Well rounded?

[DaddyChad]

Looking like we may balance the scales soon with a five star DE C Bradley.

 

[fossilfiction]

2. The more the offense scores quick, the more opportunities the Defense has to give up MAKE big plays. It's the nature of the beast.

Holds true this way too.

 

[ClearwaterVol]

When we slow down we'll still line up quickly, but will take more time at the line and run more.

 

[bpalmer28]

I’d much rather be a team that does few things well, than a team that’s well rounded and does everything at an average level.

Play fast, score points.

Bingo.

Our edge is tempo. Any time we sacrifice tempo, we sacrifice our edge.

Say we have the ball and the lead with 2 minutes left. The goal is NOT to run out the clock. The goal is to preserve the lead. Running out the clock is one way to do that. So is moving the chains and putting more points on the board. It may be easier for us to move the ball down the field with tempo than it is to slow things down and bleed the clock. To me that plays into the opponent’s advantage rather than leveraging our advantage, which is tempo.

 

[bpalmer28]

Holds true this way too.

Not really. By doing more of what the opponent is accustomed to doing, you reduce the likelihood of them doing what they want to do.

Remember, Hendon Hooker had 31 TD passed last year and ONLY 3 interceptions. Big reason for that is we kept the defense on their heels.

 

[Vol865]

Holds true this way too.

Yeah. Force the other team to keep up and make mistakes.

 

[SpookyAction]

Heupel's offense turns a lot of established football thinking on its head and still stands as correct. I am enjoying this thread immensely. Many good contributions here.

 

[LittleVol]

You're confusing different things.

Time of possession and # of plays are not the same thing as # of possessions. In CJH's scheme, only # of possessions matters. Those other two stats, they're not only meaningless, looking at them can be counter-intuitive (as you saw with us winning the KY game in spite of the Wildcats dominating the clock).

The offense goes fast to create opportunities. Their job is to score every single possession. The defense's job is to "break serve" at least a couple of times. If the offense keeps scoring (quickly) and the defense breaks serve at least a couple of times, we're guaranteed to win. Simple as that.

...

Here's a partial-game example to make the point:

We get the ball. One single play later, we score off a 75-yard strike. Time of possession 11 seconds.
KY gets the ball. Fourteen plays and 8:36 off the clock later, they score.
We get the ball. In three plays, we score. Time of possession, 0:26.
KY gets the ball. Eleven plays to get down the field, 5:58 expended.
...
at this point, the score is 14-7, Vols. Our defense has "broken serve" once by forcing KY to settle for a FG (which they missed).

Possessions were even, at 2 each. But add up those stats you mistakenly focused on: plays each team? 4 for us, 25 for KY. Time of possession? 0:37 for us, 14:34 for KY. Shockingly imbalanced...but also utterly meaningless to the score.

No, all that extra time and all those extra plays didn't give KY any extra chances to score more points than us. They still got 2 chances to score, and we got 2 chances to score.

Go back to that Kentucky game and count how many possessions each team got. I think you'll find it totalled 11 and 11.

In Heupel's scheme, time of possession and # of plays are unimportant stats. It's all about running quick to create opportunities, scoring quick, and the defense making breaks.

You might have noticed that all last season.

Time of possession is ABSOLUTELY NOT meaningless.

The people who keeps saying that obviously have never played football or started on the team.

You keep bringing up breaking serve- well the defense won't do that effectively if they are on the field 70 percent of the game time.

This isn't "balancing your checkbook ". This is real live flesh and blood humans having to endure a physical and mental test over extended time.

Huepel needs his offense to be more efficient per possession. The percentage scored can be identical...
But if the offense holds the ball longer than that means the defense defended less time AND probably did a better job at keeping points off the board.

Not sure why so many of you all struggle with this notion.

 

[Orange_Crush]

Every position is a priority in recruiting, just to this point the offense is far more attractive to recruits on that side of the ball.

I just don't get it. Some people post like certain coaches purposefully set out to build bad/mediocre defenses. I believe the fact of the matter is that all coaches want as much talent as possible. When there is a delta between talent desired, and talent that's get-able, the coach has to make a decision about where to concentrate for that talent.

Heupel wasn't going to Bama-level recruit at UCF, so he made chicken salad with chicken...er...you know... with his offensive scheme. Heupel walked into a talent catastrophe at UT in he first year and filled the gap as well as possible through portal, then did wonders with offensive scheme.

To suspect Heupel's preference is mediocre defense would be asinine. The staff will work their asses off to recruit as much talent as they can, coach up the talent they get, and scheme for the best statistical defense they can get.

 

[Devo182]

Love the excitement CJH is bringing. No question we will put points on the board.

Several questions:

1. Do you think we will always run a fast paced offense/ 3 seconds per play regardless of the game situation or do you think we’ll be able to adapt and slow it down when it makes more sense to do so?

2. Will the defense be a secondary priority with the main purpose of just trying to slow the other team down enough for us to score more points or is it possible to actually have a dominating, shut down defense with a fast paced offense?

What say y’all?

1) They'll keep doing what they did last year. Fast tempo 98% of the game. No reason to fix what isn't broken.

2) This is all just based on myths. There's no defense going...hmm maybe we could just slow them down? Every defense would love to dominate. It isn't that easy ofc. That said, this defense was just above average in most categories last year, a big improvement over Pruitt's last defense. Our only achilles heel was 3rd down defense. Fix that and we're on our way.

 

[Devo182]

Time of possession is ABSOLUTELY NOT meaningless.

The people who keeps saying that obviously have never played football or started on the team.

You keep bringing up breaking serve- well the defense won't do that effectively if they are on the field 70 percent of the game time.

This isn't "balancing your checkbook ". This is real live flesh and blood humans having to endure a physical and mental test over extended time.

Huepel needs his offense to be more efficient per possession. The percentage scored can be identical...
But if the offense holds the ball longer than that means the defense defended less time AND probably did a better job at keeping points off the board.

Not sure why so many of you all struggle with this notion.

Ok...it's 90% meaningless. Happy?

It is, simply put, a reverse correlation, especialy in the old days. But it is not a GOAL anyone should have. You don't get points for holding the ball longer and BOTH the offense and defense have to ENDURE all the same. What is more...the defense (especially the big guys) subs more often on top of everything.

Our mediocre defense last year had 0% to do with "getting tired late" or TOP. It was poor 3rd down defense, from begining to end. In fact, we tended to play just fine down stretches. We typically "lost contain" in 2nd and 3rd quarters. Not late.

The defense has to get itself off the field. No one else can do that for them. That's how they get rest...not restricting and "slowing down the offense" to gain an extra 30 seconds

 

[Devo182]

I think if we're on offense, the goal is to go fast. All the time. Of course, that works best when we're getting first downs (or quick touchdowns). It only ever hurts if we're 3-and-out.

So the real goal is not to learn how to slow down sometimes, but to get efficient enough on offense to never need to.

The defense's role is to "break serve." Think tennis. Think how big an advantage it is when a tennis player is able to win a game while the other guy has serve. Instead of being 1-1 or 2-2 or 3-3, he's suddenly ahead 2-0 or 3-1 or 4-2. Huge surge toward a win.

That's what Heupel wants from our defense. To break serve a third of the time, get the ball back without the other team scoring.

Because the math goes like this: no matter how the coin flips work out, both teams are going to get more or less the same number of possessions. At most, one team will have one possession more than the other (if they possess the ball as both halves come to an end).

So if you have the ball 14 times and I have it 13 or 14 times, it all comes down to how reliably we scored TDs while we had the ball. If I'm able to score 80% of the time, and you can only score 65%, I'll beat you. Every time.

So...defense doesn't have to stop them from scoring every time, or even most of the time. They just have to break serve often enough to give our team the decided advantage. The offense will do the rest.

Bingo. It is all about points per possession. It is about efficiency.