Our offense and how it’s evolved has been brought up in another topic, and I’d like to talk about that here. Like many of you, the performance of our offense at the A&M game did have me looking for answers. What’s changed with our offense since Crowton’s arrival in 1995? How can a defense like Rice, which was giving up a completion percentage of 75% to the teams it faced, stop us cold in the second half?
In the past few weeks, I’ve looked back at video from past years, particularly 96, 97, and 98, to find some answers. Games like Cal, Alabama, and Mississippi State. What made our offense work in the past? Here are a few observations:
1. We ran many of the same plays we run today, but we did it out of a dozen or more formations, while today we run only a handful of formations, mostly with a one-back set.
2. I had forgotten just how much we ran two-back sets in those seasons. We alternated between two-
back, one-back, and empty sets, running each about a third of the time.
3. We used a lot of motion and mis-direction, much more than in the past few years.
4. The combination of the motion and multiple formations made it difficult, if not impossible, to predict our play-calling. It made the screens, quick outs, deep passes, and passes to the backs out of the backfield much harder to stop.
5. The use of the two-back sets and our ability to run out of them, which was better than I remembered, made defenses much more honest than we’ve seen this year. Teams couldn’t drop seven or eight, but they couldn’t stack the line with seven or eight, either. This also made the empty sets more effective.
6. Those packages forced teams to play much more man coverage, as opposed to this year when teams have dropped back into zone and never been forced out of it. While driving away from Happy Valley, listening to the Penn State postgame show, one of their linebackers talked extensively about their switch from a man to zone defense at halftime.
7. We got away from the two-back sets in 1998 when we were loaded at receiver. In 1998, against Boise, a team that had beaten Utah the week before, we just lined up our athletes against theirs and went down the field. I think we still have talent at receiver but not like in years past. That offense, which is much more like what we’re trying to do now, is also much harder to run without that kind of depth.
What I’d like to see and what our coaches might be working on in the next few weeks is a group of packages that adds a back in the backfield with more motion and misdirection in the offense. I think a few changes in the looks we give defenses will force teams like Boise and Nevada to not cheat into dropping seven or eight people into zone coverage. It’s our best chance of matching our athletes against theirs.
The alternative for those defenses is to allow our offense to line up with a lead blocker and run all day. When teams did try to drop people against us in 96 and 97, we simply got into a two-back set, even the I-formation, and ran right at defenses. We had pretty good running games against all of the teams I’ve mentioned, but the aim was really to keep people honest.
A good example is the Toledo game in 1996. They had a team that won the MAC and went to the Vegas Bowl. But they didn’t have our athletes. Crowton ran enough two-back sets in the first half to keep them honest. They were forced to play much more of a base defense than they wanted to. And we made them pay. They are very similar to what Boise is today, a team Slaudawg describes best when he compares their team speed to ours, which is much better.
I don’t expect anything new against SMU. But we’re going to have to make some changes to beat Nevada.
My biggest fear is that our offense has been simplified so much we don’t have the ability to make these kinds of changes, or perhaps others, in such a short period of time. Bick and Conroy might be suffering through sleepless nights wondering the same thing.