Smart Notes - Feb. 22, 2009

1. How sophisticated is Michigan's spread? It is now apparent that the Michigan Wolverines will have to start a freshman quarterback -- one or another -- in 2009. Despite their inexperience, these guys seem, at first glance, to be a better fit with Rodriguez's vaunted spread-to-run offense simply because they are more athletic than anyone Michigan had last year. The idea is that Rich Rod needs to find the next Pat White (or at least the next Woody Dantzler). And maybe so.

But, as I have discussed previously, if Rodriguez wants his offense to be truly elite again, it's the passing game that has to be the source of innovation. The run game tools are largely in place. There's some room for improvement all around, but, last season with general inexperience -- and without a legitimate running threat at quarterback -- the lack of a viable downfield passing attack worked to help cripple the Rodriguez offense. But the fact that this aspect never developed over the course of the season was what really troubled me.

There's much more to say on this topic, but for now suffice to say that Rodriguez is in danger of falling behind in the spread offense arms race in terms of sophistication. I discussed that phenomena with Purdue as a pass-first spread team over the last decade, but it's of a slightly different order with Michigan. In the spread's nascent days, the spread-to-run innovators included Rodriguez and Kevin Wilson and Randy Walker at Northwestern, with Urban Meyer following shortly after. Wilson is now at OU and of course Meyer is at Florida. Compare their offenses with Rodriguez's: there's not much difference from a run-game standpoint (though Meyer and OU mix up their sets a bit more and use more tight-ends now), but the passing games have seen a wide departure. Wilson now uses what Chuck Long put in at OU, with some schematic residue lingering from Mike Leach and Mark Mangino, while Meyer, along with Dan Mullen and Mike Sanford, assembled a pro-style one-back approach gleaned from John L. Smith and Scott Linehan from Louisville and Joe Tiller and Jim Chaney from Purdue. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Meyer's passing game, but it's definitely more sophisticated than what Rodriguez has going on.

But Rodriguez is a bright guy and his passing game originally derived from (though is a long way now) the old run and shoot. So you'd think he could remedy this. Yet with nothing but true freshman, that evolution will have to wait. The longer they wait, however, the farther behind they fall. The only hope is the increased athleticism masks these deficiencies.

On a related note, below are some cut-ups of Oklahoma and Oregon, two of the better spread teams.





UPDATE: Brian Cook of mgoblog chimes in with thoughts here. Also, it's worth pointing out that I don't mean to say that the sophistication of Rich Rod's passing game (and by "sophistication" I mean efficacy -- i.e. how well the passing schemes fit with the protection, reads, and quarterback actions to actually get guys open on rhythm) was the sine qua non of increased success at UM, talent, fit, and techniques all be damned. Instead, it is just one more piece of the puzzle for Michigan to eventually get back to being a National Championship type team. Nevertheless, stagnant schematics and gameplanning is among the many issues inherent in (a) taking over a new program, and then (b) starting a true freshman quarterback, and a serious one, though at the margins behind the more obvious areas where Michigan must clearly improve.

2. Football pet peeves from Pro-football Reference Blog. Check it out here. A couple of the best ones:

JKL: Also, timeouts called to determine whether to challenge. I’m pretty sure I have seen Herm Edwards do this. Nothing quite as gut-wrenching and mind numbing as watching your coach burn two timeouts in a row.

...

JKL: Announcers who refer to how costly an intentional grounding penalty is, because of the loss of down. Hello! If he had simply held the ball and taken the sack, he risks a fumble and a sack also results in a “loss of down”. It’s actually one of the smarter penalties a player can risk taking. Rarely does a QB do it without a sack being eminent. At least half the time, they can convince the ref that they were trying to throw it to someone and got it close. And when they don’t, they don’t lose anything except the same result as a sack.

3. NCAA as cartel.

4. Coffee fix. Those who know me know that coffee is often my favorite reason for getting up on a given day. So I was happy to stumble on this new blog, Manhattan Roasts.

Conservative and risky football strategies (and kurtosis)

Brian from Advanced NFL stats recently posited that some NFL teams (namely, the Washington Redskins under Jim Zorn) might have been throwing too few interceptions. This was because the lack of interceptions was a symptom of playing too conservatively, and therefore costing the Redskins games.

Implicit in Brian's thoughtful article are a couple of assumptions that I want to unpack, because radically different strategies might be appropriate depending on the level of football.

• The first assumption is that a lack of passing (or passing aggressively) costs the offense points. This is undoubtedly correct: on average, passes garner more yards per play than runs, and an equilibrium playcalling strategy will seek to maximize the returns for each play (whether in terms of yards, first downs, or points).
  
• The second assumption appears to be that maximizing yards and points is the optimal strategy for an offense. Hence, the lack of interceptions means that the team is leaving points on the board, thus costing it games. This is the assumption I want to address in slightly more detail.

Is it always "optimal" to set your strategy to maximize points scored?

In the NFL -- which is what Brian focuses on -- this is likely true and the assumption holds. NFL teams are almost all competitive with each other, and even the worst teams can beat the best in a given game. So any reduction in expected points is likely to hurt a team's chances of winning because they need to maximize that out to get wins.

But is that true in college? Or in high school? Think about when Florida plays the Citadel. The Gators have a massive talent advantage compared with the Bulldogs. As a result, what is the only way they can lose? You guessed it: by blowing it. They can really only lose if they go out and throw lots of interceptions, gamble on defense and give up unnecessary big plays, or just stink it up.

A fan or some uninitiated coach might see this as a lack of effort, but another view might be that Florida used an unnecessarily risky gameplan that cost them a victory. And since we know that they would win almost every time, what did they gain by being more aggressive? Even if they gained in expected points, this is something like the difference between a forty-point and sixty-point victory, which ought to be irrelevant. (I leave aside BCS calculation questions, which very well might make it worth it to increase the risk of loss to get a bigger chance of a blowout victory.)

The upshot then is that, for the storied programs with large talent advantages, there is seemingly more downside than upside to being very aggressive, either on offense or defense. While it might increase the risk of blowing the opponent out, it also increases the risk of stumbling.

The flipside: the underdog

It's a well-worn belief that underdogs -- i.e. the kind of severely outmatched opponent that cannot win without some good luck -- must employ some risky strategies to succeed. This has long been believed but now we have a reason, though it also teaches us that there is a price to this bargain. The underdog absolutely must take the riskier strategy, whether by throwing more and more aggressively, by onside kicking, or doing flea-flickers and trick plays. They have to get lucky. In the process, however, they also increase the chance that they will get blown out, possibly quite badly. But isn't that worth the price of a shot at winning? Florida might pick off the pass and run it back for a touchdown; they might sack the quarterback and make him fumble; they might blow up the double-reverse pass. If so, then things look grim. But what if they didn't? And if the team didn't do those things, how can it beat them by being conservative? By waiting for Florida to make mistakes?

Get technical

Let's take a quick step back and talk about what is happening from a probability standpoint. What does a more aggressive (and thus more risky) strategy do to our expected outcomes? Hopefully everyone is familiar with the bell-curve, which is a graphic way of depicting the range of possible outcomes based on the probability of their occurrence. The normal distribution is the most common, and it assumes that outcomes on the left and right are as likely as the average outcome. Here, let's assume this is the curve for an offense that can be expected to score around 28 points a game.

Now, let's say they decide to ramp it up. They want to score more points, but this is a riskier strategy, and therefore the range of outcomes will vary more wildly. Below is the new curve, which has moved to the right (to reflect the greater expected points) but is also flatter -- a measure of kurtosis -- which makes the "tails," or ends of the curve "fatter."

(Remember, the height of the curve is the probability of the event happening. Although with the moved curve the whole offense now is expected to score more points, it is now less bunched around the middle because the strategy employed is riskier and hence has more variance or variety.)

What does this tell us? It really just reaffirms what we'd already guess (and assumes that we know what strategies are both riskier and more rewarding, which is an assumption but generally involves passing more). Our offense now: (a) averages more points, (b) has an increased chance of scoring in the forties and blowing out the opponent than before (represented by the shaded green area), but (c) has an increased chance of blowing it and scoring fewer points than our more conservative -- and less variant -- strategy from before. Hence, you might maximize your points but you might actually increase your chance of losing in the process.

Now, remember I'm making assumptions about the nature of the curve. There's also a probability phenomenon known as skewness, which might mean that the improved strategy actually will rarely ever incur a bad game and all the variance will be good.

But the reason I took this mathematical approach to this is that this is really the lesson of the financial crisis as applied to these Wall Street gurus, imported to football: you can "improve" your strategy, you can increase your expected gain, you can increase your chance of blowout wins, but in the process you might be sowing the seeds of your own unlikely, but catastrophic demise. Sort of Black Swans for football.

Spurrier and keeping it close

So in the NFL, where teams are almost all competitive (save, maybe the Detroit Lions), it's likely the best strategy to simply maximize expected points and to go from there. But in other levels, with talent disparities of all sorts, it is trickier, as we have seen.

In the 1990s, Steve Spurrier's Florida Gators were undoubtedly some of the most talented teams of the decade. They were also some of the most aggressive. As a result, they absolutely destroyed some teams. Of course there were the seventy-point blowouts of Kentucky, but what about when they scored more than sixty against Phil Fulmer's Tennessee Volunteers? Yet, Spurrier never once went undefeated with the Gators: his teams always seemed to drop a game or two that maybe they shouldn't have. And those losses almost always had the same profile -- too many interceptions, couldn't run the ball at all, and too many big plays given up on defense. I can't believe I'm inclined to say this, but maybe Spurrier should have been more conservative? He might not have won as many games by sixty or seventy, but maybe they would have gone undefeated and won more than one title?

On the flipside, almost every week of the season I see teams go to Southern Cal, LSU, or Ohio State, and pretty much give up all hope of winning in the name of "keeping it close and winning it in the fourth quarter." As outlined above, this might be the worst strategy against such teams. They have little chance of winning on the merits, so what they need to do is flatten the tails and increase the chance for a shocker: take risks, and hope their coin flips go in their favor. Maybe they won't. Maybe they get blown out. But not taking those chances is a surefire way to set their low chance of winning in stone.

Yet, much like with David Romer's paper where he observed that NFL coaches probably don't go for it on fourth down enough, there are external and likely irrelevant reasons that deter coaches from employing a true "risky-underdog" strategy: the risk that the coach will get fired. I am advocating here that underdogs go for it and increase the calculated risk they take on. (Keep in mind that you can go overboard on this. Chucking the ball forty yards downfield every play, while risky, would not increase your scoring or even chance of winning because you'd become predictible and downright silly. It's about calculated risk.)

But there are real costs -- at least for the coach -- of getting blown out. And make no mistake, the bargain for a greater chance of winning includes the greater chance of getting thrashed. Maybe this should be irrelevant -- a win is a win and a loss is a loss. But a blowout loss has collateral effects, even if they are purely psychological and emotional. You can lose recruits, you can lose donations, and you can lose your job. Look at Mike Shanahan with the Broncos. He was on the hotseat, but he lost his job primarily because Denver got blown out in their final game. I don't necessarily think that was because his team took on increased risk, but people do not tolerate ugly defeats, rational or not.

Similarly, there might be real gains for an underdog to just "keep it close" with a big boy without ever having a real chance of winning. People discount moral victories, but if such and such team can "keep it close" with USC, then they get all kinds of accolades and possibly even confidence going into the following weeks. But if they employed the risky-underdog strategy, then they might gain a slight marginal increase for a victory, with a steeper increase in the chance of getting buzzsawed right off the field (remember skewness).

So, from the perspective of being purely focused on winning football games, I think the implications of the risky/conservative strategy dynamic in the context of teams with wide talent disparities has some pretty dramatic implications. But in the real world, there's lots of other factors, including the felt need by the coach to protect his own skin. Yet, he might be costing his team a chance at victory.

Michael Lewis on basketball statistics

Not directly on topic for this site but it's hard to pass up an opportunity to mention a new Michael Lewis piece. This one is very Moneyball. It's about the Houston Rockets' forward Shane Battier, and the thesis is that, despite his low-scoring output he is one of the best "value" players in the NBA because of the little things he does and defensive prowess, and all that is quantifiable these days. The article is extraordinarily well-written (as always), and contains great summations of an analytical approach to sports, as is usual for a Lewis piece:

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job. In 2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire new management for his losing team and went looking specifically for someone willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,” Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.”

The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved. Outcomes that seem, after the fact, all but inevitable — of course LeBron James hit that buzzer beater, of course the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl — are instead treated as a set of probabilities, even after the fact. The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of course to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence the new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on his team’s chances of winning. In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture inside baseball or football or darts.

The key-stat that is used to evaluate Battier's importance is a modified version of the "plus/minus" stat first used in Hockey. The basic gist is one just looks at how good the team does with a player in the game versus out of the game -- i.e. how much do they outscore or get outscored by their opponents. Of course, the raw version of this stat is misleading, because all players from good teams would shoot up the rankings while those on bad teams, even excellent players, would fall far.

Supposedly, the Rockets' manager Daryl Morey has developed this stat further, though is cagey about how. But he is quite confident that Battier has one of the best "plus/minus" values in the league.

Phil Birnbaum of the Sabemetrics Research site is not entirely convinced:

[A]s I said, I'm a bit skeptical, still. I accept that Battier must be exceptionally good at defense, since (a) he plays 33 minutes a game and doesn't have very much in the way of traditional offensive statistics; (b) the Rockets have watched him and studied him and think he's great; and (c) his teams have done well. Still, from a scientific standpoint, the article is mostly anecdote and hearsay.

It shouldn't be all that hard to confirm the article's thesis and measure the size of the effect. If Kobe [Bryant] is good from one place but worse from another, that can be figured out by watching games and counting. If Battier holds him to those low-percentage shots when covering him, that can be counted too. And at the most fundamental level, can't you see what Kobe (and the other players) do when covered by Battier, and compare to what they do against the Rockets when Battier's on the bench? Something is better than nothing.

It's not really that I don't believe the Rockets. It's just that +6 points a game -- when it's acknowledged that Battier isn't all that great on offense – seems pretty high to me, and my instinct is to ask for more evidence.

One answer might be that the evidence is there, but that it is still proprietary. That was Morey's answer in the Lewis piece. Nevertheless, this does indicate to me that people are on the right track in at least trying to really analyze sports, and not get bogged down in trivia.

As a final note, the WSJ Numbers Guy, with a great sense of timing, offers up a post about the plus/minus stat featured in the Lewis article:

Earlier this week, [Mark] Cuban posted to his blog a list of the 30 NBA players who have the biggest positive impact on their teams when they’re in the game. They were ranked by a measure inspired by hockey’s plus/minus statistic, reflecting how well a team does with a player on the court, after accounting for the other players on the court with him. Cuban’s plus/minus adjusts for how good the team is without the player on the court as well as for the opponent and for game situations. (Without such adjustments, players on a top team like the Los Angeles Lakers would all look good, because the Lakers so often dominate.) . . . .

I sent Cuban’s surprising ratings to Roland Beech, proprietor of the NBA stats site 82games.com, for comment. Beech works on player analysis for the Mavericks and incorporates a version of plus/minus into his own player ratings. But that didn’t keep him from criticizing the numbers Cuban posted. Cuban and Wayne Winston, who developed the system for him, responded. What resulted was a polite yet spirited debate among Cuban and his advisors about how to best analyze players.

Beech told me he considered plus/minus ratings, as adjusted by regression analysis, “one of the most over-hyped player rating systems.” He pointed to the incongruous finding that [Sebastian] Telfair is more valuable than [Dirk] Nowitzki, and blamed other questionable results — San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker as a below-average player — on a paucity of data on top players’ performance without their star teammates. Beech also argued that there is too much noise in the system, because a player’s value is determined by coaching schemes, injuries and their assigned roles. . . .

Winston, the professor of operations and decision technologies at Indiana University who developed the system for Cuban, said that no system is perfect, but that plus/minus beats other player analyses because it can reflect defensive prowess — and Nowitzki’s defense was subpar at the beginning of the season. It’s with defense, Winston said, that plus/minus “really shines,” because defensive stats such as blocked shots, rebounds and steals can’t encapsulate a player’s worth.

We still need more and more of this kind of development with football. At least they're trying.

A-11 Ruled Illegal

So it's gone. I have updated my original "A-11 Offense: A Pragmatic Approach" article to reflect this new development (I still get many hits and comments on that article). I have reprinted that discussion in this post for those who have already read the original.

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 the vaunted A-11 offense, the players who replace regular ol' offensive linemen are about as uselessly limited as 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.

(Image credit: New York Times)

Smart Notes - Feb 7, 2009

1. The Future of coaching quarterbacks. Coach Darin Slack, in response to a question about quarterbacks with a sort-of three-fourths or quasi-side arm delivery versus a more vertical one. Slack recommends the more vertical release:

[Peyton] Manning's attack angle of his elbow allows his wrist to come through tighter . . . . That coupled with the accelerating torque of the turn, he gets power and accuracy on a more consistent basis [than most other quarterbacks].

Warner and Romo, can be very similar in their approaches. [T]he one who extends better than the other more consistently will overcome the[ir] flat[] release[s]. It still goes back to discipline, no matter how you slice.

The biggest difference [between these quarterbacks] is that Manning has a bigger margin of error with his throwing motion. This means that he can fail at some part of his move and he will still have more room to recover in [his] extension -- simply because the "around" stress put on his elbow is reduced because his elbow location is better. This allow[s] arm extension to occur easier.

The other thing to note, is Romo's increasingly curled wrist. [T]his weaker wrist position makes it much more difficult, if not impossible at times, [for him] to extend. You just cannot physically extend a curled wrist.

So, the bottom line. Kurt [Warner] and Tony [Romo], due to their lower elbow positions, have less room to make mistake in their moves even though their elbows are still forward of the shoulders. This can result in greater failure [rates] if they do not maintain discipline in extension.

Peyton has a much greater probability of success due to the reduced stress on his elbow, his better positioned tricep for extension, and his more vertical attack angle. Any pressure applied [by, for example, a pass rusher] may reduce some of Peyton's advantage, but everyone does less than they should under pressure, so the consistency, accuracy, and velocity advantage remains with Peyton.

But hey, who is in the SuperBowl? So much for coaching, right?

Now, the mistake here [for a young quarterback] would be to say, well, just get your elbow higher. That isn't the answer by itself. Peyton's elbow is not only higher, but more forward of his shoulder -- and that is where the rubber hits the road for muscular function . . . and that is why we teach differently than the common approach. To understand and apply [it] is to control the feel and self correction of flight. Why? because when you fail to get to zero [or the original position], no matter who you are, the resulting failure is consistent for everyone -- automatically, no matter what age, regardless of professional status, or skill. . . .

Just one final thought, the magic formula to all of this isn't rote visual copycat, it is understanding the timing and acceleration of the elbow, and how the feet and body support that. If you can crack the code on this, you will begin to appreciate the incredible difference you will see in your kids. . . .

These guys are pros, so they just get it done. Our kids are not, but they need this understanding all the more, and dare I say it, so do many coaches.

Slack knows what he's talking about. Some of his ideas are quite novel, while others are merely the best of what has been consistently taught in the past. The reason it works so well is that he has developed a language and teaching method to improve quarterbacks. I talk a lot on here about schemes, but you have to have a guy who can throw the ball accurately. If you have a John Elway, fine, but most quarterbacks are very poorly taught. And at the high school level, it is on the coaching to turn a guy who is a non-QB and turn him into one, to improve the mediocre quarterback, and to make the good ones great. I agree to a small degree with the "leave well enough alone," but that is also no excuse to abdicate duties. No one says about a lineman, "Hey, he's a natural. Don't tinker with him too much." But they say it all the time with quarterbacks.

2. Whither A-11? These are only rumors, but the rumor-mill is that the high school football federation rules -- which govern most but not all states (the others use NCAA-like rules) -- have settled on changing the rule governing the "scrimmage kick exception" to conform with NCAA rules. No big deal right? Well, if true (the results of the January meeting won't be public for a few weeks) it would mean that the A-11 offense, as currently used with extra eligible jersey wearing players lined up behind the line who then step up onto the line before the snap to disguise who is and who is not eligible, would be illegal in nearly every state and every level of football.

The word further is that this has not made the A-11's creators, Kurt Bryan and Steve Humphries, very happy. Their proposal so far has been to encourage individual schools who want to run the A-11 to break off from their state football leagues (making them ineligible for state playoffs) and form a kind of national, A-11 compatible league. The details of such a proposal are manifold, but teams from different states often play each other, but they agree on the rules in advance (for example, cut blocking is illegal in many states but legal in Texas and some others). But these are usually exhibition style games, and it is a heavy price if a team is willing to secede and forego their own state playoff opportunities simply to run a particular type of offense. It's unclear how different the rules there would be, too. (If a new league, why not require only four ineligible guys and and another receiver truly eligible? You could run a five wide offense with a quarterback and a runningback.) I really have no news other than the rumor-mill (hey, what are blogs for?), but it will be interesting to see how this develops.

3. NFL Overtime, Continued. Slate's "Undercover Economist" Tim Hartford has proposed that the team who gets the ball (and where) should be determined by auction. For example, the referee could start naming off yard lines. He'd start at the one and keep moving up. When one of the coaches was willing to take the ball on offense at that yard-line, he throws a flag or makes a signal. For example, one coach might think the twenty was acceptable, another might prefer to take it as far back as the fifteen.

The Sabermetric site notes that this might actually get boring, because a consensus would emerge about what the yard line was. But I'm not entirely sure: wouldn't say, the Baltimore Ravens and Arizona Cardinals have different thought processes going into such an auction? One being defensive minded (and not likely to want to drive the entire field, but happy to pin the other team back), and the other likely to want the ball one way or another. But I could be wrong.

Partially because as much as I enjoy these proposals they are unlikely to persuade the folks that need persuasion (the NFL Commissioner and his staff and the owners), so I support settling overtime by making the winner the first team to score six points. That would up the drama on those quick field goals, but also retains the penalty if the other team scores a touchdown on you.

Super Bowl - Brief Thoughts

The biggest play of the Super Bowl to me (pick one!) was James Harrison's one-hundred yard interception return at the end of the first-half. It was not just a pick-six, it was a pick-thirteen (with the ball so close to the end zone, Arizona's expected points was around six, and the resulting touchdown was obviously a seven point play).

Strategically it was also fascinating. The Steelers had been blitzing quite a bit, Warner thought it was a man-blitz, but instead Harrison dropped off into the passing lane. LeBeau has gotten a great deal of credit for this call, but at least some reports have been that Harrison was supposed to blitz but instead stepped back into the passing lane, after faking the rush.




In any event, though you can't tell the exact nature of the defense (defenses are always compressed near the goal line, and even if LeBeau did call it, it could be man with Harrison dropping off as a spy or "floater," or if it was a true zone-blitz. But it does bring out something I want to highlight with zone-blitzes: zone-blitzes do not solely occur when a defensive lineman drops off into coverage. Indeed, the entire point of the 3-4 is that you can use a zone-blitz scheme without having to drop off ends and tackles; you can just change up the linebackers who come. Quite literally, it is anytime a team employs a blitz with a zone coverage behind it. Most "fire" zones use the end dropping off, but it's not necessary.

Now, a common technique involves one often done by dropping defensive linemen, or by a player like Harrison: the step-up like a blitz and then drop-off. This technique is really independent of the scheme, but works well within it because it freezes blockers, thus making it more difficult to block the overload blitzes. This is how well-designed and executed zone-blitzes can get a free rusher with only five guys after the quarterback.

While it might seem more interesting to limit zone-blitzes to situations where a big lineman drops into coverage, it is not accurate. Indeed, they are still revolutionary because typically blitzes are forced into man coverage because, to get the advantage in rushers versus blockers, they only have enough guys to go man to man or maybe man with one help player (usually a deep safety). The zone-blitzes try for the best of both worlds with a simple coverage (three intermediate, three deep) and a five-man blitz. They try to be effective by being well disciplined at both: using a matchup-zone or pattern read approach with the coverage, and scheming the five rushers to take advantages of weaknesses in the coverage.

The good teams, like the Steelers, are dominant. But there's lots of bad zone-blitzing teams around. Zone-blitzing can sometimes be a bit like playing with fire.

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.

Hub Fans Bid Rabbit Adieu

Sad day: writer John Updike has passed away. Not known for his sports writing, Updike wrote one of my favorite sports essays of all-time: Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. It's a baseball essay about Ted Williams's last game at Fenway Park, so it is technically off topic for this site, but it is both elegant and brilliant. Anyone who has ever been to a baseball game -- or ever lived in Boston -- can't help but feel the essay's immediacy and even importance. Some brief snippets below, but read it for yourself.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. . . .
. . .
The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause — no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Miami looks to hire Mark Whipple as Offensive Coordinator

Mark Whipple is likely the new offensive coordinator for the University of Miami. That name is a blast from the past. Back in 1998 I heard of Whipple when he took UMass to a 1-AA National Title. Back then, he was a bit of a darling in football circles. He was throwing the ball around forty-times a game, and his teams were pretty wide open. So, a spread guy, you say? Not necessarily: keep in mind too that was 1998; the spread had not yet permeated all levels of college football. Although wide-open and experimental, Whipple's offense was kind of a West Coast/One-back hybrid.

Eventually, however, his success at UMass waned, and he was picked up by the Steelers to be their quarterbacks coach. And from there, Whipple's career arc has been rather perplexing: He was quarterbacks coach with the Steelers, where apparently Bill Cowher "loved" him. But Mike Tomlin was not so impressed, as he fired Whipple shortly after he arrived, citing Ben Roethlisberger's "regression."

Then he was picked up by the Philadelphia Eagles, where he coached this past season, under the vague and quite posssibly meaningless title, "offensive assistant coach." The word was that Andy Reid hired Whipple as insurance if his offensive coordinator left before this past season, but when that didn't happen, Reid kept him around anyway. Doing what though, I'm not sure. (Keep in mind that Reid is actively involved in the offense, not to mention the other assistants.) So likely Whipple was restless, and was looking for this change.

And it might be a great one for both Miami and Whipple. But the burning question for Miami fans is not whether Whipple has credentials, or whether he's a bright offensive mind. It's why has he essentially languished for several years? Is there some character or coaching issue that lurks below the surface? Who knows. In any event, on its face, the hire appears to be a good one for Shannon and the U. Notwithstanding Patrick Nix's warnings that Shannon won't allow offensive innovation, Whipple should bring a sophisticated, pro-style, wide-open but open-minded approach (and those things don't always go together, so that's a good thing). But like all else, time will tell.

Fire zone-blitzes

Dr. Saturday recently broke down some of the zone-blitzes Utah used against Alabama in their bowl game. It's great analysis; check it out. For a bit more on pass protection and zone-blitzes generally, check out my article here. Also, Bob Davie wrote a worthy article for ESPN about zone-blitzes a few years back. Read all that and come back here: I want to highlight a few quick aspects of the most common zone-blitzes or fire zones. I'll have to leave a more in depth discussion for another time.

Below is a diagram of one of Nick Saban's most common zone-blitzes:



This is very typical. One thing Matt did a great job of breaking down with the Utah article was in his discussion of how the Utes crossed up 'Bama's protections. But it's worth noting the constraints the zone-blitz puts on the defense: namely, the number of coverages you can viably use. Occasionally, in the NFL, some teams zone blitz with a mere Cover 2 or two-deep zone behind it. The Ravens get away with this sometimes with Ed Reed, but it is dangerous -- with all your defensive movement you don't get good jams on the receivers and you too often will let receivers run free in the deep voids.

So by far the most common coverage behind a zone-blitz is a three-deep three-under coverage. Obviously, that can leave wide open spots underneath, but that's still part of the zone-blitz philosophy. As some defensive coordinators say, with so much three-deep, it is actually a conservative approach. And it is one reason why zone-blitzes are so common on third down -- defenses get good opportunities to cross up the pass protection while forcing completions to be made underneath where guys can make a quick tackle short of the first down. This is a favorite strategy of Jim Johnson of the Philadelphia Eagles: there's nothing wrong with giving up a five yard completion on third and nine. (Further, most progressions have the quarterback read long-to-short. By taking away long and forcing short the defense gives itself another few moments to get to the quarterback before he can release the ball.)

Below is a video clip (courtesy of HueyTube) of LSU running basically the zone-blitz diagrammed above.



On the first play in the clip, notice the way the three linebackers appear to attack just before the snap, but then the left outside linebacker (lined up to the short side of the field) drops into coverage, as does the the left defensive end. The strong safety comes up to play the flat and seam areas, and the two corners and the safety drop back into a simple three-deep. And Tennessee actually gets a completion, largely because the linebacker who probably ought to have been in the middle of the field follows the tight end on a short drag route and thus exposes the middle to an in-breaking receiver. (The linebacker should have passed him off to the defensive end who had dropped out; they end up defending the same area leaving the middle wide open).

On the second play LSU is in the same zone-blitz, with three deep. This time Tennessee keeps it simple and throws an out route against the soft outside coverage. Throwing away from defenders is often a solid strategy -- not that it is always easy to identify when there's a zone-blitz on.

Next, briefly, take a look at the clip below of the New York Giants running some fire zones. (Note: the best way to watch this is to watch and rewind several times, watching different players. You can barely see the ball anyway so watch the safeties, linebackers, line, etc. each successive time you replay it.)



In the first clip against the Cowboys, you'll see the exact same coverage -- three-deep, three-short -- except they have changed who does what to further disguise things (hey, it's the NFL now). Now you have a cornerback blitz from the weakside of the formation (and short side of the field), and the three-deep look, instead of being comprised of the two corners and safety, is now in the form of what is called a "cloud" rotation: the corner and two safeties rotate over to create the three-deep coverage. The overload blitz now comes from the short side of the field rather than the wide side as with LSU, and the other linebackers rotate over to fill up the underneath zones. It's really just the same thing, just a different look. And, again, in the NFL your guys can do more. Not only can your linemen drop into coverage, but your secondary can blitz and get to the quartberback while apparently lined up over a receiver.

And, another advantage with the NFL over college comes with the techniques involved. Around the 1:30 mark of that clip is another, rather traditional fire-zone. Atlanta throws about a six or seven yard hitch for a completion. But note the look from the secondary: the cornerback is lined up over the receiver as if he is in press man, but instead he bails -- after the snap -- into the deep-third, thus giving up the underneath completion. Few college or high schools will put cornerbacks responsible for deep thirds of the field up on the line of scrimmage so close to a receiver. Again, it's the NFL. Here, there is little fault you can blame on the offense: kudos to the quarterback and receiver for identifying the coverage despite the disguise.

Finally, motion is still a good way to reveal whether a defense is in man or zone, particularly when the motion changes the strength of the formation. (Though teams are certainly much better at disgusing their coverages even with motion or shifting.) If the defender runs across the field with the receiver, it is probably man. If they sort of "bump over," it's probably zone. And if it is man, well, then maybe you're getting better matchups.

More to come on blitzing, pass protection, and zone-blitzes throughout the offseason.

Smart Notes - Jan 21, 2009

1. I have updated my articles about the "shakes" or "three-vertical," "all-curl," and "levels" pass plays with game film video.

All-Curl


Levels


2. Does defense win championships? ESPN chimes in, but Phil Birnbaum feels that their analysis was rather weak.

3. Pro-Football Reference Blog expands on an idea I brought out a few years ago: namely, that yards per pass is the best measure of the effectiveness of a team's ability to throw. PFR Blog expands on this by analyzing Super Bowl teams and using measures to add yards for touchdowns and subtract for interceptions.

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.