This unbelievable set of videos is courtesy of Brophy. I don’t know what he had to do to obtain these (nor do I want to know), but you’re all the beneficiaries of what was undoubtedly some unspeakable sacrifice he made. Brophy has put up roughly six or seven hours of video; check out parts one and two.
The context is that Alex Gibbs, then offensive line coach for the Atlanta Falcons while they had Michael Vick at quarterback, visited with Florida’s staff to learn about potentially adding some quarterback read plays to his vaunted zone schemes (the same scheme they ran with the Denver Broncos). Florida’s staff, meanwhile had just spent their first season in the SEC to decidedly mixed results.
Because Florida’s quarterback was not, by himself, much of a run threat (Chris Leak was still their quarterback) and defenses clogged the inside zone and simply slow played the reads and options, the Florida staff installed the outside zone mid-season with some modest success but obviously some ups and downs. The rationale was that the outside zone would get defenders’ feet moving better to open up creases and the associated options. (This is essentially Chip Kelly of Oregon’s gameplan every week.) This meeting with Gibbs was an attempt to learn that particular scheme from the best, though throughout the videos you can see the Florida coaches trying to think about how to fit it within what they already do in terms of the shotgun spread run game, with Dan Mullen, Addazio, and others each having their own points of view. All of this is great stuff, and the problems these coaches wrestle with in these videos — how to apply zone blocking to an ever increasing variety fronts and how to adapt the spread offense and its various reads and options to ever evolving defensive reactions — remain with us today. Check out the whole thing.