Boy, you should take the time to read this. It’s one of the best things Bill Connelly has written.
Although, tying back into this post from yesterday, I’d like to say Bill may be a little premature with his intro.
It had to be LSU that landed the final blow.
You knew the battle was almost over when Nick Saban’s Alabama changed its stripes, opened up its offense and kept winning. When the Los Angeles Rams nearly won the Super Bowl with a quarterback from an Air Raid offense, then the Kansas City Chiefs did win one with an even better Air Raider, the ref had to think seriously about stopping the fight. But when LSU not only adopted a spread identity in 2019, but then proceeded to put together maybe the best offensive season in the history of college football, the fight was done.
The spread offense revolution is over. The spread won.
The Tigers had come to personify Big Burly Manball more than anyone. They were the school of workhorse backs and impossibly physical defenses. They beat Alabama in 2011 while scoring six points in regulation, after all. But after a couple of aborted modernization attempts, head coach Ed Orgeron put together the perfect mix of personnel to operate a devastating, innovative spread offense.
I hope there’s a blow still to be landed in Athens, Georgia.
The funny thing is that Smart seems to have absorbed the lesson on defense already.
Good defense is all about multiplicity
Today, offense comes down to reads and conflict. How much can your quarterback process both before the snap and directly after? How well can your structure isolate specific defenders and make them guess wrong? That makes it tricky for a defense to scout opponents in the traditional way.
“People always try to take away whatever a team does best,” Heacock said. “Well, the hardest part now is when they’re in these offenses, what are they running the most of? That’s hard to decipher. They’re so based on what you’re doing, and what they do best in one game might not be what they do best in another. I think it used to be, a team lines up, and, ‘Hey, they’re a power team, a tight end run team, an inside zone team.'” And now they’re just designed to do whatever you’re not set up to stop.
Heacock set up his Iowa State defense, then, to show as little as possible. He crafted a unique version of the 3-3-5 defense, with a tight front three and eight players who swarm to the ball. In a way, they do what offenses have long sought out to do — create space for their runners. Their effect is to prevent big plays and force offenses to tolerate going five yards at a time. “I’d never heard of doing this, to be honest,” Heacock said. “We just tried to do what we could do in the conference we were playing in with the guys that we had. But when you look out there on offense, everything looks the same. That’s where you’re trying to get an advantage.”
Other defenses have gone in a different direction. If the spread offense is about getting defenses to declare themselves, declare the thing offenses are least interested in doing. “Someone told me a long time ago,” Diaz said, “one way to take away the triple option is to take away the option. You tell them what you want them to do and then force them to do it.”
You can do that in part with the alignment of your players. You also can do it by convincing the quarterback he sees something he doesn’t.
“Give ’em as many false reads as you can give ’em,” Steele said.
Read the whole thing.