I’ve coached both high-school and D-I football and I’ve learned the hard way that it is either imp...

I’ve coached both high-school and D-I football and I’ve learned the hard way that it is either impossible, in the case of high school, or or so difficult to the point of being prohibitive, as in the case of college ball, to effectively implement a multiple-formation intensive system and to consistently succeed with it. At my last D-I school we ran the true west coast offense, as my head coach was a legitimate disciple of Bill Walsh. Not only was it difficult to install all of our formations, but it made our players hesitant; they were so worried about getting lined up correctly that they were not able to concentrate on running the play. Another unintended consequence was that the different looks we installed confused our players more than the defenses we faced.

Thoughts on the spread and run and shoot offenses — Hemlock’s comment | Smart Football. Apropos of a previous discussion, Chris Brown of SmartFootball turns over the reigns temporarily to an unnamed former coach, who is not talking about us, but might as well be.

4 months ago Richard Pittman 4 comments 0 recs |

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Richard,

I read the entire article about the Run and Shoot on the Smart Football blog. The guy makes some great points. While I was reading the post and the comments, it made me think about Crowton’s offense. I tend to agree with the coach that if you don’t commit and try too many formations then you are limiting the amount of reps to perfect execution during practice.

I have just recently started reading this blog, and I’ll tell you what, it is very enlightening about the x’s and o’s of football.

by Purpletiger006 on Nov 12, 2009 7:44 AM CST reply actions 0 recs

The other option

Is to do what Mike Leach does where he uses 20 different formations, but he runs the same 10 or so plays from each. You get two pick two of these three: a lot of formations, a lot of plays, good execution. There’s not enough practice time to achieve all of them.

Team Speed Kills
SBNation's SEC Blog

by Year2 on Nov 12, 2009 9:57 AM CST reply actions 0 recs

Like a saying among lawyers..

You can have it good, you can have it fast, you can have it cheap. Pick any two.

Father. Husband. Lawyer. Nerd.

And The Valley Shook

by Richard Pittman on Nov 12, 2009 10:37 AM CST up reply actions 0 recs

Another clip from the article:

“Much of this depends on your mentality. Some coaches are fine with being only "good" at what they do. Take what I’ve seen of Florida State recently. I like Jimbo Fisher and think he calls a great game, but I don’t think his offense — either at LSU or his current one at FSU — is particularly great at any one thing. He has a lot of concepts but few of them, espcially in the passing game, seem to flow into and out of one another in the same way that, say, June Jones’s do at SMU, Mike Leach’s at Texas Tech, or Joe Tiller’s did back in his early Purdue days.”

It seems that now we have the whole playbook Jimbo left behind and added the Pistol. the Power I, and some AirRaid. Along with that we seem to need to run the short side option at least once per half. I was all for the change to GC from Jimbo because of what is stated above but I would not object to seeing GC move on after this year. I just don’t think that what he wants to do suits our talent and his problems in succeeding years could well be caused by getting too much of his offense installed as time goes by. On this same track by next year we could be completely immobile.

Whatever is done we need a radical change of philosophy on O to take advantage of the talent we have recruited.

by pttigris on Nov 12, 2009 8:16 PM CST up reply actions 0 recs