Creating Matchups with Beau Baldwin

I've got another post up over at California Golden Blogs.  This one's on Beau Baldwin and the way that he moves receivers around to create matchups.  Here's a snippet:

When Sonny Dykes came to the California Golden Bears, he talked a good deal about his offensive philosophy. He said that there are a bunch of different ways to fool people. Pre-snap, you can use formations, motions, and shifts to get the defense out of their alignments. You can also use trick plays and post-snap misdirection to spring guys open. A third option is to use tempo to keep the defense from subbing and getting new calls in. This last option is, obviously, the approach favored by Dykes and the Air Raid guys. 

New OC Beau Baldwin hasn't made similarly explicit claims about his approach to offense. He says that his offense is “multiple,” but that by itself doesn't really tell us anything. In this post, I'm going to try to provide some answers with Sonny's quote in mind. In particular, I'm going to look at how the Eastern Washington Eagles used formations and alignments to create favorable matchups for their star receiver, Cooper Kupp, in their upset victory over WSU, and I'm going to compare these strategies with the Bear Raid in order to expand on how Baldwin's offensive philosophy will change the look of our offense in the post-Dykes era.

Breaking Down Steve Greatwood

A few weeks back I put up a post about Steve Greatwood on California Golden Blogs.  Here's the introduction:

Picture this: It's 1^st and 10, and your team has the ball somewhere between the 20's. The ball's snapped and handed off to the RB, who plows into the middle of the line for no gain. What's worse, this isn't the first time that this has happened in this game. As you and the fans around you groan in disgust, you might ask, “Who's responsible for this?” Depending on the past performance and reputation of your assistant coaches, your answer could go a few ways. Is it the OL coach and the players that he's recruiting/the technique that he's teaching? Is it the OC and the plays that he's calling? 

In this post, I want to discuss a third possibility by breaking down X's and O's at the sub-coordinator level. I'm going to do this by looking at how Steve Greatwood, our new OL coach, coaches up his zone run schemes. We'll see that a position coach can have a major impact on the X's and O's of the game, and can make or break a play's success through his own schematic knowledge and teaching. While it's ultimately the OC's job to choose what plays to run, it's up to position coaches to make sure that each play can succeed in as many situations as possible; a run play that can only work against one ideal defensive look isn't very helpful for an OC, but if the OL coach can adjust that play to make it work in a greater number of situations, then he expands the playbook and gives his coordinator more to work with. The coordinator himself doesn't have time to tweak individual assignments for all eleven players on the field, and so has to rely on his position coaches to make the little adjustments that make plays work. With all of that in mind, let's look at Greatwood's zone running schemes, which will illustrate this in more detail.

Breaking Down Beau Baldwin: EWU vs. WSU (2016)

I've written a game report on EWU's offense in their upset victory over WSU in 2016.  As a preview, here's the table of contents and introduction.  If you're interested, you can purchase it from the online store in the side-bar to the right side of this page.  If you're on a device, you can scroll to the bottom of this page and click to view the web version of the page, since the store doesn't show up on the mobile version. Go Bears!

Justin Wilcox' Defense

Well Cal fans, we have a new HC. There's no more Bear Raid, and for the first time in a decade and a half Cal is led by a defense-minded coach. Justin Wilcox is a guy who's always been on Cal fans' radar, especially when everyone seemed to hate Bob Gregory in the third quarter of Tedford's tenure. Wilcox was the DC during Boise State's upset of Oklahoma just before Cal's defense started to show cracks, and he stayed on for many years as a part of Chris Petersen's stellar run there. This earned him an upgrade to some decent seasons on Derek Dooley's staff at Tennessee. From there, he helped out Sark after Nick Holts' disastrous defenses at UW, and then that whole staff fell upward to USC, where Wilcox was unceremoniously fired by Clay Helton at the end of 2015. Finally, after one very good season at Wisconsin, here we are. Wilcox' success seems to closely follow the HC's that he's working for. When his HC is good, he's good. When his HC is bad and/or drunk, he's not. Now he himself is the HC, so who knows what's going to happen? A lot of it will depend on his vision for Cal's defense.

Washington's Pass Rush

Washington is up next on our tour of PAC-12 pass rushes. In this post, we'll see how UW relied more heavily than other teams on straightforward, 4-man rushes to get production. We'll also see that, when they did blitz, they took advantage of their defensive ends' versatility and twisted them inside to the backside of their opponents' protection schemes, giving their rush a very different flavor from the relatively simple rush schemes that we saw from Colorado.

Colorado's Pass Rush

Now that I've talked about the basics of pass protection, it's time to look at our first PAC-12 pass rush. I'm going to start this series with Colorado, who led the conference both in overall sacks (35) and in sacks/game (2.7). In 2016 CU shot into the top-25 nationally in both of these metrics, and this improvement is partially responsible for their corresponding rise in the PAC-12 standings.

Pass Protection Scheme Basics

Cal's pass rush has been a major problem for three of the last four years, and is one of the most-discussed topics among the fan base. It would technically be possible to break down our pass rush and to talk about all of the things that we could be doing instead of what we actually do, but trying to predict the hypothetical results of such changes would be too speculative and abstract for my tastes. Instead, I'm going to defer to the actual DC's in the conference by writing a series of posts breaking down some of the best pass rushes in the PAC-12. As of right now, I'm planning a series of individual posts on Colorado, Utah, and Washington. In 2016, those teams were the three best in terms of sacks per game against PAC-12 competition. Depending on how things go with these posts, there's a second tier of ASU, Stanford, and UCLA that could be worth going into.

Before we get into the pass rush posts themselves, however, I'm going to say a few things about the basics of pass protection; the pass rush makes less sense if you don't know what it's designed to defeat, so this post will serve as a quick introduction and as a resource for my later posts on various rush schemes.