Offense gurus question

[Ohio Vol]

I'm assuming that's the Achilles heel of defenses? The more they have to contemplate the offense the more problems they will have?


Sorry..I played soccer.

Forcing defensive players to think is their Achilles heel.

Not because it's antithetical to defensive schemes, but because most defensive players at all levels are just really dumb.:yes:

 

[Ohio Vol]

Not a negavol, serious question. Well, backstory leading to a question.

When I was in high school we ran the veer. Two back set. Typical play was fullback off strongside tackle. Line blocked down on defensive tackle and inside linebacker, DE was first read. Outside linebacker was second read, option to tailback.

Offense was monstrously successful for a couple seasons - mythical national championship.

Then all the coaches left, took college coaching gigs - and I honestly don't believe the coaches that moved up from JV or whatever to take their places fully understood the offense.

Both at our school and at some summer camps I attended, a recurring problem was a very quick fullback (actually was more like two tailbacks) beating the QB to the hole. A recurring "solution" was for the QB to angle back away from the line - kind of like a DB taking an angle on a receiver - shortened the distance the QB had to cover to intersect the FB.

But here's the problem - once you're a couple yards off the line of scrimmage into the backfield, the QB can no longer read the DE. The DE reads the QB. In order for the option to work, the read has to be close enough to the DE that once they commit, they cannot recover. I believe this was one of the major contributors to the effectiveness of the offense declining drastically over the next several years at my HS.

In retrospect, at least to me, a coach advocating for that solution really didn't understand how the veer - or, dare I say, option reads in general, work. Incidentally, Johnny Majors at a camp at Dobyns-Bennett in Kingsport is one of the coaches that advocated this solution.

Anyway - so here's the question - and I'm hoping there's a rationale that is just beyond my knowledge.

I'm having a hard time seeing how an option read from 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage can possibly EVER consistently work, because it seems like the defense has way too much time to "read the read" and blocks have to be held for way too long. It seems to me that is why Hurd so frequently is fighting for his life to get back to the LOS, let alone break a long run.

Now I know we ran for a lot of yards last year, so somehow it must work some. But it is beyond me why/how.

Seriously, I'm not asking this just to tee up Debord (or, really, CBJ - it's his offense) for VN to bash again for the next 500 posts. I'm asking because I'm hopeful some offense guru can at least explain the theory behind what we're doing and what I'm not understanding about it.

TIA.

Solid post.

I think one of the biggest difficulties with some offensive coaches is that they lack an ability to adjust, and they don't possess that ability to isolate and attack certain points of a defense. The best offensive coaches are those that have both of these.

To give an example from my own days coaching with the option (GT/Navy style), we played a team that had an All-Ohio defensive tackle that would end up playing in the ACC. But he had a tendency to fire off the line real aggressively and that he was at his best on first downs, so we decided that we were going to set him up. First play of the game was a midline option in which he was unblocked, first play of the second half was a midline option in which he was unblocked. Two plays, something like 158 yards gained on them with two touchdowns.

But we set him up by running a ton of other types of option where he'd have at least two blockers on him for at least part of a play. It was like a street fight on almost every play, and then we'd hit him with a midline and go for 20+ yards every single time. For that game, it was our new bread-and-butter; we ran probably 60 total plays, and the midline was maybe six of those. But we ended up with around 250 yards out of it, because we were willing to use 90% of our plays to set up that backbreaker.

We'd do the same thing with veer. If the DE was being targeted, we'd run more of other things to set him up, then hit him with a play where he was unblocked. He'd fire off the line and those two functioning brain cells would convince him that he had a free shot at the dive, and next thing you know the QB has looped him and is 15 yards upfield.

And if the defense started sitting back and letting the option come to them, we'd just hammer them with simple base-type plays. We'd get six or seven yards at a time, they'd start creeping up and getting aggressive, and we'd sting them with the option.

The problem that I've seen with UT is that the option doesn't seem like a real part of the offense at all. It feels like something that someone grafted in and said, "Our QB can run, so why don't we use this? Other teams have." The DE isn't a target at all, he's simply the human manifestation of a chalk mark on a blackboard.

Yes, the option out of the shotgun can be devastating for the defense if there are other ways to make that DE start thinking. Hit him with an option a couple times, then come right at him with an inside shovel pass behind the backside guard. The DE can't win: if he stands still, he gets clocked into next week, and if he comes upfield, he's out of the play completely. Either way it can go for big yards, and the DE remembers it for the next time. Or maybe you run an inside shovel to attack him, then come after him with an option once he starts instinctively squeezing the down block.

There are a lot of ways to make this play work, and I can't figure out why none of it is being used.