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.

 

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.