My old colleague Bill Connelly has a piece up on ESPN.com today about how the spread has “won” in college football. That’s the thing now, spread offense. I’ve been writing, arguing, and explaining as much for the last several years. LSU’s dominant 2019 run obviously established this pretty firmly. Before the LSU title run and … [Read more…]
It’s been something of a fad in football for people to talk about RPOs, but now we also have PROs and PPOs emerging as “the next big thing.” If you need to back up multiple steps because all of those acronyms have completely left you behind don’t worry, this doesn’t have to be all that … [Read more…]
Today’s largely accepted wisdom is that you build a National Champion by recruiting the best players in the country, regardless of their location, and assembling your team out of the best of the best. Alabama started to employ that model as the Nick Saban program got going, Ohio State got there as well, and Clemson … [Read more…]
One of the more bizarre and interesting dimensions to the game of football is the way that it recreates the challenges of one of the worst wars in human history. World War I, or the “Great War,” was one of the most cataclysmic events in human history and a precursor to World War II which … [Read more…]
My guys Paul Wadlington (Scipio Tex) and Kevin Dunn have a very good podcast going these days called “Everyone gets a trophy!” that I recommend. It’s a weekly listen for me. In the most recent episode, Paul (in so many words) basically describes how college football is starting to experience something like the Matthew principle … [Read more…]
The Houston Rockets made a very controversial trade deadline move this season, dealing their starting center and eliminating their roster of any true big men. That move flew in the face of conventional wisdom on how you win basketball games, but for the Rockets it was a very logical move, comparable to when Billy Bean … [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…]
Once Deshaun Watson dethroned Alabama in 2016, I began to develop my theory that spread passing wins championships these days at the college level. I then began to look around at the 2017 rosters for teams that could mimic Clemson’s method and take down Alabama, settling on the Sam Darnold USC Trojans who were returning … [Read more…]
Greatest college offense of all time? There’s no question that that was literally the hardest offense to defend that we’ve ever seen. The way their passing game attacked the full field while giving Joe Burrow options and answers to most any problem the defense could present made it the most complete and fully modernized system … [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…]