the ballcarrier holds it; will there be an injury on the play; and if these factors randomly cut 50/50, will they work in our favor enough times in a row to get us in field goal or touchdown range.

In other words, lots of football fans, players, and even coaches suffer from a Fooled by Randomness problem when they analyze the game. Football is more quantum mechanics than it is Newtonian physics (though with a splash of game theory). Yet the belief in absolute determinism is natural: we intuitively want results to be indicative of objective truths, and it is much less complex to analyze easy to observe statistics and outcomes than it is to try to estimate the underlying probabilities. But football doesn't always give us large enough sample sizes to believe that results are as instructive as we'd like. So, if we want real answers, we have to admit that there's lots of luck around.

(And if you're a fan of the Michigan Wolverines, this gives you an (incredibly weak) excuse: "It's all the result of bad luck!")

Texas Tech's Offense and the Hot Hand Theory

After Texas Tech's drubbing of Oklahoma St, and the much-quoted fact that they scored a touchdown on seven straight possessions, I heard yet another commentator say that their offense was "streaky." And you hear this about other offenses too, and you hear it constantly in other sports, particularly about shooters in basketball and hitters in baseball. As I've written about previously, I think the idea of "hot streaks" are overblown.


Try flipping a coin fifty times. If you chart out the results, I would wager that it does not look as even as you might expect. Just because it's an equal chance of heads or tails doesn't mean you neatly get heads-heads followed by tails-tails. Instead you get seemingly bizarre - seemingly streaky - patterns of, say, fourteen heads followed by a few back and forth then sixteen tails. The probabilities aren't all that different.

So it is with most offenses. There's an imaginary equilibrium of how much we'd expect a particular offense to score against a particular defense. This is the average score if, say, Alabama played LSU a thousand times. But there's variance; each game is different. And once you look at it like that, you see how silly it can be to get too wrapped up into comparing a couple of drives back to back.

The answer with a team like Texas Tech is that they have a hell of an offense, and we can just expect them to score a lot. How they get those points, in what order, all in the first half, all in the second, is largely a function of variance, or in other words, luck.

I am reminded of all this because the game that seemed a shining example of this was Texas Tech's 31 point comeback in their bowl game against Minnesota a couple of years back. Tech was down 31 in the second half, and, after a barrage of passes from then-sophomore quarterback Graham Harrell, Tech won, and Glen Mason lost his job. As I stated:

As most of you know, Texas Tech came back from 31 down with 7 minutes to go in the third quarter to beat Minnesota. What was amazing to me, as I watched the game, was that despite the short time frame, the entire thing happened almost sleepily. The "comeback" appeared like some odd mixture of luck and manifest destiny. Minnesota did not really lose the game like most teams who give up huge comebacks do. Indeed, Minnesota should be a team designed to control second half leads: they have an impressive running game and a methodical passing game to complement it. Minnesota did not turn the ball over in the second half, and got a number of first downs. Tech did not get particularly good field position, either. The most frantic moment of the entire game was Tech's 90+ yard drive to kick a 52-year field goal, and even that still seemed surprisingly serene. . . .

There actually is an entire field of study dedicated to this idea regarding sports, investing, and other facets of life and it is called the "hot hand fallacy." (See also here, and here.) Surely we've all experienced and witnessed the "hot streak" or the "cold streak" in basketball where a shooter has a poor half and then literally can't miss in the second. We see the swing in momentum, the crowd cheering or silenced, the shooter's swagger, his confidence, his teammates feeding him the ball, and his confidence to shoot it from anywhere on the court with a hand in his face.

Except that is an illusion. At least according to researchers Gillovich, Vallone, and Tversky: If you're a 40% field goal shooter for the season, you're pretty much a 40% shooter all the time, even if in one game you shot 20-22 and another 1-15. It evens out over time. The difference is just chance.

This same logic applies to football, and to no offense in football more than Texas Tech's. Clearly, over the last several years Tech's offense has been one of the most productive in football. It's been well documented that Leach's offense often sputters for a quarter or two before exploding to score points at an almost ridiculous pace. So maybe the comeback wasn't such an aberration. 44 points is not so abnormal for them--what's the difference if they had scored those touchdowns on every other drive over the course of the entire game, rather than scoring them all in the second half?

I did note an exception to this, though. Not all football teams or quarterbacks act like coins; sometimes they can get rattled, and the probabilities can change on the basis of perceived adversity. The "human coin" would be someone like Michael Jordan. He's shot millions of free-throws, and he was not going to be rattled. If he missed five free-throws in a row, it wasn't because he was rattled, it was because that's how the coin flip turned out (though it was a stacked coin, with 90% heads and 10% tails).

But with young players, they might let it get to them. I noted this with Harrell in that game: he was but a sophomore then, but he had a full-season under his belt. Had he not, I do not think he would have had the confidence to keep the probabilities the same. Flash forward to now. Last second drives against Texas, falling behind early against Oklahoma State. Not an issue. Harrell's just out there coolly flipping his coins. I will end with what I said about the end of that comeback game, which has renewed relevance now.

The upshot of all this is simply that, particularly from an offensive standpoint, you practice to remove emotion and to remove the hot hand effect. You want to be Michael Jordan looking at the game winning free throw like it is just the 156th free throw after a routine practice. I think what made Leach come to tears after the game is that everyone on the team - coaches, player, fans - went about their business as usual. Tech didn't come back by launching hail marys, running trick plays, grabbing turnovers, or even really getting lucky breaks. Everyone bought into the system and the program, did their job, played smart football, and performed.

I think what brought Leach to tears was the realization that, for young kids in a hyperbolic football world, sometimes it's brave and valiant simply to do your job.

* As a final note, sorry for all being all Texas Tech all-the-time recently, but (a) I've been acutely familiar with Leach (once had a long conversation with him about applying the pythagorean theorem to calculate how long a QB's throw was) and that offense for over a decade, so it's nice for me to see their success, and (b) their past two prime-time games have really been the only football I've been able to see recently. In any event, there might be a bit of a delay before my next post, because I'm working on some more detailed substantive posts - or as Orson Swindle likes to call them, my "coach porn" articles - about Florida's offense along with a couple of passing concepts in vogue right now. So stay tuned for those.

The A-11 Offense: A Pragmatic Approach

Update - Feb. 17, 2009: The A-11 has now been ruled illegal. The ruling is consistent with this piece: rather than aim directly at the offense or the formation, the National Federation of High School Athletics has clarified the scrimmage kick exception to be limited only to fourth down. As explained in the full-post, the A-11's creators, Steve Humphries and Kurt Bryan, had found a way to transform the scrimmage kick exception (which all agree was at least originally intended only for kicking situations) into an every down offense by putting the quarterback more than seven yards deep. The new ruling eliminates this by requiring that at least four players on the line of scrimmage wear an ineligible jersey number (50-79), except on fourth down.

The A-11's creators have a few arrows left in the quiver. First, they have encouraged teams interested in the A-11 to break off from their state's rulemaking body to form a loose-coalition of A-11 teams, or all A-11 league for themselves. Doing so would require that those schools would not be eligible for their state playoff systems (because they would not be following the rules/procedures that other schools did) and would have to encourage the other, non A-11 league teams locally to play them using their brand of rules. This proposal has not been met with enthusiasm, to say the least.

The other proposal they have floated, this time via email, is called "numerical camouflage." To me, part of this is an admission that the A-11 itself is not that innovative -- the major contribution Bryan and Humphries made was not the formation or the "super-spread," but was with toying with who was and was not eligible so as to confuse the other team (and officials). Basically, they would line up in the A-11 or old BYU type formations with three interior linemen, and give the eligible and ineligible guys similar numbers, like "68" and "88." This way they could still have everyone huddle up near (but not on) the line of scrimmage before the snap, and then, just like the old A-11, have some of them step onto the line and be set for only a second.

Whereas with the real A-11 each would be potentially eligible (before being covered up), here, although it would be foreordained that 68 would need to be on and 88 off, the defense might not be able to determine who was wearing 68 and 88 until it was too late. Make of that proposal what you will, but they are certainly determined.

In any event, it's slightly sad to see it go. I never had any animosity against the offense (certainly not against innovation and being spread), but the scrimmage kick exception was never the proper vehicle. Maybe football is moving the direction the A-11's creators say to being fully wide-open where linemen are a thing of the past, but why not do away with the eligibility restrictions entirely? Many states also have 8-man football leagues, which more closely resemble Arena football, which is itself something like what the A-11 proponents advocated for. Moreover, there was always so much confusion about the offense: so many thought that "A-11" actually mean that the offense could send eight, nine, ten guys downfield to catch passes, when the reality was that it only referred to what was going on pre-snap, and after the snap the offense had no more downfield receivers than the west coast offense or the wishbone. Maybe in the future we will continue moving that way, but it always struck me as bizarre that this was seen as some kind of ultimate and brand new innovation. As documented in the full-post, the actual formations have been around for fifty years, and the Canadians have been one-upping the A-11 since they can send six receivers out for a pass (rather than five as with every U.S. team, including the A-11), due to the fact that there are twelve players on each side.

If we want to change the rules we ought to do it head on. The memory of the A-11 will not fade away, and flag, Arena, and Canadian football are constant reminders of what is possible, if it is true that football is inexorably moving in the direction of being all-spread, all the time. I for one disagree that this is the only direction football goes. It is more cyclical than that and linemen are not as useless -- or as uninteresting -- as the A-11's proponents seemed to argue. Moreover, even in their vaunted offense, the players they replace them with are about as uselessly limited as a position can be: they stand on the outside of the formation and back up to possibly receive a lateral (which a lineman can currently do in any offense), but is otherwise purely a decoy. To me, the idea of the spread is to turn kids into threats by isolating them, moving them around, and unleashing them as downfield terrors. All too often, despite its "wide-open" appearance, the offense tends to restrict the number of eligible downfield receivers (because the running back is needed as a blocker with only three linemen, the offense routinely only can release four receivers downfield instead of five) and it turns players who can do multiple things to the defense -- yes, linemen -- into mere bystanders. That's not spreading; it's bad arithmetic. And that's not an argument against the spirit of the game or to persecute them, it's just that I don't think you gain a strategic advantage from the offense besides whatever deception you might get from confusing the other team about who is and is not eligible.

But that debate is over for now, and will have to be taken up in the future. It no doubt will be.

Original post

The Roman aqueducts. The Gutenberg printing press. The Wealth of Nations. The atomic bomb. The personal computer. Now, the “A-11 offense.”

The A-11 is a football offense which, in reliance on a particular high school rule exemption, puts eleven offensive players on the field who are eligible to catch a down field pass, at least until they are actually set and the ball is snapped. By contrast, on ordinary plays at least five players (the linemen) are automatically ineligible because of the numbers on their jerseys. But in the A-11, the offensive players hover near the line and then quickly set for the required one second before the ball is snapped, thus putting the burden on the defense to determine who is actually eligible to catch passes. If this sounds unique, it is. But the rhetoric of the A-11's creators might make you think that they had discovered nothing less than latest step in mankind's systematic and scientific march through history:

“We’re doing futuristic football. We’re doing football where every play is innovative.” – Steve Humphries

Others are not so impressed. According to the Washington Post, Joe Warren, the football rules interpreter (what a title!) for Maryland’s Public Schools, has called the A-11 “sneaky” and declared that it “makes a travesty of the game.” A quick perusal of the lengthy threads on Coach Huey’s site reveals the deep discord surrounding this offense. And North Carolina has banned the offense, making a second offense grounds for suspending the coach.

The debate is so vehement because the offense – and the behavior of its proponents – touches on many of football’s most timeless debates: the value of “gimmick offenses”; whether there is a type of “true football” and whether this offense violates it; the debate of whether something might be unsportsmanlike because though it is within the letter of the rules it is allegedly not within its spirit; and whether coaches are justified in marketing and selling their ideas for profit rather than sharing them freely.

Explanation of the Offense and the Related RulesIn both high school and college football, while a team is on offense it is required to have a minimum of five players wearing jerseys numbered 50-79 who line up on the line of scrimmage. These poor souls are branded “ineligible,” as in they are ineligible to receive a forward pass, regardless of where they actually line up. So you cannot throw number 63 the ball, even if he lined up in the backfield. Similarly, if 63 lines up at Flanker and 22 lines up as a covered guard, neither can go out for a forward pass, as 22 is barred under the traditional rule that only allows ends and backfield players to be eligible for forward passes. And unlike the NFL, High School and College ball does not have a reporting system to allow ineligible guys to become eligible again. This rule's animating rationale appears to have been an attempt to stamp out tackle eligible plays, possibly as a direct rebuke to Bear Bryant who in particular had used such plays with success.

This is the base rule. The A-11 offense seeks to liberate those five from their “ineligible” status by relying on an exception to the general rule: the “scrimmage kick” rule.

In both high school and college, if a team goes into a “scrimmage kick formation” (more on this in a bit) the offense can disregard the rule requiring the five-man minimum of 50-79 numbered players and can, if it likes, put eleven guys on the field who all have eligible numbers. (Still, only a total of six guys remain eligible to receive a forward pass: the two ends and the four backfield players. ) The scrimmage kick exception was put in sometime after the number-eligibility limitation to allow more flexibility on punt plays by allowing teams to put faster players on the field rather than having to keep five linemen on the field.

So the A-11 offense is built on this scrimmage kick exception. To confuse the defense, the offense puts as many guys up near (but not on the line) as possible, and then shortly before the snap six of them (two ends and four interior linemen, not counting the center who is already on the ball) move onto the line, set for one second, and the ball is snapped and off the offense goes. The defense then must figure out who is eligible to receive a forward pass. The offense compounds this confusion by having the ineligible guys put their hands up, run bubble plays or little dummy hitch routes behind the line. They also can of course block for run plays or for screens, and they can even receive laterals (backwards passes), but a lineman wearing number 63 could already do that without the scrimmage kick formation. Note also, however, that once a player has lined up on the line of scrimmage he remains ineligible and you can’t then shift who is on and who is off multiple times.

What is the scrimmage kick formation? I saved this for last because the formation is defined differently for college and high school. In high school, a team lines up in a “scrimmage kick formation” anytime they have a “receiver” of the snap lined up seven yards deep or more. (I say “a receiver” versus the receiver because it doesn’t have to be the actual recipient of the snap. For example, on a fake punt the punter lines up more than seven yards deep but the actual snap might go to the upback who is lined up only four yards deep.) So all a high school team needs to do is put its quarterback seven yards deep and then it may employ this scrimmage kick exception. This is how Piedmont turned the A-11 into an every down offense.

In college football, however, the exception is more narrow: A formation will only be deemed a “scrimmage kick formation” (thus making the offense exempt from the 50-79 numbers requirement) if the above requirements are met and it is “obvious that a kick might be attempted.” In other words, if an offense lines up on first down with the quarterback seven yards deep but with no other indication of an impending kick – field goal or punt – then the scrimmage kick exception does not apply and the offense must still have five guys with ineligible numbers. Some states like Texas use college rules for high school football so the A-11 is functionally illegal there, as well.

That’s the relevant framework. Below is some video of Piedmont:

As a final note on the possible origins of the offense, the idea of detaching the line from the usual five interior linemen set has been well known at least since the 1980s and 1990s as BYU under LaVell Edwards and Steve Spurrier both used such sets with success. Of course, both used it only in spot duty as a change up as something to make the defense prepare for a little bit extra each week. Run and Shoot innovator Tiger Ellison also explored the idea decades earlier. But, as far as I am aware, Piedmont under Humphries and Bryan were the first to wed the general idea to the scrimmage kick formation to get eleven possibly eligible players onto the field.

Below is the BYU formation, courtesy of Bruce Eien:

Controversy

In this section my aim is to take on two erroneous approaches in this debate – one on either side – and in the process hopefully shed a little light on why I think they are incorrect approaches to football itself. On the one side you have the A-11’s sycophants who have announced to us plebes that, through their Ideas, they have given intellectual birth to an offense which is truly Innovative, unlike whatever the rest of us have had previously been doing. (For some reason people like this are always compelled to capitalize otherwise commonplace words.)

The reality of course is that while no one enjoys football’s strategic complexities more than I do, at core football is a simple game, and none of us are luminous visionaries. Although there no question that it was creative to combine the BYU formation mentioned above with the Scrimmage Kick exception to create some pre-snap confusion, this is not the stuff of “Genius,” (as ESPN.com would lead us to believe), it is not “futuristic football,” (whatever that is supposed to mean), and, not only is it not Innovative (certainly not in the capital letter sense), the self-righteous obsession with transcending mere coaching to become known as an “Innovator” is immaterial, misguided, and probably just plain unhealthy.

On the other side are people who hold another set of beliefs so silly that, if they did not actually exist, Bryan and Humphries would have to make them up. These people tell us that the A-11 offense is bad because it’s not “real” or “true” football” because, apparently in some Platonic-ideal sense, it doesn’t look to them like real football. Their argument is that there’s a certain way one must play the game – no wait, a certain way you have to line up – which is likely based on no more than whatever people already do. Anything contrary to their conception of Platonic-ideal football is unsportsmanlike or simply “a travesty.” No doubt, these are the same people still grumbling about the spread, wishbone, or West Coast Offenses as being in violation of whatever football is to them in their mind’s eye. I will describe why the idea that there is some kind of pure, Platonic form of football which the A-11 violates is necessarily incorrect, and the people who make this argument are wrong. (In the section following this one I address some of the more practical questions of what actual rule makers ought to think about when assessing the offense, and I actually come out on the side that the offense should probably - though it is a close case - be made illegal.)

Self-Appointed Geniuses

One of the difficulties of discussing the offense is trying to separate the A-11's schemes from Steve Humphries (Piedmont’s director of football operations) and Kurt Bryan (Piedmont’s head coach), the offense's rather unique and vocal creators. A major reason why this offense so quickly left a bitter taste in these coach’s mouths is because it didn’t hit them the way normal football innovations do, which is by word of mouth about what some team is having success with: “Hey, have you seen what Podunk High/Eastern State U is doing? It’s really interesting! Check it out!” Instead, coaches were bombarded with the offense through some kind of directed marketing blitz more akin to laundry detergent than a football offense. To many, the “A-11 Offense” came across less like an offense to be marketed than as a marketing campaign looking for an offense.

Keep in mind that the entire history of this offense has been roughly 7-9 games of partial then full use by a single small division high school team. Within a matter of months of losing in the playoffs, Bryan and Humphries launched a soft and direct marketing campaign – complete with media and internet write-ups, websites (a11offense.com), message board postings, by hosting and attending clinics – and now of after some success there is now (surprise!) a DVD set available for purchase, where one can learn to install this magnificent offense for the low-low price of $199.99 (or $40 for a given component). Even the origin of the moniker "A-11" is preposterous: it takes a certain kind of hubris to actually name your own offense after using it for less than a season, especially considering that even the vaunted “Airraid” offense used by Mike Leach, Chris Hatcher, and Hal Mumme had been in use for nearly a decade before some employee working in marketing in the University of Kentucky’s athletic department thought it’d be a good way to sell some tickets.

But more power to them on this marketing blitz. If people want to buy these DVDs, that’s fine. What troubles me is their approach to football and their self-designation as Innovators and Idea men. Like much else in life, in football the conviction that everything you are doing is innovative (“every play is innovative”) indicates that either you are woefully ignorant of what you are doing (or else it wouldn’t seem so innovative) or you’re simply being arrogant and it's the arrogance blinding you.

The articles and sites that discuss this offense describe the three years Bryan and Humphries spent Thinking Important Thoughts about football. And, at least according to them, their resulting creation – this “All 11 offense” – is fueled not by the pedestrian concerns of common football coaches but instead (I suppose subconsciously channeling Hegel’s “Absolute Idea” in their mad reach for profundity) the A-11 is solely concerned with “IDEAS.” From Humphries's blog:

“It’s taken almost three years for the A-11 Offense to morph from a collection of different formations into a theoretical ‘offensive system,’ which then had to translate itself onto the field as an actual offense for the 2007 season. We’ve gone from ideas, to plays, to a system with techniques and throughout the whole process the driving force has been – IDEAS.”

Such self-parody hardly needs an encore. But let’s at least try to ask in what way this offense is driven by these ethereal and erudite IDEAS which, by implication, must be somehow wholly distinct from the types of IDEAS that are behind what other football coaches do. In other words, by what metric is this offense so Innovative? (Again with a capital “I”). Again, from Humphries’s blog:

“On the flip side there are many examples of new ideas making their way to the gridiron and enlightening the game. Florida’s game plan versus Ohio State in the 2007 National Championship game, spread speed across the field into open space and decimated Ohio States [sic] #1 defense. Rutger’s [sic] super spread punt in 2007 put severe stress on the defense and showed amazing promise if they tried a play. The Forty Niners tried a contrarian punt that looked a lot like our 'base' A-11 formation in week 15 of the 2007 NFL season. It almost got blocked, but Carolina definitely looked confused[.]”

So maybe the A-11 is truly innovative, so long as our definition of what is innovative includes game-changing irregularities like, uh, spread punt formations that a variety of teams have used for decades. Of course, what Humphries is really looking at as his barometer of innovation was that University of Florida offense in the 2007 BCS Title game between Florida and Ohio State. He mentions it here and it is mentioned both in the Washington Post and ESPN.com write-ups of the offense (of which the Washington Post's article was far superior; I lack the adjectives to explain how laughably abysmal the ESPN.com piece is). ESPN.com earnestly tells us, apparently in some misguided effort to convince us of Humphries’s genius and authority on the issue of his offense’s status on the Innovation-scale that – aside from going to Cal-Berkeley (holy!), Humphries (wait for it) diagrammed every single play from this Florida – Ohio St. game.

Indeed. This might be persuasive if (a) this wasn’t something that coaches did all the time to often hundreds of games a year, and (b) there was any evidence that Humphries had ever diagrammed another game in such a way. In fact, diagramming that particular game and repeatedly singling it out reveals Humphries’s ignorance on these matters. Competent “diagramming” of that game reveals that Ohio St. played poor defense, turned the ball over repeatedly, and got outplayed. Meyer’s gameplan was certainly great, but it was hardly innovative in some kind of revolutionary and game changing way. It was not much different than what he had been doing for years, and the fact that his offense at that time was a known quantity was why he was paid so much money to come to Florida. Indeed, I had discussed his offense and the spread more generally long before even that game. (Try here and here.) And make no mistake, it is not enough for Humphries argue that Meyer’s gameplan was simply clever or well planned any more than his offense is merely clever or well-planned. Instead both must be truly Innovative and “futuristic.”

Continuing with the absurdity: Apparently Humphries, in his profound quest to diagram Florida’s innovative gameplan, must have failed to diagram any of Ohio St.’s plays. Had he done so, he might have noticed that Ohio State, with Troy Smith at Quarterback, used the zone read along with many of the same sets and formations as Florida and Meyer (hello!).

But we should let Humphries go. Despite the fact that it is his name that appears most prominently in the media, I don’t believe he is the actual driving force behind the offense, though he appears happy to appear publicly. Kurt Bryan is the one who actually coaches the team and has implemented the ideas and he is the one who has made most of the rounds through the coaching and officiating circles preaching his revelations to the rest of us. And Bryan is certainly no less enthusiastic about the offense or in his belief that it is truly Innovative and Game Changing. On the Coach Huey site mentioned by the Washington Post, Bryan posted a thread innocuously titled “Seriously Innovative Ideas Forthcoming?” to post others’ ideas. Bryan invited other coaches to join in (while admonishing them and, of course, capitalizing "Innovations"):

Keeping this thread SERIOUS about forthcoming Innovations, does anyone out there believe in something Truly groundbreaking they are working on?

Bryan saved the punchline until sometime later, but of course, the big reveal was that the A-11 was (surprise!) precisely the kind of “Seriously Innovative Idea” he had in mind.

The point is that while the A-11 is certainly intriguing, what appears to drive these people is their self-aggrandizing belief that the job of a football coach is to Innovate and operate in the Realm of Big and Important Ideas, so that as a result they might be called geniuses (as ESPN.com shamelessly implies). They believe they have taken the pop-ready idea of the “Spread” to its extreme and should be praised accordingly.

As a threshold matter, I agree with Joe Theismann (in spirit, if not to the letter):

“The word 'genius' isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”

Football is a simple game. There’s plenty of complexity, but if you’ve appointed yourself a genius and a revolutionary then you not only lack humility regarding this sport (not to mention your profession) but you’re just plain missing the boat. Everybody’s got schemes. Good coaches surely spend time on schemes, but anyone who has ever been around the game realizes that schemes are just one part of coaching, and I’d say that schemes usually aren’t the outcome determinative part. I don’t even think schemes were necessarily the difference in that famed 2007 BCS game between Florida and Ohio St. that Humphries is so fond of.

And, most ironically, I think these even more egregiously miss the boat on what the importance of their own offense is in their frantic attempt to be recognized as revolutionaries and Innovators. Even with the A-11, a team is still constrained by ineligible players at the snap due to who is covered up even if it can play pre-snap games. They shouldn’t think of it as a super spread. Instead, Bryan and Humphries ought to view the philosophy behind their offense as a willingness to detach and play around with the idea that the five interior linemen don’t have to be seen as a unit of five interior linemen.

The Platonic-Idealists

The argument on the other side all-too-often goes as follows: the A-11 isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad or illegal or sinister or poor form or the like. Yet, haven’t we heard this charge before? Yes we have: The spread isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. And the run and shoot isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. And the West Coast Offense isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. And the wishbone isn’t real or true football and therefore it is bad. Hell, at one time the argument was that the entire T formation with a quarterback behind the center wasn’t real or true football and therefore it was bad!

I could stop here. But the A-11 raises this important question: Is there some pure, true, Platonic-ideal football? If not, then why? The answer is that there is not such a pure, true, ideal football because football is a game; all the rules – except ones designed around safety - are arbitrary. They might have in mind competitive balance, but this doesn’t make it “true” or “real” in any meaningful sense. What are the most fundamental, “true,” important, or essential rules in football that you can think of? For me, short of the shape of the ball used, my tops would probably be the 100-yard football field, the limit on both sides to eleven players on the field, and the limit on offenses to four downs to score or get a first down. Certainly, all would rank higher than the number of players who might possibly be eligible to receive a forward pass pre-snap, which logically must also rank lower than the number of actually eligible receivers.

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

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

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

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

Verdict: The Self-Appointed Geniuses vs. The Platonic-Idealists

Despite their absurdity, Bryan and Humphries have the better of this particular strand of the argument. I will address in the next section a few thoughts on whether the Scrimmage Kick rule ought to be amended, but hopefully I have helped discredit the notion that football – or any other game – has some kind of “true,” inviolable Platonic-ideal form which makes violators of such true or ideal football both wrong and bad, and I hope I have shed some light on why the cult of Innovation is misguided.

Should the Rules be changed to outlaw this offense?

There are two lines of attack on the offense: First, it is already unsportsmanlike because, though it might be within the letter of the rules, it is not within its spirit, and, second, regardless of your answer to the first question the rules should be changed to outlaw it.

For the first, this is one of those moments where football coaches and those associated with football are forced to become like lawyers and parse some governing text for its meaning, whether in strict exegetical fashion as Humphries and Bryan necessarily do or by asking more broadly whether the A-11 offense is within the spirit or reason animating the rule. And like many lawyers, the interpretive method each side has chosen appears to depend primarily on the side they are advocating. (And it's not like this is the kind of thing that gets asked about in interviews for a coaching positions: “Enough already about tradition, being there for the kids, and building a fanbase here at our school, what I really want to know is when you read the rules, do you strictly follow the text or do you try to discern the views of the reasonable member of the athletic association that enacted them?”)

Following the discussion above, the rules governing football are simply the rules that govern a sport, and as a result are in fact arbitrary in nearly every case (again, 100 yard football fields, four downs, one foot or two feet in bounds, etc), so to say that something is invalid because it is not within a rule’s spirit even if it is within its text is an empty charge, at least in this narrow context. To say otherwise presupposes the view that Platonic-ideal football exists.

The tougher question is the second: Should the rules be changed?

The Scrimmage Kick formation was designed to enable teams to put faster players on the field when they punt. So one way to eliminate the offense would be to limit the use of the Scrimmage Kick rule to fourth down (though teams occasionally punt on third and long, depending on the situation), or to use the college rule which asks the official to only allow the formation if it is "obvious" that a kick could be attempted.

So is it so “sneaky” that it must be eliminated? There’s no doubt it is illegal in the NFL and in college football. And even Bryan and Humphries admit that the Scrimmage Kick rule was not designed with this offense in mind. So it’s fair to call this an offense based on a “loophole.”
But that isn't immediately fatal. In most states, a shotgun snap of seven or more yards triggers the rule that a defensive player may not immediately hit the snapper; the rule was similarly designed for punts and field goals to protect the long snapper who has to put his head down. But many passing teams have adopted this for their every down shotgun offenses to make their blocking easier and to provide their QB with more time. Coaches deride this as the exploitation of a loophole as well, though the rationale of protecting a snapping center from head blows still applies. But not every “loophole” must be closed.

Yet, the flipside for Bryan and Humphries of rejecting the Platonic-ideal view of “true” football is that the ruling body, being merely the body charged with establishing the arbitrary rules of a game designed for amusement, are free to do whatever they like. Coach Bryan likes to say that one of the best aspects of the A-11 is that it is fun for the kids, and he’s right that football rules are designed to foster a game that is fun to play. But not everyone’s fun is the same, and many – in my view rightfully – don’t always see the swinging of the advantage to the offense as promoting fun. Arena football and “traditional” football (a more accurate term than “true football,” though not entirely accurate because the game has still changed in many, many ways) were not meant to be the same. As a result, even the taking of certain aesthetics into consideration is permissible.

So the decision to close the loophole and eliminate the offense must be made much like we make other decisions in our democratic society in that these rule makers – many of different minds and opinions, after consulting the public – will not be able to theoretically deduce the best answer like Descartes or by appeal to Platonic-ideal football, but instead, like Montaigne (to stay with the philosopher theme), will have to bring their own best judgments to the question.

My answer: The loophole ought to be closed. I don't think there is any hurry, and it is entirely fine that it is too late now to ban it for the Fall 2008 season because I sincerely doubt that it will catch on. While it will be excruciating to hear the A-11's Innovative creators claim martyrdom from now until the end of time, the fact is that the rule does effect a rather significant change on the game and, to say nothing of whether that change is a good or bad one, it's bizarre to effect it through an exemption designed for punts.

Maybe the number eligibility rule itself should go (though if so I'd like to see the requirement that the offense be set increased to two seconds instead of one), but if it is why not abolish that rule directly instead of through this exception? To me, that - the oddity of making such a major change to football through a rule designed for punts - tips the scales in favor of banning it, rather than simply worrying about whether the defense might get confused. If Bryan and Humphries want to run their offense, they should take their results from last season and the upcoming one and lobby the rulemakers to abolish the number eligibility rule itself rather than continue with all this.

Alright, Let’s Talk Football

Alright, let’s finally discuss a couple ideas of how one might actually use this A-11 offense along with some possible problems. I personally think the best chance for success with this set is to ignore Bryan’s idea of “nodes” (three groups of players, one in the middle and one on each wing) but instead to freely flop the line around interchangeably. This includes rejecting the idea of being wedded to the minimum 3-man interior line all of Bryan’s diagrams include. These are my IDEAS. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Problems with the Offense

I have a few issues with what the A-11 set forces you into. My biggest complaint is that, if you ignore the raw confusion you might cause a defense about who to cover, it’s not a particularly effective set for dropback passing. This is because, with only three interior linemen (and only two gaps) you are largely forced to use one of your two backfield players to block. So what happens is that, while you have six guys “spread out,” you actually can only get at most four of them out to catch a forward pass. This is particularly significant because (a) the defense can largely ignore the ineligible receivers (assuming they can identify them), thus making them entirely useless to you (you will have traded one receiver for zero defenders, a fatal trade when, as I’ve discussed before, you really want to trade one receiver for two defenders to open the others up), and (b) you’ve shortened the pass rushing edges by a great deal. I know the theory is that you can spread and release it quickly, but even spread teams recognize that shortening the edges decreases the time it takes for outside rushers to get to your quarterback.

For the run game it’s hard to say because defenses haven’t yet had time to adjust so it’s guesswork to determine what fronts are expected, but generally the disadvantage of fewer linemen is that there are fewer gaps for the defense to control, and therefore it is harder to employ traps and double teams. For example, if a three-man defensive front team (i.e. a 3-4 defense or a 3-3-5 defense) lines up against a traditional set with two tight ends, there are six interior gaps to control and double teams are easier. If a three-man defensive front team lined up against the base A-11, they would have all three linemen covered and they have more defensive linemen than there are gaps. This is not fatal, but it is a concern.

Possible Advantages and Ideas

The theoretical advantage of the offense – aside from mere confusion on who can release for forward passes – is to further the spread offense’s quest to turn football into a counting game. Dan Mullen, Florida’s offensive coordinator under Urban Meyer, likes to say that as a general rule they will run the ball with their spread against five-man fronts and throw it against six-man fronts. The A-11 or an A-11 type offense can ratchet up some of these numbers with a healthy screen game. Really, if you’re going to spread out guys who are ultimately ineligible, they have to be a threat to block for screens.

This is one reason why I would advocate unbalanced sets, like the one below:

Then you could go to the line with a play like the double-screen play below where the QB reads the defensive end (if the DE rushes or stays home, throw it to R on the crack-screen; if he follows the R out throw the receiver screen) and has the option to check to an inside run like a draw or lead play. And one could also use simple quick passing plays with dummy routes by the covered guys. Again, I’m not a big fan of these dummy routes, but in spot duty they can be acceptable.

Also, if I was going to do this I would heavily employ an H-back because he would be the type of quadruple threat – block, release for a pass (or check-release), take a hand-off, or block for a few counts and release for a delayed pass – that could really help the offense. I’d like to say that there was a whole lot more to it but there really isn’t. Unless you’re going to have your spread linemen run complex trapping schemes out beyond the hash marks it’s difficult to have truly complex pass patterns or blocking schemes in this offense. (A good high school will often use sprint out blocking from this set.) But of course if it works to make the game into a counting one then that is a virtue. Simple is better.

Conclusion

How unique, this whole experience. I suppose it’s no surprise that the people who would try to turn the scrimmage kick formation into an offense (and possibly even into a Way of Life) would be like Humphries and Bryan – egomaniacs and desperate for wins. It’s a creative gesture, made all the more bold because they went right to it as an every down offense. And all the more audacious because the offense barely had gone from whiteboard to field before it became a DVD available for sale. But that’s the world, I suppose. I certainly have bought many football DVDs and materials.

And Humphries and Bryan might just be acting realistically: I expect this comet to burn up before it lands. I don’t think defenses will forever remain bewildered by the offense – indeed, Piedmont lost its last two games last season 38-15 and 56-21 – and there isn’t really a debate about whether the scrimmage kick formation was intended for this purpose (it wasn’t). Maybe the 50-79 eligibility rule ought to be done away with, but I’d guess that the rule makers will want to do it directly through amendment than indirectly as with the A-11. Nevertheless, I’m quite curious – all any of us have seen are a few p and some grainy YouTube clips – and I’m sure Piedmont will be heavily followed this fall.