One of the biggest shocks that has come from the new #RhuleofLaw in Waco has been the physical nature of Baylor Bear practices. This has been a major departure from the Art Briles regimen of extremely rep-heavy, up-tempo practices designed to get as many reps in as possible every day. Most teams find that these up-tempo, … [Read more…]
Because of the nature of Briles’ Baylor program towards the latter end of that regime, before things went horrifyingly wrong, it has become a bit easy to forget how Briles built that program in the first place. After consecutive Big 12 titles in 2013 and 2014 the Bears were cruising in recruiting, snatching up highly touted … [Read more…]
I don’t think most pundits or fans have fully grokked how good the Big 12 might be in 2017. This has almost always been a QB-driven league, at least since Mike Leach transformed it by bringing the Air Raid and Texas HS football became a frontier for spread tactics. There have been some seasons where the Big … [Read more…]
Over at Football Study Hall I have a breakdown of star Temple DE/OLB Haason Reddick and many of the ways that Matt Rhule used him last year. His film is exceptional and instructive on some of Rhule’s favorite tricks for dealing with college offenses. It’s amazing to see all of the guys that Rhule and … [Read more…]
That’s where you add pass-options, particularly vertical pass options, to your two-back runs. With the additions of OC Chip Lindsey and former Baylor QB Jarrett Stidham, War Eagle now has the main components needed to do this successfully. Gus Malzahn was an early innovator of the smashmouth spread and you can read my man Alex … [Read more…]
It’s time for the new home of Sports Treatise to host it’s first Big 12-focused Twitter-bag. If it wasn’t obvious, that’d be where I take questions from all my fellow Twitter-bags and try to answer them in this space. Let’s begin… @Ian_A_Boyd do you think a 34 can work in the big 12? — Matt … [Read more…]
Now that we’ve gone through every Big 12 recruiting class, I guess it makes sense to grade them all in comparison. This is a little tricky since each team has different goals for their program and different approaches to getting it done, but I’m basically going to rank each class on how likely it is … [Read more…]
Matt Rhule walked into a tough situation, a true fixer-upper if you’ll forgive me, in taking over Briles’ Baylor program. Beyond the acrimony over the scandal that took down Briles and much of the leadership at Baylor, Rhule also came to find a gutted roster and a recruiting class with only a single committed player. … [Read more…]
Those games featured future Big 12 QBs Shawn Robinson (TCU), Charlie Brewer (Baylor), and Xavier Martin (Texas Tech). It also provided a nice contrast between two diverging paths I see for spread-option football. I’ll be posting more on these QBs as I wrap up my breakdowns of the Big 12 recruiting classes but read my … [Read more…]
A few weeks back I explained in my column at Football Study Hall “why your team’s new head coach is from the AAC.” Matt Rhule, Tom Herman, and Willie Taggart all used successful stints in the league as launching pads to the Baylor, Texas, and Oregon jobs respectively. AAC football is a wonderful thing and the … [Read more…]