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.

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.

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.