8. The spread and pro-style offenses will learn to coexist

College offenses constantly go in and out of vogue, which means the spread-offense craze is bound to plateau (if it hasn’t already). [Ed Note: Yes it has, if the goal is to give underdogs a better chance.] Last season, the spread still thrived for teams like Pac-10 champion Oregon, Big East champion Cincinnati and 13-1 Florida. However, Alabama won the national championship with a more traditional, pro-style offense, Stanford defied the trend of recent upstarts by utilizing an old-school, smash-mouth offense and Nebraska’s disruptive defense showed it’s possible to shut down a wide-open attack like Texas’.

So will the recent influx of NFL-influenced coaches like Washington’s Steve Sarkisian and USC’s Kiffin kill the spread? Not exactly. Spread gurus like Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly and Mississippi State’s Dan Mullen keep importing it at new locations, and Arizona State’s Dennis Erickson — a veteran of both levels — is one of several coaches implementing a version of former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach’s Air Raid attack this season.

Instead, the future is likely a hybrid of both systems.

“The great thing would be the combination of both — spread it out and throw it, then be able to do it with two tight ends and run the ball with some power,” said Erickson. “It’s just the evolution of football. I really believe if you can have a combination of all that stuff and confuse [defenses] with different personnel groups, that’s what it’s all about.”

. . .

9. Option offense: Ready for a comeback?

The future won’t belong solely to the pro/spread hybrid. As the spread flourished this past decade, defenses adjusted. More teams adopted a 3-4, allowing more flexibility to spy a quarterback who might double as a fullback.

That shift in defensive philosophy means it’s time for a new-old offensive fad. And since bell-bottoms and platform shoes have already enjoyed minor renaissances, it seems only fair that coaches bring back that staple of the ’70s football experience: the option. We’re not talking about the occasional pitch play. We’re talking about the holy trinity of the dive back, quarterback keeper or pitch.

Paul Johnson, who probably has leisure suits and tearaway jerseys in his closet, has proven at Navy and Georgia Tech that the option still works. How well? In Johnson’s second season at Tech, he won the ACC title.

Most people think the option is a boring, grind-it-out scheme. Not true, said Tom Osborne, an option aficionado who coached Nebraska to national titles in 1994, 1995 and 1997. “Most of the zone plays you see now, if you block things perfectly, you may make seven, eight, nine yards,” Osborne said. “If somebody misses a tackle, you might go a long way. In option football, if you execute correctly, you’ve got enough people to block everybody and theoretically score a touchdown on most every option play.”

. . . So what’s the holdup? Johnson already has proven the option can work in a BCS conference. It’s time to bring it back on a grand scale.

I generally agree with everything Andy and Stewart say, especially the point that whatever the dominant offensive strategy of the 2010s ends up being — and there may not be one — it will be a response to the defensive changes being undergone right now. I’m not sure yet that it will be the option, if for no other reason than we don’t yet know what defensive schemes will be dominant either. We are in a very transitory time, and to get a little perspective, it’s helpful to look at the strategic milieu that the modern spread came out of in the 1990s.

The spread developed essentially in response to two defensive phenomena. The first goes back to Buddy Ryan: the ubiquity of the eight-man front defenses. Although his vaunted “46″ defense became famous in the 1980s, in the 1990s teams still used it and, more importantly, they used his philosophies — his eight-man front principles — to overwhelm the run and protection schemes of teams still trying to use traditional personnel, i.e. two runningbacks, one tight-end, and two receivers. Personified by defenses like the one used by Dick Tomey at Arizona, his Under-Shift Double-Eagle Flex — a.k.a. the “Desert Swarm” — these defenses were basically impossible for anyone using traditional sets, personnel and concepts, unless the talent gap was wide enough to overcome the strategic disadvantage. Which is exactly why the small schools led the changes.

In response, through luck or strokes of genius, some teams began spreading it out as far back as the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of these were of the four wide variety but the category also includes “one-back” teams like Washington State and Louisville whose coaches (Dennis Erickson, Joe Tiller, Mike Price, John L. Smith, Bobby Petrino, Scott Linehan, and so on) helped spread the good word to other coaches (ahem, Urban Meyer). This element, the response to eight-man front defenses, is where the spread can claim almost total victory: Not many teams, if any, base out of eight-man fronts anymore (Virginia Tech is a prime example of a great defense that made a very visible switch), while the spread reigns nearly supreme. Indeed, it’s unlikely that teams will ever be able to go back to the total eight-man front approaches for the whole game. It may exist as a very useful package from time to time, but the nickel defensive back is going to be relevant for your team’s success throughout the rest of your lifetime.

The other narrative — one slightly more complicated in the back and forth between O and D, in that the give and take continues today — deals with the increased use of the zone blitz and the offense’s manifold responses. The spread run game evolved for many reasons. One was to deal with the problem the eight-man fronts present, i.e. the numerical issue presented by an extra guy in the box (solved by making the quarterback a legitimate run threat), but another reason it developed was to counteract defensive fronts with linemen dropping into coverage and linebackers trying to fill inside gaps immediately. The term “zone read” is useful because both halves are key to the its success: the “read” obviously gives the offense flexibility, but so does the zone part of the play, which allows linemen to area block and pick up obscure and unpredictable stunts and movement.

Whether or not being “spread” helps against zone blitzes is an ambiguous question due to the vagaries of six-man protection schemes, but the spread is undoubtedly the best offense ever devised if your goal is to run a lot of screens. A multiple spread offense gives a coach more options for constraint plays than any set previously designed: bubble screens, rocket screens, jailbreak screens, slow screens, middle screens, shovel screens, and so on. And remember, screens are the one thing almost every coach recommends against zone blitzes and they are also the one pass that any quarterback at any level can complete, no matter the protection, blitz scheme, or coverage — an important thing when your gameplan involves trying to get the ball to your playmakers.

So I don’t know what the next big thing will be (and if you go back to 1996-2000 I was pretty damn certain it would be the spread), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the 2010s are middling in terms of strategy, though possibly dominated by some new defensive wrinkle or trend. A major factor in this is that the speed of change is faster now than it was even a decade ago — it’s not clear that you can have a “decade” devoted to any one scheme, considering that if a college team has a good season high schools around around the country have the offense installed by the spring. But whatever offensive strategy comes to dominate in time, be it the triple-option, the Power-I, the pro-style offense or the single-wing, we’ll need to first know what defensive schemes are all the rage.

Indeed, what with Nick Saban’s protégés proliferating year-by-year, maybe studying his defenses will tell us what offensive trends to expect. We’re clearly living in Saban’s world — at least for another few weeks.

Four verticals against Cover 3 [is] really a 2-on-1 against the free safety.

The QB is coached to look off the Free Safety and throw to the #2 receiver away from him. Well-coached safeties are instructed to not come out of the exact middle of the field until the ball is in the air. Four verticals against Cover 3 is not designed for the home run. The QB should deliver the ball on a relative line (a la Denard [Robinson] to [Roy] Roundtree in the spring game) at 15-20 yards downfield; i.e., behind the LBs and in front of the Free Safety.

Right where you want them

A properly coached Cover 3 defense will use its LBs to re-route and not give up easy seam throws. For a 3-3-5 defense, the alignment of the #2 reciever changes who is responsible for this. If #2 is a TE or Wing, then one of the Stack Backers (Sam, Will, whatever) is responsible for seam elimination (as we like to call it). If #2 is a wide slot, then either the Spur or Bandit is responsible.

The objectives are threefold:

1. Take away the quick seam throw by jamming and running with #2.
2. Widen the seam route to the Corner’s zone, or outside 1/3. Do not let #2 cross your face.
3. Get your eyes to #1.

Once the jam and re-route is accomplished, the LB will key #1. If #1 continues vertically up the field, the LB will continue to run with #2. If #1 throttles down, the LB will come off #2 and get to his zone. The Stack Backer will hunt a crossing route by #1 while the Spur/Bandit will hunt inside-out; i.e., curl to deep out to quick out. This is an easy read but hard to get to quickly. The Spur/Bandit must be a superior athlete. (This is one of my reservations about Kovacs. I don’t believe he can take away a seam and be able to get to a curl against quality QB/WR combos.)

The properly-coached Corner in Cover 3 will align himself on the outside shoulder of #1 at a depth of 7-8 yards (assuming he is not using a bail technique, something I loved to use). His keys are #2 to #1. Against 4-verts, the corner will read the vertical release of #2 and pedal with the idea of splitting the distance b/w #1 and #2, and then key #1. Seeing #1 also vertical, he indeed splits the horizontal distance of #1 and #2 while staying deeper than the deepest. (If #1 were to run an underneath route, the Corner would then adjust his backpedal to the outside shoulder of #2 without going inside the hash.)

The Mike is responsible for crossing routes b/w the hashes and checkdowns. Digs and hooks he will attack; shallow crosses and checkdowns he will not attack until the ball is thrown. Saban rule: in Cover 3, never break on any route under 5 yards until the ball is thrown. If you do, he will oversign your ass out of town. (Okay, I added that last part.)

Of course, all this is nice clinic talk. In reality, a good QB/WR unit can carve up even a good defense in Cover 3 with Four Verticals.

Probably not the best option

Hawkins wanted “Madden” to play out like the NFL. Equivalent stats. Similar play charts. Real football.

By contrast, Lyndon and Knox previously had made a well-received “Monday Night Football” title featuring arcade-style, action-heavy game play. That clicked with Genesis “Madden” producer Rich Hilleman, whose top design priority was fun — a game with more sacks, more bombs, more tackles in the backfield and more 60-yard runs than real-life NFL football. Something akin to an episode of “The Hills,” or what philosopher/author Umberto Eco dubbed the “hyperreal” — seemingly authentic, yet more entertaining than the genuine article.

“I came to the game from making flight simulations,” said Hilleman, who is now EA’s chief creative officer. “If you make an F-16 fighter simulation and it’s very accurate, to fire a single missile takes like 20 procedures. Only that’s not people’s perception of being a pilot. People’s perception is Tom Cruise. Push a button and blow something up. With Genesis ‘Madden,’ we wanted to emphasize what makes football exciting, not perfectly replicate the brutality of a 3.1-yard-per-carry running game.”

And:

“Let me ask,” Madden said. “When we get into the spread, the quarterback in shotgun, do the linemen get in three-point stances?”

“In some sets,” White said. “But largely in two-point.”

“They should all be in two-point stances,” Madden admonished.

Madden is 74, a grandfather and retired from broadcasting. Clad in a black tracksuit and a collared, button-down shirt, he seems smaller in person than on television — voice less booming, movements more ginger. A few years ago, EA removed Madden from in-game color commentary duties. (When Strauser broke the news, Madden replied, “I feel that something is being taken away from me.”) Sipping from a can of diet cola, his enormous cigars long gone, he remains an advocate for real football, for art imitating life.

White flips open a laptop. Using “all 11″ Detroit Lions coaching film, shot from the same perspective as Madden’s original pseudo-3-D field, he demonstrates new in-game blocking schemes. Madden nods his approval.

“The quarterback may fake,” White said. “But the guards never lie.”

Another nod.

“Anyway, running the ball wasn’t Detroit’s problem,” White continued. “It was passing.”

“Once they had Daunte Culpepper in [at quarterback], teams just dared him to pass,” Strauser interjected. “He used to be so accurate. What happened to that guy?”

“Wasn’t he on our cover one year?” White asked.

Everyone laughs. Madden gets serious. He breaks down upcoming rules changes. He brings up concussions, helmet-to-helmet hits and gimmick quarterbacks. A digression on how the Dome Patrol-era Saints used to frustrate Bill Walsh’s 49ers teams with short linebacker drops becomes a lecture on the obsolescence of the fullback, which then morphs into a short aside on player character.

Who, Strauser asked, are the hardest players to coach?

“Single guys,” Madden said. “Because they don’t have anyone to report to.”

When Madden left the Raiders, he took a job at the University of California, offering a course called “Football For Fans.” Three decades later, he’s still teaching. In a way, so is his game. Current Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris told game producers that playing “Madden” has influenced the way he runs his team. Before scoring a game-winning touchdown last season, Denver Broncos receiver Brandon Stokley killed clock by running parallel to the goal line, an unconventional move familiar only to anyone who has ever picked up a control pad. Years ago, Madden wanted his namesake to resemble a television broadcast; by the late 1990s, network producers were flipping the script, deploying skycams and electronic first-down markers, peddling their own brand of hyperreal entertainment. Life imitating art.

Strauser mentions 3-D televisions and the movie “Avatar.” A compatible version of “Madden,” he said, is already in the works.

Talk turns back to real football. The Super Bowl. Indianapolis versus New Orleans. In the first half, Saints coach Sean Payton went for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal, eschewing a “gimme” field goal. He opened the second half with an onside kick. Madden watched the whole thing from his California studio, incredulous and oddly transfixed. Even now, two months later, the old coach knows exactly what he was seeing.

“I was thinking, ‘S—,’” Madden marveled, “‘this guy is playing a video game!’”

One, two, three, throw

Yet it must be possible to run the west coast offense at the lower levels, isn’t it? The answer is yes and no. Yes, because the most important elements of the offense can definitely be applied to the lower levels, while Jon Gruden’s extensive call sheets can be left aside. The no is just that: you won’t be able to run every formation, motion, and play in Holmgren’s Packers playbook, but fortunately you don’t have to. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about installing the WCO. The wrong way is to download a WCO playbook and try to install Walsh’s verbatim. That approach is also known as suicide. Instead, to use the offense at the lower levels (including college)  — or even to merely understand why the WCO and is such a good offense — it’s necessary to focus on the offense’s core principles.

1. Timing-based, ball control passing game. Routes are timed to match receiver steps and quarterback steps, with a healthy mix between 3-step and 5-step drops. It’s not about long bombs (though it has these too), but instead about efficiency. This is probably Walsh’s defining legacy. Most of Walsh’s plays existed before he came around — you can find Paul Brown and Sid Gillman using them, among others — but Walsh’s passing game exploded because he was essentially the passing game’s first risk manager. Although quarterbacks had long been able to sling the ball — for example, Joe Namath threw for over 4,000 in 1967 — Walsh’s quarterbacks became great by what they didn’t do: they didn’t throw incompletions (Walsh’s quarterbacks consistently completed over 60% of their passes, and occasionally closer to 70%), they didn’t throw interceptions (the interception rate per pass attempt went way down) ; and they didn’t take sacks, owing to Walsh’s meticulousness about their not holding on to the ball too long.

To compare this to the prior generation of signal callers, in 1977 the Oakland Raiders won the Super Bowl despite Ken Stabler’s 20 interceptions; in 1978 the Steelers won the Super Bowl despite Terry Bradshaw’s 20 interceptions; and, in 1978, the Steelers won the Super Bowl and won more games … despite the fact that Bradshaw threw 25 interceptions. (In 2009, only three quarterbacks threw 20 or more interceptions: two rookies, Matt Stafford and Mark Sanchez, and Jay Cutler, who had some issues in that department.) Moreover, if you roll the relevant passing stats together you get a useful stat called “Adjusted Yards Per Pass Attempt,” which averages how many yards are achieved per passing attempt (which usefully combines completion percentage and average yards gained per completion), with the adjusted part being the subtraction of yards to account for interceptions. Pro-Football-Reference.com has an in house version of Adj. YPA quite similar to what I’ve described, and the upshot is that Walsh’s quarterbacks, Montana and Young, average between one and a half and two adjusted yards per pass attempt more than Hall of Famers from an older generation, like Bart Starr, Joe Namath, Johnny Unitas, Stabler, Bob Griese, and so on. The difference was the efficiency, the careful approach, and the timing.

All of the above is a long-winded way of saying that it’s really important to focus on the details. It’s one thing to say that the WCO “treated short passes like runs” and used a “ball control approach to the passing game,” but it’s another to make pass plays so routine that they really become as second nature to the players as a handoff off-tackle. You do that through intense drill-work and matching routes, reads, and drops.

2. Meticulous gameplanning. If his legacy is not about reducing the risks of throwing the ball through a disciplined approach, it is by revolutionizing how coaches prepare for games through simple organization: scripting plays, analyzing tendencies, self-scouting, probing defenses to look for weaknesses, and so on. As with his plays, none of Walsh’s innovations here were truly new, but his approach obviously worked because not only was his success outsized but so has been the success of those who coached with him — those that were able to observe his methods.  Applied to the lower levels, it is about having a plan for gameplanning, designing practices around what actually happens in games and using as many “situational” or “game-like” scenarios as possible, and treating the creation of the scripted plan and playcall sheet as tools to be organized during the game (when you have the least time to think and things are craziest). You don’t need to produce 200 page scouting reports (like this one which Mike Shanahan and co. made for the Denver Broncos as they prepared for the Indy Colts in 2002) but the creation of a thorough plan will make you a better coach and will make your practices more focused on the things that matter.

3. “Balance” between running versus passing. Now, I have written a lot about notions of balance but and how I don’t think traditional notions — an equal number of runs or passes or an equal amount of passing and rushing yardage — is a useful way to think about the concept. But there is no doubt that the West Coast Offense wants to be balanced in a meaningful way: the defense must fear both the run and the pass. Now, again, the WCO is a pass-first offense, so I think the best way to think about whether your team has sufficient balance is to contrast the offense with offenses that don’t care about balance, like the Airraid teams or run-heavy option squads. And the best way I know of to determine that is to ask whether the play-action pass is a legitimate threat. For many pass-first spreads, the play-action pass is a non-starter because the run is an afterthought. But it is also the main source of the West Coast Offense’s explosive plays.

Indeed, Walsh as Walsh explained:

The Play-Pass is the one fundamentally sound football play that does everything possible to contradict the basic principles of defense. I truly believe it is the single best tool available to take advantage of a disciplined defense. By using the play-pass as an integral pant of your offense you are trying to take advantage of a defensive team that is very anxious very intense and very fired-up to play football. The play-pass is one of the best ways to cool all of that emotion and intensity down because the object of the play-pass is to get the defensive team to commit to a fake run and then throw behind them. Once you get the defensive team distracted and disoriented, they begin to think about options and, therefore, are susceptible to the running game.

In highly competitive football, it is very unlikely that you will be able to run the ball so effectively that you will not need to do anything else to move the football. There is no question that having the play-pass, as a part of your offensive arsenal, can allow you to get a key first down or big chunks of yardage.

And when do you need those kinds of play-action passes? When you’re in the scoring zone:

I have seen many teams march the ball beautifully, but right around the 15-yard line, they are already warming up their placekicker, because right at that point defenses change, the field they can operate in changes, and suddenly their basic offense goes all to pieces.

My contention is that if we are on their 25, we’re going for the end zone. Failing at that, we will kick a field goal. In an evenly matched game, I don’t want to try to take the ball from their 25 to the goal line by trying to smash it through people, because three out of four times, you won’t make it. Unless you are superior. Of course, if you are vastly superior it makes very little difference how you do it.

Why? First, every defensive coach in the country is going to his blitzes about right there. The pass coverage, by and large, will be man-to-man coverage. We know that if they don’t blitz one down, they’re going to blitz the next down. Automatically. They’ll seldom blitz twice in a row but they’ll blitz every other down. If we go a series where there haven’t been blitzes on the first two downs, here comes the safety blitz on the third down. So we are looking, at that point, to get into the end zone.

By the style of our football, we’ll have somebody to get the ball to a little bit late-just as an outlet to get 4 or 5 yards, to try to keep it. But from the 25 to the 10, we’re going for the end zone.

The bottom line is that you must be able to run the ball enough and well enough to make the play-action passes go. The rest is ball-control passing and getting the ball to the playmakers. If you use ball control passes, the draw play, base runs, and well practiced play-action passes, you’ll know by the defense’s reactions (Is the safety flying up for the run? Are the linebackers respecting our slot receivers? Do the linebackers begin each play with their pass drops?) whether they are sufficiently respecting your run game or not. And you use those reactions to burn them.

4. Keep it limited. This is where you must differ from the Walsh offense, or the Holmgren offense, or the Sean Payton offense, or any other pro coach. At the lower levels — including college — you don’t need a thousand plays. You need a core set of plays that fit together. You don’t need 15 versions of the same flat pass and no good Cover 4 beater. My recommendation is to limit yourself when running the West Coast Offense at lower levels by picking around 10 or so pass plays and 5-6 run plays (along with screens, bootlegs, and other constraint plays). [Ed Note: I didn't mention protections -- you need one or two versatile protection schemes as well as some kind of roll-out or sprint out scheme; most WCO playbooks have way too many different protections.] You must then figure out a systematic way to mesh your playcalls, play-action, and so on in both a huddle and no-huddle environment, and then get your Vince Lombardi on and simply practice these plays repeatedly until you get unbelievable at them. Remember, it’s a waste of time to practice and install plays that will not get used, and I’d argue it’s just as much of a waste to practice plays that you only use a few times. Conceptualizing your offense makes the process of keeping the necessary and throwing out the unnecessary much easier.

5. Calling the game. If you’ve done all of the above, this part should be (relatively) simple, albeit stressful. The plays have been selected, they have been practiced repeatedly, the players know which ones are in the gameplan, and the gameplan itself is well organized and provides logical responses to the various threats the defense may present. Of course, during the game you get some unexpected blitz or other wrinkle you hadn’t prepared for, but the point is not to eliminate this risk but to instead reduce it. Soon you settle down and realize that it isn’t so different than what you’d practiced, and then you’re picking it up and getting big yards. Each playcall seems to indicate the counter and the following play; and the quarterback, insofar as you’ve given him freedom, is putting you in good position. In other words, the method works: it makes mortals into great playcallers, through the magic of preparation.

6. Personnel. I have purposefully saved this until late in the discussion. Not because personnel is unimportant — anything but — but instead because at the lower levels your control over it varies. In the NFL if you need a tight-end or fullback or wideout you draft or hire them; in high school you might not be so lucky. I personally think you can be “West Coast” with four wides, three wides and a tight end and runningback, three wides and two halfbacks, or with the traditional personnel — a tight-end and a fullback. The key is to make sure your concepts are teachable across personnel groups and formations. It would be silly to have to reteach your whole offense every year because this season you’ll predominantly be using a slot receiver instead of a fullback or tight-end. The whole point of the West Coast Offense and all the “multiplicity” and formationing is that you can take advantage of your best 11 players every year.

The related thought here is that one adjective used to describe the WCO is “multiple.” When people think of the offense they think of motions, shifts, and multiple formations. I haven’t discussed this much because I think it is a subset of the gameplanning and personnel discussion: all of that is only worth it if there is a point, or some specific matchup or numbers advantage to be gained. The other reason I haven’t mentioned it is because each team has to decide their identity: you can be “West Coast” and use few shifts or motions and a handful of formations and give your quarterback freedom to check, or you can be “West Coast” and use a lot of shifts and motions and so on to try to gain certain advantages on a given play. It’s a different discussion.

7. To mobile QB or not to mobile QB? The last consideration is old but has a modern twist: what type of run game will you marry the offense with? One reason the WCO has survived is because the running game has evolved from man-blocked schemes with some Wing-T influence to today’s uber-prevalent zone blocking schemes. The type of run scheme you choose will dictate your formations, though not necessarily your approach — i.e. it’s harder to use zone schemes with traditional splitbacks.

But the more interesting question is whether you will adapt spread principles into your West Coast Offense. NFL teams are wrestling with this quite directly. The problem is that, by trying to do more, you risk being able to do nothing well. Yet I still think most (though not all) of the zone-read and related concepts are simple enough to fit right in with the rest of the WCO, with only marginal additional teaching required. Just make sure you spend enough time on the timing of the passing game first.

I’d love to hear additional thoughts from those seasoned in coaching the West Coast Offense, at any level. Below are some links to additional reading and watching:

- The NFL Offense: What is it? Why does every team use it? And how does it differ from college?
- westcoastoffense.com
- Airraid Info (condensed, pass-first derivative of the WCO)
- Mike Shanahan on Playcalling
- Brian Billick on the West Coast Offense

The numbers refer to the number of steps the receiver takes: six vertically, attacking the defender’s outside hip, then three quick ones at 45 degrees to the sideline (sometimes with a head turn but not necessarily), with the break to the post made at full speed on the ninth step, or the third of the “6-3.” The idea is that you will take away the safeties either through play action or some kind of inside route — like in the Mills or double-post concepts — while the 6-3 technique will enable the outside receiver to get plenty of leverage as he bursts inside.

See the video linked here for a great example of Kez McCorvey from FSU (remember him?) running the route near-perfectly. (For some reason embedding is disabled, so you’ll just have to click the link.)

- Because I can. Check out Bear Bryant’s 1958 Alabama playbook. Note that playbook designing technology did not advance beyond this pen and typewriter method until apparently around 2006.

- Good morning, Dave. Buckeye Football Analysis breaks down Tressel’s favorite play — the “Dave” play, which is what he calls his variation of the “Power O” which he has been running since at least his Youngstown State days. Well worth the read.

- The most important thing a college football fan can read: This fall’s ESPN announcer pairings, complete with commentary from EDSBS.

- Watch Mark Sanchez make figure eights. This kind of drill reinforces my advice to all young quarterbacks: jump rope.

- Good article from Billy Witz of the Times about Dick Enberg. Enberg has gone back to doing play-by-play for the San Diego padres:

But the reason Enberg was here became apparent on a recent afternoon as he entered his small office at Petco Park, arriving four and a half hours before the first pitch with a news release in his hand describing the Padres’ trade-deadline deal for St. Louis outfielder Ryan Ludwick.

Picking out pertinent statistics, Enberg fretted that he did not know much about the prospects San Diego had dealt, but he said that he liked the gumption the Padres, the surprise leaders of the National League West, had to acquire Miguel Tejada the day before.

“We’re getting serious,” Enberg said seriously. It was clear, at that moment and for the rest of the night, that baseball stirred him.

- How badly do you love football? If you’d be happy playing through this, then you probably qualify.

- Study on NFL field goal “choking.” From the Sabermetric Research Blog: Upshot is that a study found evidence of choking, but it’s also possible that there are other conclusions to draw regarding difficulty rather than pure mental breakdowns.

- Football Outsiders on Rookie Cap Salary Considerations (say that three-times fast). Check it out here. Learn all about the 25-percent rule.

- Bleg. In the comments, please feel free to request topics for future coverage on the blog. I’ve got some projects I’m working on but I am always looking for new ideas.

Indeed, the pistol has been adopted by other teams as well, as this video from the Big Ten Network discussing Indiana’s use demonstrates (h/t Shakin the Southland):

Shakin the Southland buttresses this video with a lengthy discourse on the subject, drawing on some of my past work and a great American Football Monthly piece by Mike Kuchar. See parts one and two of Mike’s breakdown.

As I’ve said before, however, whether the pistol is a “system” or a “formation” is secondary to the results, and when it works

When the offense is rolling (which it is most of the time these days), the pistol gives a team the best of both worlds: It has at its disposal all the Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez spread offense stuff, like the zone read and other gadgets, as well as the advantages of a “traditional” I-formation or pro-style single-back attack. Among these are that the runningback, aligning as he does behind the quarterback, tips no hand to the defense on the direction of the play, and the offense can get both good downhill running and play-action off those looks.

The test of the pistol will be, as it is for all offenses, along two vectors: First, will Nevada break through? But second, what will its ongoing influence be? Regardless of how this season turns out for the Wolfpack, I think the “pistol’s” legacy is safe.

As a bonus, below the jump I’ve got a video of one of my favorite Nevada plays, the “horn play.”

The other two videos can be found below the fold:

- Shocking commentary on how to be an offensive genius, by Georgia offensive coordinator Mike Bobo:

A year of Matthew Stafford and Knowshon Moreno followed by a season without them will make you realize things. “I think I have learned, too, you have to have good players,” he said. “I think good players help you win football games.”

- “But coach, I need a run up!” Article on dealing with players from the British American Football Coaching Association, i.e. the association for people who play real football in England. The site is worth a visit, as you don’t always see football coaches on this side of the Atlantic poppin’ their collars:

- Eleven Warriors has a nice breakdown of some expansion answers from the Big Ten media days.

- Expanded Season Revenue: The NFL’s real math problem, from Tom Gower. An excerpt:

[H]ow much more would the NFL make if the regular season was expanded to 18 games and the preseason was cut to 2 games? . . .

Why is Roger Goodell advocating for the players to play less and make less money per-game? Doesn’t he know that the NFL won’t really make that much extra money from moving to an 18-game season? The question to that is almost certainly yes, so why does he do this?

[T]here really is a level of popular discontent over the 4-game preseason, especially from media people and season ticket holders who feel like they’re getting screwed. These people, especially the latter, are probably wrong. . . . Proposing an expanded regular season allows Roger Rex to make nice with these people.

. . . . I don’t think the NFL is, or at least should be, particularly serious about the 18-game season. If my numbers are close to right, it doesn’t make anywhere near as much money as you’d expect from a basic 16 to 18 game comparison, and the players really don’t like it. It is, instead, primarily a negotiating tactic and media ploy, and should and will be dropped when the labor negotiations get serious.

- If Sam Bradford is worth 50 million guaranteed, what is Tom Brady worth? From the Pro-Football Reference Blog.

- I’m not a big Fantasy Football guy, but if you read one thing read “Fantasy Drafting: How to Maximize Value by Position and by Round,” by Chase Stuart.

- The Itch of Curiosity, from Jonah Lehrer’s new digs at Wired:

Because curiosity is ultimately an emotion, an inexplicable itch telling us to keep on looking for the answer, it can take advantage of all the evolutionary engineering that went into our dopaminergic midbrain. (Natural selection had already invented an effective motivational system.) When Einstein was curious about the bending of space-time, he wasn’t relying on some newfangled circuitry. Instead, he was using the same basic neural system as a rat in a maze, looking for a pellet of food.

- Defensive back fundamentals, from Brophy. One of my favorite things about Brophy is he is a big believer in “show, don’t tell.” Watch the clips already.

- Finally, below the jump a great catch by Arizona State’s Kerry Taylor. Make sure to watch the full video (h/t Offensive Musings blog). Also, it’s a great example of a “sluggo” route: