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.

Cal Defense vs. OSU 2016

Once again, Cal's 2016 defense is historically bad and people want answers. I don't have them (if I did I'd be collecting half a million a year and saving Sonny's job), but there are a few things that can be added to the discussion that might be helpful for thinking about what we're watching week-in and week-out.

The biggest questions that people have are based around coverage. There seems to be a solid consensus that goes something like this: Art Kaufman is worried that our DB's will get burned if we play aggressive coverage schemes, and so we play off-coverage and don't put enough guys in the box, which also limits us in the pass rush. As a result, not only do we get killed in the run game, but we give up a ton of passing yards with a “Bend But Don't Break” coverage strategy. If we're going to get killed in the passing game as it is, why not play more aggressively with the DB's, load up the box, and get after the RB/QB?

Treggs' TD vs. UW

If you're interested in scheme, go back and watch Cal's offense vs. UW's defense right now. Do it twice. This game was awesome. Both sides had clearly scouted each other well, and both sides made great adjustments from those initial good gameplans. I've got a few aspects of our offense that I want to write posts on, so be on the lookout for a later post about what Brandon Jones has added to our run game (more lead blocking!), but for now I want to talk packaged plays, and particularly Treggs' 1^st half TD.

Introducing Oregon State's New Coaches

Later in the off-season I plan to put out some e-books on the other teams in the PAC-12. In most cases, the coaching staffs at other schools are staying the same, so the breakdowns are easier to do. Oregon State's new staff is cobbled together from several different places, however, and so my breakdown of them will be a little more complicated. As a result, I'm putting together a three part preview of what we can expect from Gary Andersen's Beavers. This post, on the coaching staff and its background, is installment one.

A Study in 4-Verticals: Cal vs. UCLA (2013 and 2014)

When Cal played UCLA at the Rose Bowl in 2013, the game was downright boring. Cal got shut out in every quarter but the second, and after scoring ten points in that quarter gave up twenty unanswered to lose the game 10-37. Goff threw for a near season low 215 yards with zero TD's and one awful INT. One year later, Cal was driving with a chance to kick a go-ahead FG in the final minutes of an exciting, back-and-forth 34-36 shootout. Unfortunately, we all know how that ended.

This post is going to answer two questions about the scenario that I just described. The first is, “Why was Cal's offense so much more successful in 2014 than in 2013,” and the second is “Why did we throw a deep interception on a play that didn't need a deep pass?” Conveniently, an answer to both of these questions is the pass concept “4 Verticals,” a concept I've discussed a few times on this blog. There are a ton of interesting specifics behind that general answer, though, and this post will focus on those details.

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.