That’s the title of this new ESPNU documentary about the new SEC Championship game, and specifically the 1992 Championship game between Alabama and Florida.
At the risk of spoiling the fun, the play call that changed the game is revealed after the jump.
(more…)
From Ross’s great analysis of Ohio State’s offense (and the lack thereof) at Along the Olentangy:
Every primary backfield action needs to threaten all 11 defenders. What a primary play needs is good counter plays. Every defender needs to be worried about the ball coming to his area – on a throwback screen, a reverse, a play-action pass, or whatever – as a play begins.
What makes a defender good is something to read. If he can say to himself something like, “As soon as that quarterback makes that half-assed fake, I’m going to find the tightend coming across and try to get an interception,” if he can read initially and react accurately, he can play over his head. Counters, not mirrored primary plays, keep defenders from reading and jumping on plays.
The quote is of course from the great Homer Smith. Read all of Ross’s analysis here.
Very interesting piece from the New Yorker:
What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying too hard. For the Brits, coaching, even practicing, was, well, unsporting. In America, a more competitive and entrepreneurial spirit took hold. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the nation’s first American-rules football games. Yale soon employed a head coach for the team, the legendary Walter Camp. He established position coaches for individual player development, maintained detailed performance records for each player, and pre-planned every game. Harvard preferred the British approach to sports. In those first three decades, it beat Yale only four times.
The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide. . . .
Bruce Feldman goes behind-the-scenes for West Virginia’s preparation for LSU:
The staff is waist deep in LSU film. Most of the WVU coaches will go home soon after the team meal. Meanwhile, Holgorsen settles into what staffers affectionately call “The Lounge” to resume studying the Tigers. The 10-by-20 room next to the head coach’s office, which used to be where former WVU coach Bill Stewart would smoke his cigars, has been remodeled and now has two theater-style seats, a few bar stools, an antique metal Coke cart, a Red Bull cooler and a 50-inch flat screen with an Xbox. Holgorsen likes the feel of the room for whenever he wants to have a one-on-one with a player. It’s also an ideal spot for the coach and Spavital to get another look at a ferocious defense.
The scouting tape, broken down by situations, isn’t supposed to seem like “a highlight tape,” but in LSU’s case, it does. On one clip, backup defensive end Barkevious Mingo roars down the line of scrimmage to level an Oregon running back. Holgorsen rewinds the clip twice to double check where Mingo began the play from and exactly how he was able to get to the ball carrier so fast. “This is why you run the outside zone,” he says, “because that guy right there [the defensive end] is not supposed to be able to do that. And that’s friggin’ LaMichael James too.”
Read the whole thing.
And the Valley Shook has a Q&A with me about WVU/LSU, along with its own preview. It’s of course similar in spirit to what I wrote for Grantland.
- The 46 nickel and nickel tracer.
- Tijuana sports hall of fame.
My LSU/West Virginia preview is up over at Grantland:
The intrigue surrounding Les Miles, Louisiana State’s coach, and Dana Holgorsen, West Virginia’s first-year head coach, has little to do with what their teams have done on the field. When they play each other Saturday in Morgantown the public will know them as football coaches, but also as something closer to memes. There is Miles, The Mad Hatter, with a 10-gallon ball cap on his head and blades of stadium grass dangling from his lips, mismanaging a timeout to call a miraculous fake field goal that wins an SEC road game; and there is Holgorsen, Holgo the Barbarian, stray wisps of quasi mullet fluttering in the wind as he chugs a Red Bull on the sideline, calling a play-action bomb to one of three or four receivers. . . .
From Don Banks’s latest piece:
NFL Has Started to View the Spread Offense as its Friend
And that comfort zone that rookie quarterbacks feel extends to the field, various NFL sources said. The NFL coaching and personnel communities are rapidly changing how they view the spread offenses that have come to predominate college football. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that spread offense quarterbacks get to the league relatively unequipped to play the game in a pro-style passing attack. But what was once seen as a disadvantage may now be one of the keys to the early success of passers like Newton, Bradford, Freeman and McCoy. Coming out of the spread, quarterbacks come to the pass-happy NFL very used to seeing the field, making quick decisions, and throwing, throwing and throwing some more.
“What’s happening is you’re get a lot of these read-option quarterbacks, and they have to make a lot of decisions on the field,” said former Bucs and Colts head coach Tony Dungy, now an NFL analyst on NBC’s Sunday Night Football. “And quarterbacking is so much about decision-making. It’s not the same type of decision-making necessarily, but they’re still in the decision-making mode in college and I think that’s helping them. So it transfers a little bit quicker.
“People have kind of gotten away from the stereotypical thinking we used to see about the spread. I remember when [Florida State's Heisman winner] Charlie Ward came out and they said, ‘Oh, he plays in the shotgun.’ There were all these different reasons why he couldn’t succeed, and it just baffled me. I said ‘Do you see what the guy is doing? He’s making plays to win games. He’s making decisions, he’s throwing the ball, he’s on target, he’s moving away from the rush, all the things you have to do in the NFL. Taking a snap from the center is the easiest thing to learn, all those other things are hard. But I think we’ve kind of gotten away from that kind of thinking, and we’re looking at what these guys do positively. They can make decisions, they can throw on the move, and they can get out of the pocket. So you say, OK, let me build off of what their strengths are.”
The success of quarterbacks like Newton and Bradford atop the draft the past two years has influenced the league’s instinctive distrust of spread-offense passers, and if Gabbert succeeds as well, NFL personnel decision-makers will have another recent example to point to. While much is made during every spring’s draft scouting season about whether or not spread-offense QBs can master the center exchange, no one seems to be worrying much about that in the fall these days.
Think Hard Knocks of the United Kingdom:
Shot over 3 days in October 2010, this documentary gives an exclusive inside look at the University of Portsmouth Destroyers American Football Team. This insight into their pre-season camp aims to tell the story of what motivates a Championship caliber team and attempts to promote the game of American Football in the UK.
The film documents the physical toll demanded of American Football players and charts the highs and lows of being a student athlete.
For more information on University American football please visit buafl.net.
(Hat tip.)
Highlights from the championship game after the jump.
I listened to the Solid Verbal podcast this morning, and Ty and Dan discussed the plethora of “popgun armed quarterbacks” currently plaguing college football. Relatedly, a reader asked about why quarterbacks can’t seem to improve their arm strength once they reach a certain age. I can think of really only one example of a guy whose arm now seems significantly stronger than it did earlier in his career as a college player and rookie, and that’s Tom Brady. And, well, Tom Brady is Tom Brady. But it does seem like this is generally true, at least at the higher levels once a quarterback is physically mature: There are almost no examples of guys whose arms went from “popgun” to bazooka through discipline and training, not matter how tall they are or how many weights they lift.
This is not entirely surprising, given the unique nature of a throwing motion, but even golfers manage to add some power to their drives. (Maybe someone with more of a baseball background can tell me if any pitchers have added MPH to their fastballs after hitting college or the majors. Quarterbacks are not pitchers but there are similarities.) But I really can’t think of quarterbacks who have really improved the amount of power behind their throws. Of course, Dub Maddox and Darin Slack might have a thing to say about this, but I’m curious what the general reader thinks. Feel free to chime in.
It’s up over at the Grantland blog:
The route concept the Bills used on the play is an old West Coast offense staple: the “drive” concept. On the play, the outside receiver, usually in a short motion (just as Nelson was) comes in motion toward the line of scrimmage and runs a crossing route. An inside receiver will push straight upfield to 10 to 12 yards and break across (on this play, the Bills used a man-to-man technique where the receiver turned outside but pivoted back inside), while a third receiver, in this case the running back, ran to the flat.
Read the whole thing. I should have a longer feature up over there later this week.
Order The Essential Smart Football today
