The sincerest form of flattery

Chris Brown’s got a fascinating post about how the NFL is adapting all sorts of college offensive schemes these days, for many of the same reasons that such have succeeded on the college level.

There was never any doubt these concepts would eventually be adopted by NFL coaches as a useful tool in a larger arsenal, but many resisted the notion of ever making the concepts the centerpiece of a team’s offense. The most common reason cited for such resistance was NFL defenses were simply too fast, too strong, too complex and too good for it to be successful. Yet that always got the point backwards. Those factors – while all true – also made it inevitable that the NFL would eventually adopt these concepts: Ault’s Pistol zone read attack, Chip Kelly’s no-huddle spread option, and other variants mathematically tip the scales back to the offense’s favor. It’s basic arithmetic.

“As I’ve tried to explain to people, whenever the guy who takes the snap is a threat to run, it changes all the math of defenses,” Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Greg Schiano said last March [source]. “That’s really what defense is, it’s getting your troops to where the ball is going to be. And when that guy holding it is a threat to run, it changes the numbers – minus-one.”

And it’s not all about running. The other reason – maybe the major reason – the NFL is now catching on is that they now see the effect these schemes can have on passing. When the quarterback is a threat to run, defenses must stack the line of scrimmage, opening up passing lanes and one-on-one matchups for wide receivers outside.

But it’s the why the usually stodgy NFL is grabbing this stuff and running with it that’s most interesting.

The common motivation for change in the NFL is not the genius of the coaches, or a desire to be revolutionary, or any kind of special tactical wisdom unforeseen by anyone before. In the NFL, change is not driven so much by the ideas themselves as by the skills of its players. In this instance it is the need to find a way that best takes advantage of the dynamic talent of young quarterbacks like Griffin, Kaepernick and Wilson. As long as more quarterbacks with their skills keep coming into the league, the NFL will continue to adapt.  [Emphasis added.]

All of which makes me wonder how this shakes out on the recruiting trail.  If there is a true future on Sundays for dual-threat quarterbacks, how much will that affect sales pitches to kids who would formerly be pigeonholed as “athletes” and moved to receiver or defensive back by many schools?  And, indeed, how much will that affect the way college programs evaluate high school quarterback talent?

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Kickoffs and depth

Mark Richt wouldn’t have a problem if kickoffs were abolished tomorrow.  But Kirk Olivadotti would.

“At the end of the day, shoot, it’s out of my pay grade, whatever they tell us to do we’ll do,” Olivadotti said. “But it’s an exciting play, it’s a play that I know there’s guys that started their playing career at Georgia. Or shoot, in the NFL, there’s guys that played for me for seven years making a million a year and they covered kickoffs and punts. That’s what they did. So guys make a living off doing that stuff too, so that might be where having a kickoff team is important.

“So that’s where I’d lean personally. I do understand the injury aspect. You’re never gonna eliminate injuries. But you want to limit them as much as you can.”

That is… interesting.  He’s got a point that there are plenty of student-athletes on a college roster who only see the field because of special teams play.  But safety concerns are legitimate.

When Georgia recruit Tramel Terry was tore his ACL in the Shrine Bowl on Saturday, the reaction in many quarters was to say it was another reason for these players not to participate in All-Star Games. That’s a valid debate to have, but here’s another part of it:

Terry was injured on the opening kickoff. The kickoff remains the play with the most instances of injury, which is why both the NFL and college football have taken steps to minimize the play.

So maybe you split the baby.  If you eliminate kickoffs, do you need 85 players on scholarship?  Maybe if some of those kids go elsewhere, they’ll have a better chance to play.  And play more safely.

In hindsight, maybe this wasn’t the best decision.

I bet when SOD looks back on what went wrong, the Sal Sunseri hire will eat at him the most.  Sure, he had to do something, since most of his 2011 staff bailed on him, but it’s not like there wasn’t plenty of relevant history about how SEC defenses switching to a 3-4 scheme do in their first season.

Surely there was a 4-3 guy out there who would’ve done better than this.  If Dooley had hired a new DC who merely held serve from the previous season, it’s likely he’d be getting his team ready for a bowl game today.

Familiarity breeds containment.

The Air Raid is now the hot chick in town, judging by the spate of recent coaching hires.  Chris Brown explains what’s going on:

The Air Raid, by contrast, was always designed to be picked up and installed elsewhere. Mumme and Leach brought it to several schools before they wound up at Kentucky; Leach was hired to install it verbatim at Oklahoma, and he left after one season to go to Texas Tech; and, of course, Tony Franklin has taken it the next step by systematizing “The System” into something that can be bought and then installed anywhere, for any high school or college that wants it. But this wasn’t entirely about moving from school to school. It also was an acknowledgment that in college football, every year brings a different team, so you might as well start over. One of the difficulties with prior passing systems — the west coast offense most prominently comes to mind — is that they took years to master, and for a team to have a great season they needed the right confluence of talented but also veteran players, primarily at quarterback. Now a redshirt freshman playing in the country’s toughest division for a team in its first year in the system can win the Heisman trophy and lead his team to ten wins. This is what athletic directors hope they are hiring, and what the Air Raid now promises.

But hot ain’t cool.  Maybe that means the Air Raid is over as soon as it’s started.

What gives me pause, however, is that the offense was also always designed to be different, and it’s difficult to be different when two-thirds of your conference, in the case of the Big 12, runs the same offense, or when prominent teams all over the country all use the same attack. Ask any high school coach and they will tell you that being “contrarian” is largely a function of what their district looks like: if everyone in the district is pro-style, then the wing-T is pretty different; but there are districts where teams are predominantly wing-T, or flexbone, or Air Raid, or Oregon spread, or whatever. The Air Raid as a system is well organized, well defined, and well practiced enough to succeed even if the other team knows all about it; but it can’t be doubted that something is lost when your opponent has faced a version of your offense on six of the prior seven Saturdays.

That doesn’t mean the scheme will suddenly fall on its face, just that as it becomes more a norm, its value in leveling the playing field will diminish as defenses become more familiar and comfortable facing it.  In other words, it’ll take more traditional means of utilizing it to succeed, i.e., having the better Jimmies and Joes to execute it.

Then somebody else will have success being the contrarian.  Like he needs the help.

No spike? No regrets.

Richt spoke with the media today, and as you might expect, the last play of the SECCG was a hot topic.  To his credit, it was something he was willing to discuss at length.  I think you’ll get the flavor of things from a few tweets.

Richt answers "no" when asked if they'd do the last 15 seconds of the SEC championship all over again. Wanted Alabama off-balance on defense—
Seth Emerson (@SethEmerson) December 12, 2012

Richt said that even if they spiked the ball, they would have called the same play: "The problem was the ball was tipped."—
Seth Emerson (@SethEmerson) December 12, 2012

If that’s the case, then I don’t see what spiking the ball in that situation would have gained the Georgia offense.  And before you go with huddle talk about what to do with a ball not in the end zone, keep in mind that the Dawgs weren’t doing much huddling at that point.  With the play already called, they would have likely lined up quickly to prevent ‘Bama from doing much substituting.

To summarize,

Richt adds that Mike Bobo had already made the play call as the offense was getting in position for that final play. So no need to spike it.—
Seth Emerson (@SethEmerson) December 12, 2012

Richt then cites an offensive guru in support.

Richt cites Homer Smith in that: "Homer is not going to clock the ball. He says, 'Clocking the ball is for people that don't have a plan.'"—
Gentry Estes (@GentryEstes247) December 12, 2012

Smith, you may recall, is whom Richt went to early in his coaching career to consult with about better clock management.  It sounds like the student took the master’s lesson to heart.

Again, my point here isn’t to say that not spiking the ball in that situation was the right call.  It is to say that it clearly wasn’t a mistake.  Give the coaches credit for being decisive at a key point in the game even if you disagree with the tactic.  Anyway you look at it, it’s light years away from the dithering we saw by Richt in the overtime of last year’s Michigan State game.

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UPDATE:  By the way, for those of you who point to Mike Bobo’s change of heart in hindsight about what he should have done then, here’s the other side of that coin.

Asked what would have happened had Mosley not tipped the pass on final play, "It's a touchdown," Murray says.—
Gentry Estes (@GentryEstes247) December 12, 2012

Remember, Murray was the guy signaling for the spike as they hustled up to run the play.

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UPDATE #2:  More fleshed out comments here.

“It’s a phenomenon driven by people complaining.”

I think what amuses me the most about the cut blocking debate is that it’s all about the three service academies and Georgia Tech.  I get that Air Force, Army and Navy have to scrap and do what they can to get by, since they’re not going to get the kind of athletes that power conference schools are attracting.  But what’s Tech’s excuse?

“… but if he goes out and throws a touchdown pass on that play then it’s different.”

Thomas Davis, you’ll always be a DGD and I’ll always love you, but the clock ran out because a pass was tipped and caught in bounds, not because Richt elected to forego spiking the ball.

To spike, or not to spike…

That is the question.  Actually, I’m not sure why spiking is such a slam dunk decision in minds of many people today.  If you read Weiszer’s post on the play, you get a valid rationale for what they called…

“We were moving the ball effectively. By the time we got down to the red zone we didn’t really want to spike the ball. We wanted to keep the personnel they had in the game. We decided to hurry up and get to the line and get another play off. There was a little bit of confusion.”

… and you get an explanation for why it didn’t work out.

Mark Richt on spiking the ball: “Well, spiking the ball takes time. We had plenty of time to call play, so we called the play and we were taking ‑‑ the goal was to take a shot at their back right end of the end zone and the ball got batted, the ball got tipped and it landed to a receiver that was running a speed out.”

And more: “We had the play we wanted. We had a good play. The ball got tipped at the line of scrimmage and it fell in the arms of a guy in play. The ball was going to the back end of the end zone, either a catch or out of the end zone. Because if you have, I don’t know how many seconds there were, 15 or whatever it was, if you spike the ball, you might only have two plays after that.  If you throw the ball in the end zone, you probably get three plays out of it.  So once you spike it, it does take a little time to spike it, and you reduce the chance of having the third play, basically. So the goal was to throw it in the end zone. That’s what Murray was attempting to do.  Once again, the ball got batted, and landed in the arms of our guy in play.”

Plus, they thought they had what they wanted.

“I wasn’t calling the plays,” quarterback Aaron Murray said when asked if he thought of spiking the ball. “We thought we would have time for two more plays. Obviously they were running down the field. They wouldn’t get set up real quick. I actually think I had Malcolm (Mitchell) on the fade. When I threw it, he said he had him. I thought he beat him too. If it was an incomplete pass we still would have had one more play to go.”

I’m not saying you can’t make a case for spiking the play there, because you can.  But what Richt decided then is certainly defensible in my mind (unlike, say, the idiocy of what happened in the overtime of last year’s bowl game loss).  The momentum running Georgia’s way at that moment was palpable.  I can’t blame him for wanting to capitalize on it.  Besides, who’s to say that a pass play after spiking wouldn’t have been tipped?  Or that in all the confusion and excitement of the moment, Georgia has a problem getting a play called and executed in time?

Besides, that call isn’t where Georgia lost the game.  Georgia lost because its run defense got owned for better than two quarters of play and because its offense couldn’t convert a couple of third-and-ones that would have helped keep the defense off the field a little longer to regroup perhaps.  If you’re a Dawg fan and you’re angry – and I’m not sure why you should be given the level of effort those kids gave yesterday – that’s where your attention should go.

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UPDATE:  Chris Brown adds his thoughts on the decision here.

Wednesday morning buffet

A few morsels to nosh on as we wait for Saturday to get here:

• The third quarter has been berry, berry good to Georgia this year.
• Here’s a handy yards per play chart.
• Mark Schlabach tells you why he thinks Georgia is going to upset Alabama.  So much for that ESPN monolith that hates the Dawgs.
• Bobby Hebert:  “I know this and I actually believe this, and people say ‘oh come on;’ but I know I’ve forgotten more football than Les Miles knows…”  Amazing his name isn’t being brought up with all the head coaching openings out there right now.
• If this report is true, it’s a sign that some Vol fans have too much money.
• Patrick Garbin suggests that Georgia’s offensive line is doing better than we might think.
• A heartfelt plea for Georgia to beat Alabama:  “The primary reason I’m hoping for a Georgia win on Saturday is because it would mean we could avoid the snotty, unending pontificating in advance of a BCS title game featuring two of the bluest bloods in college football.”  Amen to that.
• Georgia players believe they learned a valuable lesson from last year’s SECCG.
• I don’t think there’s much to this story, but if the NFL were to ban cut blocking, can you imagine Paul Johnson’s recruiting sales pitch to high school offensive linemen?  “Come to Georgia Tech, where we’ll teach you to become proficient in a technique that’s banned at the next level.”

Chizik, losing his religion

I know taking advice from former Auburn offensive coordinators – amazingly enough, two of Tuberville’s former staffers are up for the Broyles Award this year – is probably the last thing Gene Chizik wants to hear right now, but something Tony Franklin said bears repeating as we enter into what very well may turn out to be Chizik’s farewell on the Plains today:

“New England is the best offense in the NFL for one reason,” Franklin said. “They play like colleges do. They play no-huddle, fast-tempo, they change tempos and they do what they have to do to win. I think Belichick would probably disagree with his buddy.”

“It’s the great equalizer,” Franklin said. “People say Baylor can’t play defense. You know what? Before Art Briles got there, they couldn’t play offense, either, and they couldn’t win games. Now all of a sudden, Baylor can beat people because they can outscore people.

“Obviously if you can line up and you’ve got better players than everybody else and play great defense and eat clock and win as many games as you can, that’s a great way of playing football, too. The problem is, 95 percent of us don’t have that type of talent to do that.

“So when they fall into that trap of saying, ‘Here’s how Alabama has won championships. Here’s what we should do,’ to me, that’s the trap that Coach Saban would want everybody to fall into because, the reality of it is, he’s going to have better players most of the time.”

Chizik walked right into that trap with eyes open when he ditched Malzahn and elected to go with a more traditional offensive scheme.  I read the other day that Chizik without Malzahn has a 2-22 record as a head coach against D-1 teams.  Choosing a course of action with the thought that Auburn would be able to go toe-to-toe with Saban’s Process, even with guys like Luper and Taylor luring recruits to Auburn, was a fool’s errand from the start and Chizik is about to be presented with the check.

It will be interesting to see where Auburn goes from here.  Does it proceed to act as if it’s part of the five percent that can line it up with Saban, or does it go the let’s try to outscore ‘em route – a path that served Texas A&M pretty well this year (and made Ole Miss a pain in the ass to play)?