Football analysis and strategy from Chris B. Brown
Lane Kiffin’s Southern Cal Playbook and (Entertaining) UCLA Scouting Report
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Lane Kiffin’s Southern Cal Playbook and (Entertaining) UCLA Scouting Report
Lane Kiffin’s run at Southern Cal ended rather inauspiciously, but there are many who still respect his mind as an offensive coach, most notably his new boss at Alabama, Nick Saban. Not only did Kiffin learn from his father, Monte, he also spent long hours at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ football facility studying and learning…
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Gus Malzahn Discusses How to Attack Nick Saban’s Alabama Defense
This is from a few months back, but is one of the best one of these such segments I’ve ever seen. Malzahn does a really good job explaining exactly what his thought process was and would be in attacking Saban (and Kirby Smart)’s great Alabama defense: (H/t RBR.)
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Attacking “Psycho” fronts and other blitz heavy defensive looks
When asked earlier this season how he would describe the current trend in modern defenses, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton summed it up in one word: “confusion.” While there are few truly “new” ideas in football, there is a near infinite number of ways to hide, disguise, or slightly vary those ideas. One increasingly…
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Keep it simple, stupid – Paul Johnson edition
From the AJC: Q: Is there a coach out there whose schemes you like to watch for ideas? A: I don’t know if there’s any one person. We’ve had our system, and we’ve run it for a long time and we don’t change a whole lot. If somebody has some ideas on the staff, I…
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Game planning (and game theory) wisdom from . . . Lane Kiffin
From the 2011 Nike Coach of the Year Clinic: Each year we do a self-scout at the end of the year…. After the review, we could see where we made mistakes of adding plays that we did not have time to perfect. We have decided to stop running plays we add late in the week,…
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What impact will (or should) Tom Moore have on the New York Jets offense?
Jets coach Rex Ryan, more comfortable with a more experienced Mark Sanchez, has promised to open up the Jets offense to throw the ball more this season. And there was some (meager) evidence of this in the Jets first preseason game, as George Bretherton writes over at the NYT Fifth Down: Even if you took…
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Playcalling doesn’t have to be difficult
Okay, so here’s a story for you. Kilff Kingsbury was our starter, and he was sort of conservative, you know? B.J. (Symons) knew what I wanted to audible to before I even said it, but Kilff was just careful like that. It was third and long against someone, and their corner was cheating way up.…
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Why every team should install its offense in three days (and other political theories on coaching offense)
Dana Holgorsen, West Virginia’s new offensive coordinator and head coach in waiting, has frequently said that his entire record breaking offense can be installed “in three days.” And, now that his three days of spring practice are up, he said on day four his team will simply “start over,” and will run through this install…
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How can a pass-first team score more touchdowns in the red zone?
I received this great question from a reader: We run the Airraid offense, and we’ve noticed that it’s very easy to move the ball down the field to the 20 but then it gets really difficult as the field compresses. We can’t power run because that’s not what we do and it’s hard to throw…
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First down means everything
According to an exhaustive study of NFL play data conducted by Yale professor Cade Massey, what happens on first and 10 in an NFL game is a powerful indicator of who will win. According to Dr. Massey, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Management, the ability of an NFL team to meet certain…