One Season Ends, Another Begins

Well, Monday night ended the collegiate football season, and what a display by Ohio State! I was rooting for Oregon, not out of any particular fan reason, and not for any particular dislike of Ohio State (unlike if, say, Texas or Notre Dame were playing, but fat chance of that!), but just because I like Oregon’s up-tempo fast-break style of play. I like the stress it puts on defenses…..well, most defenses. Hats off to Urban Meyer, who although I’ve stolen my share of concepts from him over the years (as far back as when he was at Bowling Green), I suppose I just didn’t realize how good he was. I got a pretty good idea when his 3^rd string QB helped beat Alabama, but last night cemented it.

OSU’s willingness to run the counter over and over again was admirable. And you might say, well it was working, so why not? Well, that brings up another related, interesting point…one of my good friends and fellow coaches, Winston Martin remarked to me the other day, that at the high school level, he (as a DC) pretty much figures that offensive coaches get bored easily, that we want to run through our playbook. And I’ll admit that there may be some validity to that. I know that I “get bored” easily sometimes and want to run some things just to show them. So last night got me wondering if I would be as willing to run the same play over and over again, even if it was working. I don’t know for sure, and I suspect that many of you playcallers out there assume that you would, but you might want to go back and check your old call sheets to verify that. But I do know that now it is in the forefront of my mind.

As far as those counters were concerned, another one of the coaches I used to work for, way back in the day was Fred Valko, and his comment was spot on, “The counter trey hasn’t been run that well since Riggins and Co.” I saw two different ones last night from OSU. The one they ran the most was what I call a “Skinny” – the guard and H-back pull. That H back/TE /FB type player did a great job all night long. The other one they ran (I only saw it once) was what many call a “Dart” where only the tackle pulls. I didn’t see the classic version of the counter, where both the guard and tackle pull, but I may have missed it.

We’ve had great success with the counter over the years. I’ve been blessed with very athletic tackles at many of my stops, and it really, really opens things up when you have the ability to pull them on plays. If you don’t have access to an athletic tackle, then you might run the “Skinny” variation. I don’t think that was OSU’s concern, I think they were more worried about Oregon’s big DEs crashing down in a hurry. So that would be another reason to run a Skinny. You might run the Dart if you were going to package the counter with a backside read, like you would with a zone read. I don’t remember if OSU did it that way or not, but that is a possibility. You can also package the “classic” version with the backside read as well, to help keep those DL at home a bit.

Once again, hats off to Coach Meyer and the Buckeyes. We very well may be seeing them again next year!

Now that college is over, that can only mean that the women’s season is starting! I talked about the two teams that folded last week – the Las Vegas Showgirlz and the Boston Militia. I’ve very pleased to report that it looks like both teams will continue in some form or fashion, Las Vegas as the Sin City Sundevils and Boston as….well, we don’t know yet, but they will have a team.

Both teams coming back do have questions. For any of his shortcomings, Coach Dion Lee of the Showgirlz had a pretty imaginative offensive mind and did an overall good job of using his personnel I thought. As I mentioned last week, he did a great job of getting his team hyped and convinced that they could beat the world. So I’ll be very interested to see how the new coach implements the offense and what kind of mindset he brings. I’ll just say this….please, please, whatever you do Coach, don’t become another one of those mind-numbingly boring double wing teams. Please remember that you’re in the entertainment capital of the world, and that football is supposed to be entertaining to fans. That is all……

The Boston team has an entirely different question. I’m sure the players and coaches will answer this in their minds right now, but I’ll be interested more by their actions come July, and that is, “what happens now that the money is gone?” And hey, I’ll freely admit that I have no clue as to who the new owner(s) is/are and what their personal wealth situation is. But I find it hard to believe that another owner will come in with the same resources available that their old one had (and if they do, count me as being extremely jealous). If that is the case, that the players/coaches may have to come up with more out of pocket than they did before, I just wonder how it will affect them. That’s not meant as a dig at them at all – they’ve kicked my butt two too many times on the field for me to be anything less than respectful to them – but that’s just another question going through my mind.

The Surge has put together some pretty good numbers this year from an athlete standpoint. If the veterans can regain their hunger after losing to Boston, similar to how they did in 2012, and the rookie class shows up ready to work and follows through, we could be pretty good. It’ll be very nice to get back to a two-platoon system. The last two years we haven’t had the numbers to do that. Not only did we have half the athletes, but also in effect half the coaching time. We’ll see how serious everyone is in just a couple of weeks!

NFL Conference Championships this weekend – who ya got?