A Study in 4-Verticals: Cal vs. UCLA (2013 and 2014)

When Cal played UCLA at the Rose Bowl in 2013, the game was downright boring. Cal got shut out in every quarter but the second, and after scoring ten points in that quarter gave up twenty unanswered to lose the game 10-37. Goff threw for a near season low 215 yards with zero TD's and one awful INT. One year later, Cal was driving with a chance to kick a go-ahead FG in the final minutes of an exciting, back-and-forth 34-36 shootout. Unfortunately, we all know how that ended.

This post is going to answer two questions about the scenario that I just described. The first is, “Why was Cal's offense so much more successful in 2014 than in 2013,” and the second is “Why did we throw a deep interception on a play that didn't need a deep pass?” Conveniently, an answer to both of these questions is the pass concept “4 Verticals,” a concept I've discussed a few times on this blog. There are a ton of interesting specifics behind that general answer, though, and this post will focus on those details.

Defending Trips with Cover-4: Treggs' OT TD

I like to think of playbooks like tool boxes (creative, right?). Some coaches have a million plays, because they want to have the perfect play for every scenario and defensive look that they could possibly see. A guy like Tedford doesn't just have a tool box, he has an entire Home Depot. Our coaches make do with decidedly less, and they're happy to let you know it. From the sounds of things, you'd think that they're just really, really good at using a hammer and screw driver. Like, they've just sat down and hammered a bunch of things, so they're really really efficient at hammering. On this model, playcalling starts to sound really easy.

This is the trap, though. The party line is that we can complete whatever we want no matter what the defense does, because we've just practiced it more than they have. In reality, our coaches (and the Air Raid guys in general) have re-imagined the things that are possible with a few basic plays. They can take a hammer and screwdriver and produce a space shuttle. They can take any defensive look and come up with novel ways to apply our very few offensive plays to beat it. Treggs' overtime TD is a good example of exactly how much strategy goes into our playcalling.

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.