When it was announced that Tom Brady is at last moving on from the New England Patriots, bizarrely to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I was lead to reflect on what for me was the most memorable Brady and Belichik performance. Super Bowl XLIX against the Seattle Seahawks, a down to the wire battle … [Read more…]
Strategy > tactics. That was my prevailing thought watching the Super Bowl and reviewing some of the film and notes after the game. In football tactics are your play-calls, play-designs, scheme, and all the details that go into creating advantages on a down by down basis for your team. The 49ers have some of the … [Read more…]
The Shanahan O is probably one of the more poorly examined and least understood offensive systems in football. It doesn’t even really have a name other than the general “zone run game” tag that isn’t always particularly useful since a lot of teams run zone but don’t run the offense developed by Mike Shanahan. The … [Read more…]
I’ve been trying to find the right words and analogies recently in order to explain why it is that I’m so confident in the emergent supremacy of spread passing offense, particularly pro-style spread passing. The Big 12 and Flyover Football is often dominated more by smashmouth spread systems that emphasize the run game in order … [Read more…]
The Tennessee Titans, who’s victory over New England I dismissed as being more emblematic of Patriot decline than Titan ascendance, pulled off a shocking win over the Baltimore Ravens on Saturday night in the AFC divisional round. I’ve actually been suspicious of the Ravens all season. I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes much … [Read more…]
High school football, and sometimes college football, regularly takes simple spread strategy to its logical end points. After throwing for 333 yards and five touchdowns as a sophomore in their victory over Duncanville in 2018, North Shore QB DeMatrius Davis took a different approach in 2019. He completed 6-12 passes for 91 yards but had … [Read more…]
I’m really starting to enjoy the NFL. For the last several years I’ve had limited attention to give to the NFL between my college football writing commitments, another role I have in life in my local Church that eats up time on Sundays, my family commitments, and then also the NFL’s constantly negative press they … [Read more…]
I didn’t really expect the Super Bowl to be a high scoring game. What I saw of the Rams against the Cowboys and in glowing columns written here and there about Sean McVay’s genius suggested to me that he’d simply built a thorough, modern, and well executed version of the old Mike Shanahan offense. I … [Read more…]
I examine the issue over at Football Study Hall. * Of course it’s always possible that the NFL is simply overlooking Big 12 players that might be better than expected.
As someone that watches a ton of recruiting film I have a fairly good idea of how people that follow a game at one level tend to evaluate players coming up from the lower levels. You try to watch for raw athleticism and skill from highlights or moments from games and you don’t spend forever … [Read more…]