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.