Scheme, Strategy & Tactics

[Irish du Nord]

Following up on what Gower wrote above, we seem to run a pretty balanced version of the spread. And as the article mentioned, the strength of the spread is not in declaring, "This is what we do, we're really good at it, now try to stop us," but in taking whatever the defense the gives you, which (if done properly) ensures you've always got an advantage. That runs counter to those who complain about our "lack of offensive identity". None of the top programs are winning by playing Manball™ anymore.

Here's our OFEI for every year under Kelly:



Give him elite skill players, and Kelly will field a championship-caliber attack (2014's combo of Kizer, Prosise, Adams and Fuller). Give him merely good players, and our offense will at least be good enough to make the playoffs (2017's combo, etc.)

The fact that we don't recruit the offensive skill positions well enough to replicate 2015's success more than once a decade is obviously, uh... not great, and no one but Kelly can be blamed for that. But I don't think there's any problem with our scheme. We're doing the same stuff all the top offenses are, just with far fewer game-breakers.

I think this past year showed that to compete for championships, you still need a physical run game. Maybe it was due to the relatively weak QB crop, maybe defenses are adapting to the passing threat of spread offenses.

OSU had two 1000 yd rushers, and the games in which their offense stalled were when thy couldn't establish the run. PSU was run first, Texas had a balanced attack despite being a Sark offense.

UGA in 2021/2022 had a balanced attack as well. I think that's what Freeman was looking at when he talked about having an Offensive line and Defensive line driven program. A solid O-Line opens up the passing game as much as it opens up the run. Being versatile enough to deal with whatever the defensive scheme throws at you is how you have a functional offense in 2025.

 

[Me2SouthBend]

Of course it’s SHORT YARDAGE situations.

 

[Jiggafini19Deux]

Film and analytics have advanced rapidly in recent years. Even since this thread first started.