« Kickoff rule changes the game | Home | Know your players »
Trends in the offense vs. defense battle fun to watch
By Coach P | September 21, 2007
Looking back over the trends in football and how the offense and defense affect each other is a fun study. My dad told me once that when he was in high school nobody really blitzed much. Most of the teams he played against ran either a 50 defense (linemen head up on the center and tackles and outside shoulder of the TE and the backers head up on the guards) or some sort of 60 look (6 down linmen, 2 backers and 3 secondary guys). Everybody just sort of played “vanilla” and you always knew who to block. Defenses, in turn, became very good at “playing their positions”…each man doing his job and playing his area. Enter the wishbone. Oklahoma made a living for a long time by taking advantage of that defensive theory. The veer puts defensive players in “no win” situations by having the QB read what they do. There isn’t a pre-determined ballcarrier. I remember watching a game a couple of years ago on ESPN Classic. It was a game from the 70’s between Notre Dame and, I believe, Oklahoma. Both teams were running the wishbone and both teams were running a 50 defense (both of which are distant memories in college now.) Then people started blitzing more so that the offense couldn’t just tee off on defense. What college coaches started realizing was that if they got away from the old “read and react” defenses which often took defensive linemen a couple of years to learn and get strong enough to do and went to more active, attacking, “go get the ballcarrier” type defenses they could recruit these slightly undersized but fast and athletic guys and play them earlier making recruiting easier. They took guys who would have been LB’s and made DE’s out of them. They took guys who would have been DE’s and made DT’s out of them. Speed became a premium on defenses. Eventually the offenses had to adjust. The old “you have him” blocking schemes didn’t work anymore because the linemen didn’t know where “he” was going. Now the spread offense is all the rage. It’s all based off of zone blocking. The linemen don’t have a man, they have a gap. “Step to your gap and take what comes” is now the predominate thinking in most blocking schemes. This is where the trickle down affect comes in. High schools tend to follow the lead of the colleges. Fifteen years ago most of the high schools in our area were in either a 50 look or a 60 look. We saw them week in and week out. Fifteen years ago we were in a 50 defense running the wishbone and the old Colorado I-Bone (the veer run from more of a power-I look). Today we are in a 3-3 (or a 3-5 as some call it) and running the spread. I keep thinking “what will people come up with next?” I’d say for a preview..watch what Urban Meyer is doing with the spread at Florida. Watching the evolution of the spread is amazing…I just wonder what defenses are going to come up with in the next 10 years to stop it.
Digg
del.icio.us
Netscape
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Technorati
YahooMyWebTopics: Uncategorized |