Hey Coach....

[DowntownDawg]

...<span style="font-weight: bold;">2.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">The rise of the terrible spread team.</span> I forecast this day some time ago, but this year's college football season has wowed me with the number of just awful spread teams. Now, there's some good ones: <span style="font-weight: bold;">Florida has great talent</span>, and just about every top team has some kind of "spread" element to their gameplan. But there's a ton of just awful spread teams. This topic deserves a much more in depth treatment, but the basic gist is what I forecast a few years ago: <span style="font-weight: bold;">the offense just isn't an equalizer anymore, but instead more of an amplifier</span>. <span style="font-weight: bold;">If you have great athletes you can isolate them in space, but if you don't then you're just giving them one-on-one matchups they can't win and asking your quarterback to play perfect or you can't win.</span>

<span style="font-weight: bold;">But the biggest reason is simply that everybody is doing it and there's just not much novelty to it.</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">And it's not like you can fool a defense with some dizzying array of spread formations when each guy on defense played against spread teams for four years in high school and every week in college.</span> That said, this also makes the cries from these teams and their coaches that there's a "steep learning curve" with their spread offense ring rather hollow. How much different is it to tell guys to line up differently and read the defensive end on the zone-read? There's lots of teams who successfully do that who use it only sparingly; it's unconvincing when teams that rely heavily on the zone-read and zone options claim that they need more time to teach it.

Smart Football

More logical opposition to your "spread is the magic bullet" theory. And I couldn't agree more.

 

[patdog]

I especially liked his analysis of the 2-minute offense. He hammered home several points that have been pet peeves of mine for years.

 

[Coach34]

but i'll just have to disagree with him. You cant tell me we couldnt get some favorable match-ups with McRae on safeties or LB's, Elliot on LB's, Dixon hitting it up inside with Carroll making the reads on the midline, veer, and zone option...crossong routes off of play-action runs inside....

It just takes imagination. And there are way too many teams having success doing it.

 

[8dog]

a. we have playmakers

b. the one thing that guy is ignoring is: what would the "terrible" spread teams be doing yardage-wise if they weren't running the spread.

 

[patdog]

We'd suck if we ran the spread full time just like we suck running the WCO.

 

[TR.sixpack]

a break from going against spread offenses this week. Little did they know...

 

[futaba.79]

we had great WR matchups vs Tech, but it didn't matter. AU played us with 7 and 4, so we should have been able to take advantage inside with our RBs, but we couldn't. Carroll running option reads against either of those teams would've been plain stupid.

Our problem isn't formations and schemes, it's QBs and OLs. You could put whatever WC or spread genius you can find in charge of our players and it wouldn't matter.

 

[Todd4State]

We'd suck if we ran the spread full time just like we suck running the WCO.

we were a spread team now according to Croom?

I guess that proves your point though- we suck running the WCO and the spread. Actually, it just proves that Croom is incompetenet, not that we need any more evidence than what we already have.

 

[Coach34]

the fact that Crooms and McCorvey are terrible coaches doesnt mean that Spread principles and creating match-up advantages dont work. We have had some players, but our coaches cant come up with anything that resembles a formidable scheme.

Lance Long almost makes a pro roster. yet is a non-factor playing for us? We cant find a way to get the ball to Burke last year?

Their incompetence doesnt mean we dont have guys that cant make plays.

 

[BriantheDawg]

nt

 

[futaba.79]

pray tell, who would've gotten the ball to these "playmakers" in a different scheme? Carroll?

 

[BriantheDawg]

His name is Tony Burks. With an 's'.

Edit: Is this an inside bashing that I'm just not aware of? Kind of like Crooms?

 

[Stormrider81]

That's what some of us have been saying for a while now. Get someone in here that can effectively coach offense and call plays and it would make a world of difference. Better playcalling in itself would help a ton, not to mention the ability to "coach up" rather than "coach down" the QBs. The idea that the spread would fix our problems is just plain wrong. Until we hire good coaches on that side of the ball and allow them to do their job unimpeded it doesn't matter.

 

[Coach34]

everybody has trouble spelling it cause we never got him the 17'ing football

 

[BriantheDawg]

nt

 

[futaba.79]

where it's due....that was a good one.