Football analysis and strategy from Chris B. Brown
New Ringer: Chip Kelly’s offense is broken. Really broken. How did that happen?
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New Ringer: Chip Kelly’s offense is broken. Really broken. How did that happen?
I will be writing for The Ringer this fall (which I’m quite excited about). My first piece is about how (and why) Chip Kelly’s offense is fundamentally broken: And now Kelly — stripped of any oversight over personnel — is in charge of a 49ers offense that boasts arguably the worst skill-position talent in the NFL and will be…
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New Feature: Football Strategy’s Tech-Fueled Future
I wrote a feature for Wired on what football strategy will look like in 50 years: Over the last few months I’ve asked a number of coaches at a variety of levels what they thought football strategy would be like in 50 years. Given that, as a profession, coaches tend to be focused on immediate…
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New Grantland: Breakdown of Gary Patterson’s TCU 4-2-5 Defense
I’ve been working for a few months on a deep-dive analysis of Gary Patterson’s morphing, multifarious 4-2-5 defense for Grantland, and it’s now up. Patterson’s defense is intriguing on a number of levels, and not only because TCU is ranked #2 in the preseason AP polls: Patterson’s 4-2-5 is custom built for the kinds of…
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New Grantland: True Grit — How a formula (and a secret ingredient) can help us evaluate Jameis Winston, Marcus Mariota, and the 2015 QB class
It’s now up over at Grantland: Drafting an NFL quarterback is risky business, and the lesson of Druckenmiller’s story and others like it is that no one truly knows which players will succeed in the pros. Even the brightest GMs and coaches can whiff badly: By nearly any measure, fewer than 50 percent of passers…
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New Grantland: Evaluating QBs: Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, Johnny Manziel…and You
It’s now up over at Grantland: That, however, is precisely what makes this draft so fascinating: Bortles, Bridgewater, and Manziel are all first-round talents with fifth-round flaws, and which of them a given personnel man or fan likes best says as much about that person as it does about that quarterback. They’re different players, but…
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Smart Links – Spurrier’s Mills, Oklahoma State’s Diamond, Tony Dungy, Seamus Heaney – 9/4/2013
Coach Hoover on Steve Spurrier’s 1995-1997 era Florida passing game. Coach Hoover shows one of my favorites from Spurrier, “Mills,” which his South Carolina team scored with for the first touchdown of the 2013 college football season. Compare this: With this: – I did a really fun podcast (which you can listen to here) with…
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Stanford HC David Shaw: Can Football Change the World?
Very interesting TEDx talk by Stanford head coach David Shaw:
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Chip Kelly on Designing an Offense
When I was hiring staff, I wanted to hire a lot of smart people. Then let’s sit together as a group and say, ‘Alright, what did you do in the quick game? How do we want to do it in the quick game? This is what we did here. How did you call it in…
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New! Shop in the Smart Football Store
Smart Football now has its own online store, just in time for the holidays, featuring shirts, accessories, and more. It’s just getting started, but be sure to check it out and get some goodies for your friends, families, and — in the case of my coaching readers — staff. Check out the store here. Be…
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Smart Links – Georgia’s Pass Protection, Super Quarterbacks, Macho Camacho, Under Defense – 12/5/2012
Why did Georgia lose to Alabama? What if I (or, more precisely, Coach Hoover) told you it was poor runningback pass protection fundamentals. – Johnny Football and the era of Super Quarterbacks, with some quotes from your humble editor. – Under defense from Pete Jenkins. – Brady Hoke has sought to bring “Manball” (not his…