What do you want to see?

I'm taking recommendations for post ideas.  I've already posted and gotten a few ideas in the following BI thread, so if there's something you want to see, head over there and let me know.

http://bearinsider.com/forums/showthread.php?88765-Bear-Raid-Breakdown-What-do-you-all-want-to-see

Pick Plays and Cover-0: Caleb Coleman's 4th Down Stop

Every season there's some hot-button issue that gets the pundits talking. This year, for a stretch after the controversial finish to Notre Dame-FSU, that issue was the pick play. A little closer to home, a similar play gave Utah the victory over USC in the last minutes of that game. These are plays that everybody runs. Everyone complains about them when they're used against their team, and nobody notices them when their own team runs them. Until someone institutes a rule that no two receivers can pass within X yards of each other, these plays will have a legitimate place in football strategy, and that's OK. Although picks capitalize on a certain amount of “interference,” defenses have plenty of answers that can render them ineffective. Like every other play, it's about the coordinator having a sense for when these plays are coming, and making the right call to stop them. This post will break down three key plays involving picks from the OSU game in an effort to get inside the game-within-the-game behind compressed formations (formations where two or more receivers line up tight to each other). The ultimate point will be to understand Caleb Coleman's game-sealing tackle late in the game on 4^th and 2.

UCLA Defensive Gameplan

Up until the UCLA game, our defense had never given up more than 5 ypc against the rush, and had only given up more than 4 ypc twice. We'd only given up 150+ yards one time (to Colorado), and had held everyone else under 120. In the UCLA game we gave up 237 yards at 5.04 ypc. Why the sudden change? It's tempting to say that they're just better than the teams we'd played up to that point, but on the season they aren't that far ahead of UA. As always, it's a lot more complicated than the size, strength, and speed of your opponent.

Cal's Coverage Problems

Pass coverage is the hot-button issue for our team this season, so I want to keep chipping away at how it's supposed to work and the kinds of things that can go wrong.  This post will look more in depth at our Cover-4 package, the key responsibilities within it, and the things that can go wrong.

TD's TDs: Kick Return Edition

My girlfriend and I watched the WSU game with the fledgling CAA-Long Beach chapter at Coach's in Seal Beach (there's another viewing party this Saturday, for those who aren't going up for the game).  She's kind of marginally interested in all the stuff I talk about on here, so while watching the replays of Davis' TD returns she says to me "I kind of believe you when you say that all the stuff going on on offense and defense isn't just chaos, but you'll never convince me that there's any plan behind THAT [i.e. kick returns and coverage]."  Challenge accepted.  I know next to nothing about special teams, but we'll probably never see back-to-back TD returns again, so I'd be remiss not to talk about them.  After a little research, this is what I've come up with.

Art Kafuman's Defense: Arizona

This post is going to build toward talking about the UA game, but it's also going to be my first general introduction to some important concepts in defensive football. We're going to look at some defensive structures before getting into the problems that UA caused for them.

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.

Unbalanced Formations

There's been some twitter buzz floating around about our unbalanced formations. What's an unbalanced formation, and how did it help us get our first TD against UA?

QB Run Game

Luke Rubenzer was the hot discussion topic after Saturday's game. Let's break down what he did, why it was effective, and where we need to go from here.

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.

Terminology

This is meant to be a reference post that I can link to in subsequent posts.  What follows is some basic terminology that's useful for readers to know when thinking about football strategy.