Cal vs. Northwestern: TD's TD

I've spent a lot of time talking about our offense, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The plays that are called and the success that they have is largely dependant on what the defense is doing, so if you really want to understand the Bear Raid you need to understand the defenses that it faces. In this post we'll look more in depth at quarters coverage (Cover-4), and the way that we were able to break it on Trevor Davis' long TD reception against Northwestern. I think that the commentors got this right on the TV broadcast so the conclusion won't be a surprise, but this post will hopefully give a deeper understanding about why Northwestern was running what they were running, and will let you recognize this kind of thing for yourself when it happens in the future. Also, if you see some of the defensive stuff that I'm about to discuss happening in a game, you'll know what kind of plays we should be calling!

Defending the Bear Raid with Cover-3 Variants

You wouldn't know it from my earlier posts, but defense is my favorite side of the ball. I've focused on offense so far in part because that's what our coach is supposed to be known for, but mostly because I don't hate myself enough to break down last year's defense. Now that I've written some posts on our offensive positions, formations, and the way that our plays are supposed to work, I'm going to start incorporating some more info on defense by looking at interesting things that opposing defenses did to stop us. The goal of these posts is both to teach defense from the ground up, and to show the most interesting strategies that were used against us. This post will look at some basics of a few zone coverages before moving on to a particular Cover-3 variant used by Northwestern.

Bear Raid Positions

So far I've been going into our concepts in detail, talking about how they're supposed to work and how they might look against different coverages. In this post we'll step back and look at what all this means for individual players at specific positions.

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.

 

Downfield Passing Game

First of all, this post will make use of some of the stuff discussed in my “terminology” post (http://calfootballstrategy.blogspot.com/2014/01/this-is-meant-to-be-reference-post-that.html). If you don't know/remember how to number WR's from the defense's perspective, you should definitely take a look at that post before getting too far into this one.  Also, if you want to skip ahead TouchedTheAxeIn82 has put together a video of a bunch of these plays, and that plus some written commentary is at the bottom of the post.

This post completes my basic introdution to the Bear Raid offense by looking at the downfield passing game. The name “Air Raid” might make you think that the passing game is sophisticated, but it's really not. The theory is that there are only so many coverages that the defense can run. If you have a play (or two) that can beat each of those coverages, how much more do you need? Sonny tells a story about how the Texas Tech coaches would go around the clinic circuit, meet with other coaching staffs, etc. during the off-season, and they'd all come back with great ideas and things to add to the offense. They'd present their findings to Leach, and his answer would be “That sounds great. What are we gonna cut?” If the new play was better than something they already had, then they had no use for the old play. If the new play wasn't better than something they already had, why add it?

This might make the passing game sound too simple, but certain route combinations are just plain tough to defend with certain coverages. It doesn't matter if the defense knows what you like to run against Cover-2, because if they're running Cover-2 when you're running your Cover-2 beater they're in trouble. This is a point I can't emphasize enough: The defense doesn't figure out an offense by understanding how individual plays work, they figure out an offense by knowing when you're going to run those plays. This post, then, is going to take you through each of these concepts against the coverages they're designed to beat. I should also note that no matter what coverage the defense is in, every concept has a route that should gain positive yards against it. There is a limited number of concepts in the offense, but the idea is that through repeating the same concept over and over again you can make it efficient in a lot of different situations. This is the philosophical opposite of having a different play for every situation.

The Bear Raid Quick Passing Game

The most characteristic element of our offense is the quick passing game. The quick game doesn't refer to every pass that's thrown short, however. On almost all of our pass plays there are short routes built in, so it's useful to define the quick game as contrasted with other passing plays. One key feature is that it usually uses 5-man protection (protection involving only the OL) while the QB takes a 1-step drop from the shot-gun.  In the most common versions of these plays, the RB is an essential part of the passing concept and so we can't use 6-man protections here. Another feature is that in the quick game the “concept” that's being worked happens less than 10 yards from the line of scrimmage. This contrasts with our down-field passing game, where we'll use more 6-or even 7-man protections, the QB will take deeper drops, and the concept that's being worked is meant to read defenders farther downfield. So, we might throw short routes such as outs, slants, or flat routes on any number of passing plays, but the quick game only refers to a subset of them.

Bear Raid: The Run Game

This is the first post of a lengthy study on the Bear Raid offense. My first three posts will look at the most common plays in the run game, the quick passing game/screens, and the deep passing game from the first three games of the season. I'll outline how our most common plays are supposed to work, and then comment on how successful they were, what players were most successful at running them, etc.

Once I've gone through these basics I'll talk about how all these plays fit together, game-planning, adjustments, etc. Once I've done this for the first three games of the season, I plan to treat the rest of the season more briefly in three game chunks, showing what changed and why as the season progressed. Let's get it started.