Buddy Ryan’s “Polish Goalline” tactic

Tennessee tried it last year vs. LSU. Didn’t work. 

Wouldn’t a smart QB recognize this and spike the ball (assuming he had downs to spare)?

But that was with time expiring…you would revert to your base defense for the last play of the game. This is just to burn time from the clock.

I’d argue that the “optimal” strategy might be to combine your idea and Ryan’s. Throw a bunch of linebackers on the field and, since you’re already getting a flag for 12 men on the field, commit every penalty in the book knowing that only one can be enforced.

That said, and I think this is the flaw in Ryan’s plan, I think the officials can use their discretion to remedy blatant tactics designed to take advantage of loopholes in the rulebook. I wouldn’t be surprised if they added time back to the clock in these situations, for example.

The time taken off the clock during the play would still be “gone,” but the clock would stop at the end of the play due to the penalty.  Plus, the game could not end on an accepted defensive penalty, so if time expired anyway Cal would still get one more play.  Starting at the 20 is probably too far out anyway for such a maneuver to have any use for the defense I think, but the penalty would stop the clock only at the end of the play.

The most interesting thing about it to me is the attention to situational detail. It makes me think of the most successful coaches and their insight into situations more than schemes, maybe?

I’d considered this from an offensive perspective before, but never for the defense.

Why limit yourself to “too many men” how about positioning a defender in the offensive backfield?

Offsides with an unobstructed path to the QB is a dead ball foul.

“Our defensive philosophy is simple.  We will do anything and everything it takes to win, within the rules.”

When did utilizing 14 defenders fall under “within the rules?”

You are on defense. Offense in on the 1 foot line with 20 seconds in the game. They need  a TD to win as you are ahead by 4 points. Why not have your best 2-3 leapers (one at a time alternating attempts) try to time a perfect jump over the center to tackle the QB? Every time the leaper mistimes the attempt you only lose half way to the goal. The yardage is meaningless, more so over time as what is half an inch. When one of the leapers finally times it right you now play defense from the 3, not the 1 foot line which is a big deal!

The auto-formatter messed up the link, it should be http://quirkyresearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/blogging-nfl-rule-book-palpably-unfair.html

In today’s Polish Goal Line it is done on pass downs where nobody commits to a stance or position, so the prtoection cannot be set and the team runs out of play time before setting the call and loses any read to middle crossers or quicks.

Sure, but you only need it to work once. If you recall, Wisconsin got away with their kickoff shenanigans that year.

Similar: when defending a 2pt attempt, commit pass interference.  Worst case is a re-try.

 It’s completely ‘within the rules’…to try to take advantage of how the system deals with illegal formations.  Take away those highly situational advantages, and it’d never happen.

I say it’s an outstanding example of out-of-the-box (heck, burn-the-box) thinking.

Ryan was going to blitz everybody anyways. Why not get a penalty before doing that so they have less space to throw the ball forward and your press coverage gets amplified in tighter confines? Not like you were afraid of a goal line run right at Reggie White anyways.

amplified by inches at a time…?

That was the first thing that came to my mind as well

All-caps was pretty standard practice back in the early days of personal computers. Reasons for doing so varied, depending on the document. Sometimes all-caps was used for emphasis, in the same way we use bold today. Use of all-caps also often revolved around issues of ambiguity. Monospace fonts weren’t the most distinctive and could occasionally cause ambiguities. By typing in all-caps, you could reduce some of these ambiguities.

I believe it was also found to be easier on the eyes to have less variable character sizes… This is one of the reasons old computer programs were written in all caps. It made reading through lines of code much easier.Another clear example of this was with postal envelopes. If you look in old keyboarding/formatting textbooks, you’ll often find they instruct readers to use all-caps for when envelopes are addressed using computer print-outs. This was because the postal service would often use computer scanning technology to read typewritten addresses, but the technology was in such an early stage that it could be confused by small-case letters.