Where is the gimmick in our offense?
Wide splits – From what I understand this is an element some claim doesn’t translate well to the NFL. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me but I’ve heard the reason is because the hash marks are different in the NFL. That’s true. The football field dimensions are all the same size, high school, college, and NFL, so 160’ wide. The hash marks in high school are located 53’4” from the sidelines with 53’4” between the hashes, basically the field is split in even 3rds. In college the hash marks are located 60’ from each sideline leaving 40’ as the distance between the hashes. In the NFL the hash marks are located 70’9” from each sideline with the space between the hashes at 18’6”. I guess the idea of the narrower hash marks in the NFL was supposedly to favor the passing game.
The hash marks on a football field are for aligning the ball for play after the previous play. If the previous play ended outside the hash marks then the ball is placed on the nearest hash mark for the next play. If the previous play ended between the hash marks the ball is placed at the midpoint between the hash marks.
In using wide splits our receivers generally line up outside the hash marks but they could still line up wide even if there were no hash marks. Obviously I don’t know everything but I just can’t see how wide splits wouldn’t translate to the NFL and given that the formation generally forces a lite box I can’t imagine why more teams aren’t doing it to some extent. jmo.
Route trees – Last year (2021) when I first heard this critique I went to SecStatCat because for every SEC team he lists the routes run by each receiver and this data covers all receivers for the team. You can look at an individual player in a given game or for the season. You can look at the entire team for a given game or for the entire season. Both last year and this year I compared our routes to Alabama’s and at least on paper there’s no difference. They may use some routes more than us and we may use some more than them but we’re both running the same routes. So I don’t understand this critique either.
One of the pre-draft critiques on Hyatt was an “anonymous coach” said he didn’t really see Hyatt transitioning in and out of his routes and that we used a lot of option routes that don’t translate to the NFL. First, as I understand it, every NFL football team, and presumably every college team uses option routes to some extent. I don’t know what makes ours different. Whether or not Jalin is a good route runner is a reasonable question but I can’t see the reason why the routes are questioned. I mean we’re running those routes against NFL defenses because the SEC is putting more defenders in the NFL than any other conference.
Tempo – As best I can figure we have two base tempos that we run. We run a 2-minute offense and we run a 4-minute offense. We are masters of tempo and while we use a fast tempo more than most we’re selective on the plays where we go hyper fast. I looked at NFL offenses and the tempos they use. Generally the teams that use tempo the most shows up more in the 4th quarters than in the early parts of the game. Still, there are NFL teams that over the course of a season in 4th quarters are playing pretty much as fast as us, i.e., around 3 plays per minute. Again, we just have a better coached team than most of our peers and probably better than a number of the NFL teams. That’s not our fault. Blame Heupel for being a better coach than his colleagues but I don’t know where that gets you. He took a group of kids that everybody left for dead and in less than 20 months had them ranked #1 in the college football playoff poll. I guess some people feel like he shouldn’t be able to get away with that. jmo.
We have a vertical run game and that’s not unusual for teams because it dramatically reduces the number of TFLs you give up. The wide splits, forcing a lite box, give us an advantage in the run game. Pick your poison. Use your safeties to help out in the box we’re going to exploit the passing game. Stay back in coverage, we’re going to run downhill. Everybody does that, well, everybody that knows what they’re doing. Heupel just does it better, and sometimes with a lot less to work with. jmo.
I’m sure there’s something I’m missing about all this gimmick stuff and I’m trying to keep an open mind but I’ve always heard that football is a game of matchups and it’s the staff’s job to create matchup advantages in order to get the players in a position to be successful. I guess if you actually do that and sort of unexpectedly it antagonizes a lot of people. jmo.
Back in the fall of 1998 I had people coming up to me, people very much into football, telling me Peyton Manning would never make it in the NFL, because, well, he had happy feet. The next year those same good folks were coming back to me saying they may have been wrong about that. lol.
I agree we have difference of opinions…. It will continue happening in baseball and the world goes.
