Treggs' TD vs. UW

If you're interested in scheme, go back and watch Cal's offense vs. UW's defense right now. Do it twice. This game was awesome. Both sides had clearly scouted each other well, and both sides made great adjustments from those initial good gameplans. I've got a few aspects of our offense that I want to write posts on, so be on the lookout for a later post about what Brandon Jones has added to our run game (more lead blocking!), but for now I want to talk packaged plays, and particularly Treggs' 1^st half TD.

Formations, Tendencies, and Packaged Plays

One part of understanding an offense is understanding its tendencies. Some of these might be related to down and distance (“What do they run on first and ten?”), but many are also based on formation. It's obvious that you run different plays out of a 4-wide spread formation than you do out of a three TE power set. Even in spread offenses that are 4-wide most of the time formations play a crucial role in understanding an offense's tendencies and, in turn, in understanding what the offense is trying to do. This post will break down our offense in terms of the plays that we run out of our main formations, and the advantages and disadvantages that each formation has. It'll also look at some of our “packaged plays,” which are closely linked to the formations that we run and do some interesting things to our tendencies. It should be noted that all of my information for this post and those before it comes from the first three games of the season, and so the picture might look different by the time we get through breaking down the rest of the season.