pjlbear;842283661 said:
Berk18,
Thanks for educating me/us about our offense. In viewing Goff I think I noticed that Goff was telegraphing where he was going to throw the ball - at least on short passes he seemed to lock on to a receiver and the linebackers/db's would then race to the receiver before Goff even released the ball leading to next to zero yards after catch. Perhaps a fake to one receiver and then throw to another would give our wr's more space.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this - I'm just an amateur and die hard CAL Golden Bear.
YAC is something I think we can definitely improve on next year. It sounds like you're talking about the quick game specifically, so I'll mostly comment on that.
When LB's race to a receiver in the quick game, it's not necessarily because the QB is looking at that receiver. In most college defenses, in any given zone coverage the LB's are dropping to specific receivers, not to specific spots, and they'll drop to that guy when they read pass no matter what. We get no YAC's for two major reasons: One is that the LB's could be really athletic and disciplined in their zone drops. This accounts for some of it, but the majority of our problems come from our execution, which is reason #2.
Execution involves the QB making a quick decisive read. The faster he gets the ball out, the less time the LB has to get to the receiver. Goff was pretty good at this, at least early in the season, but he can probably get even faster. Execution is also about precision, though. On any play where a receiver is settling down in an inside void, where the QB throws it is as important as when he does. Let's say that the LB covering the receiver is coming from the left side. When the offense is running with a high level of precision, the QB will throw the ball to the receiver's
right shoulder. This tells the receiver to spin upfield to the right, taking him away from the defender. The QB essentially throws the receiver to open grass. This is the kind of thing we didn't execute very well last year, at least early.
If we're having trouble with LB's, the best way to keep them out of their drops is actually with play-action. Remember that above I said that
when the LB's read pass they'll drop over a specific receiver no matter what. Well, if they read run initially, they're going to have a hard time doing that and YAC's will result. Some of our best plays in the quick game came from using play action to create non-standard variants of the plays that I discuss in my post. This is something we did very sparingly early in the season, so we'll see how it develops as I watch the rest of the games, but this is something I think we could do a lot more of to suck LB's up and away from these quick routes.
Anyway, those are some thoughts on this problem. It'll be interesting to see how these kinds of things develop throughout the last 9 games of the season.
