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?

Rules

In my opinion, the most important rule in football is the rule that the offense must have seven men on the line of scrimmage. Closely connected to this is the rule that, of those seven, only the two players on each end of the line are eligible receivers. This rule gives football much of its strategic shape and is responsible for many of its characteristic formations. For example, the pro-I formation:

The rules above explain why everyone has five offensive linemen.  Consider that you must have seven players on the LOS, and only the two on each end are eligible to catch passes.  In this diagram, seven guys are on the LOS (X, LT, LG, C, RG, RT, Y). Five of these guys are not the end men on the LOS (LT, LG, C, RG, RT), and so are ineligible receivers and will never get the ball.  Because these five are ineligible receivers, you might as well make them good blockers. Those five good blockers are your OL. 

These rules also explain the names “tight end” and “split end.” The two “end” men are the only players on the LOS who are eligible receivers. A “tight end” lines up in close to the offensive line, while a “split end” lines up “split out” away from the core of the formation. 

These rules also explain why a “flanker” (the WR off the line of scrimmage, Z in the formation above) lines up a few yards off the ball; if Z were on the LOS, then the TE (Y) wouldn't be eligible to catch passes, because Z would now be outside of him on the LOS, and so Y wouldn't be the end man. 

These rules also explain why there are five eligible receivers. If there are 5 guys ineligible to catch a pass (the OL) and 1 QB doing the passing, that leaves five guys who can catch the ball. In my opinion, no other rules have been more influential in shaping the strategic backbone of modern day football.

Unbalanced Formations

Given these two rules, let's look at unbalanced formations. Take the seven guys who have to be aligned on the LOS. In an unbalanced formation, all that you're doing is putting more of those seven guys on one side of the formation than on the other. Let's take a basic “tackle over” unbalanced formation as our example:

This looks almost identical to the Pro-I formation shown above. The difference is that the LT is lined up on the right side of the formation, where the TE would usually be, while the TE (Y) is lined up outside the LG, where the LT would usually be. Also, while Z was off the LOS in a normal pro-I formation, he's on the LOS in an unbalanced pro-I formation.  X, meanwhile, is off the LOS. 

What makes the formation in the diagram above unbalanced? Remember the most important rules of football strategy: there must be seven offensive players on the LOS, and only the end men are eligible receivers. In this unbalanced I-formation there are seven men on the LOS (Y, LG, C, RG, RT, LT, Z), but only two of them are to the left of center (Y and the LG) while four are to the right of center (the RG, RT, LT and Z). This contrasts with the normal pro-I, where there are three players on the LOS to the left of center (X, LT, and LG) and three to the right of center (RG, RT, and Y).  In the normal Pro-I, we can consider the C as being the middle of the formation.  In an unbalanced formation, he isn't at the center of the formation.

Why is this difficult to defend? Defensive fronts normally align based on where the center is. So, the NT lines up over the center, the other DT lines up over one of the guards, and the DE's line up over the guys immediately outside of the OG's, as seen against the I-formation: 

Usually the guys outside of the OG's are ineligible receivers, as is the case in this normal I-formation, so you don't have to account for them in coverage (as is the case with the OT's in the diagram above). In the unbalanced formation, however:

the guy outside of the LG (Y) is an eligible receiver, because there's no one on the LOS outside of him. If the defense doesn't recognize this fact, they can fail to account for Y in coverage by lining up as if he is the ineligible LT. They don't recognize that they have to account for him, leaving him wide open. Meanwhile they cover the LT (now on the right side of the formation) as if he's an eligible receiver even though he's not.

The First Two Offensive Plays Against UA

Unbalanced formations don't only have advantages in the passing game. They can also be used to outnumber an unsuspecting defense in the run game. Let's look at our first two run plays from the UA game:

The only player not on the diagram is the FS playing in the deep middle of the field. First, why is this formation unbalanced? It's different from the tackle-over unbalanced formation diagrammed in the previous section, but the idea is the same. We have seven men on the LOS (LT, LG, C, RG, RT, Y, Z). Two of those (LT and LG) are to the left of center, while four (RG, RT, Y, Z) are to the right. UA hasn't accounted for this shift, though.  They're still lining up as if the C is  in the middle of the formation. This means that while we've shifted our formation unbalanced to the right, they still have a CB on the left side of the formation who is completely useless, because there's no one on the left side of the formation for him to cover. We've negated him completely. Furthermore, they haven't shifted their defensive front to the right of the diagram even though we've shifted our offensive formation to the right.  They're still lining up as though the center is in the middle of the formation.

As shown in the diagram above, we're running “power” to the right, which means that our LG is pulling to the right side of the formation. This gives us SIX blockers to the right of center (the pulling LG, RG, RT, Y, X, and the FB). The defense doesn't have anywhere near enough numbers to match this. Pre-snap they only have three defenders in the box to the right of center (the DE, SS, and one LB), and we get an easy seven yards. The very next play (run at tempo so that the D doesn't have time to adjust) we run the exact same play for a 44 yard TD run. I've included both plays in the video below.  Pause before each snap to confirm that this an unbalanced formation, and why it is unbalanced:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoW1JjAFZJY&feature=youtu.be
 

Unbalanced formations should be all the rage for those who pay attention to modern spread offenses. We actually do this kind of thing a lot. The shovel passes to Treggs against USC last year operated on similar principales, and I know that Sark also did this with success against UCLA last year. Sonny and TF ran this kind of thing less often at La Tech, but they did run it, and the precise formation is always slightly different and presents a different problem for defensive adjustments. I don't know how many other teams are hopping on this band wagon, but it's an interesting phenomenon to be on the look-out for.  As always, check out the BI thread here for discussion: http://bearinsider.com/forums/showthread.php?86486-Bear-Raid-Breakdown-Unbalanced-Formations-and-our-1st-TD-vs-Arizona&p=842364165#post842364165

Just as a heads-up, my next post (hopefully coming before the Colorado game) will be a monster post about defense and the 4^th Q of the UA game, so stay tuned. There will be a lot of important stuff in there.