Football analysis and strategy from Chris B. Brown
Translating Nick Saban: Three Plays from the BCS Championship
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Translating Nick Saban: Three Plays from the BCS Championship
Nick Saban did the full ESPN car wash today, and ESPN, to their credit, fit in a brief bit of actual football talk as they looked at three plays from the BCS Championship game against Notre Dame. The segment is definitely worth watching: Although there was good information here, the segment was also a bit…
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Grantland: Charlie Strong, Joe Lee Dunn, and the Birth of the 3-3-5 Defense — An excerpt from The Essential Smart Football
An excerpt from my new book, The Essential Smart Football, is now up over at Grantland: Even with his success, Dunn’s career can also be a warning about the 3-3-5. He’s held down jobs with good schools, but he never was able to break out beyond schools like Memphis, Mississippi State, and Ole Miss. While…
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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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Bud Foster of Virginia Tech explains his “field dog” pressure
As I’ve previously explained, Virginia Tech’s “lunchpail defense” has gone through several evolutions, despite remaining one of the elite defenses in the nation: In the nineties, many teams tried to emulate Frank Beamer and defensive coordinator Bud Foster’s scheme, with its premium on defenders stacking the line to either stop the run or scare the…
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Bobby Petrino’s shallow cross concept – concepts, routes, and protection
The shallow cross is, quite possibly, the best pass play in football: Almost any quarterback can complete it; almost any receiver can run it (though there is more nuance than maybe one might initially realize to a good shallow route); it is a way to get “speed in space” without requiring a big arm; it…
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Smart Notes – Tressel, Triple Inside Fire Zones – 3/15/2011
I’m generally not a fan of sentencing guidelines, but the Jim Tressel, Cam Newton, and other stories indicate to me that some kind of guidelines would be helpful, even if they were entirely advisory. The upshot of what I mean is that it’d be nice if we, as the football populace, knew that if you…
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