I would venture a guess that most people watching the Texas 5A D1 state title game between Highland Park and Manvel were rooting for Manvel. The Houston-area program is a perennial contender that’s always filled with exciting athletes with offers from top schools like Texas or A&M and this particular team was a diverse and … [Read more…]
Buzz Bissinger’s book about the 1988 Odessa Permian high school football team is one of the greatest sports books ever written. That’s high praise that I’m personally poorly qualified to give but the breadth of subjects and characters he’s able to cover are stunning. Many of you may not have read the book but enjoyed … [Read more…]
Barry Switzer’s big innovation in college football, besides foregoing discipline in order to keep star players on the field, was using more of a burner at fullback to give the dive runs in his wishbone offense a little more explosiveness. Lincoln Riley stumbled upon something sorta similar when he used Dmitri Flowers on play-action tosses … [Read more…]
Over at Football Study Hall I surveyed some of the better OL units of this decade in college football and what sorts of parts went into their assembly.
Over at Football Study Hall I explain the philosophy of offenses using unbalanced sets, fullbacks, tight ends, and multiple RB formations to try and confuse opponents before running them over. The main idea with this style of offense is to use a variety of formations, sweeps, and multiple ball carriers to obscure the fact that … [Read more…]
There’s a lot to this story that’s pretty fun and interesting beyond the “FCS champions/powerhouse upset P5 blueblood on their own field!” if that wasn’t enough to make this one of the more compelling games in history. I broke it all down with some help from then QB coach and current App State head coach … [Read more…]
My man Bill Connelly (@SBN_BillC) has made it to the upper tiers of the 2017 Big 10 in his annual preview of every single team in college football. If you don’t track this series every year I don’t really know what’s wrong with you because it’s a fantastic, ongoing stat-based historical of every team in … [Read more…]
Everyone runs the spread now. Well, almost everyone, it’s totally ubiquitous across the game of football, including at the higher levels. The question for major programs is now whether to run a pro-style spread or a college-style spread. I explain over at Football Study Hall.
Gonna take a brief pause here to talk a little basketball. The Houston Rockets just had a brilliant 2016 season that I found rather comparable to the Art Briles, Baylor offense. They embraced the extremes of spacing and spread concepts with a pick’n’roll offense geared around James Harden surrounded by shooters and typically either a … [Read more…]
My man @The_Coach_A from matchquarters.com did the coaching world a service and summarized a modern, anti-spread defensive philosophy in his new book: I’ll confess, I opted for the Kindle version, which still reads really easily but is perhaps a tad less useful for sharing for coaches that would want their staff to read this book. … [Read more…]