berk18;842283732 said:
I've attacked the idea that we can't run our plays against athletic defenses in a number of different ways, but maybe a new approach is in order. We can look at your example of the Campbell INT. There is nothing uniquely Air Raid about throwing down the seam vs. Cover-3. The Air Raid isn't distinct because of the plays it uses or the concepts that those plays are built on. You can find triangle reads, floods, etc. in every pro-style play-book. The concepts work every Sunday against the most athletic defenses in the game. The Air Raid isn't distinct because of what it does run, but rather because of what it doesn't. In short, the Air Raid is different in the big picture in terms of its attack strategy and adjustments, but from snap to whistle it doesn't ask its players to do anything that every other offense wouldn't also ask them to do. You can argue that a limited playbook is easier to defend for other reasons, but athleticism isn't the crux here.
OK
Thanks for filling me in.
Let me be clear that my concerns are specific to the quick out pass portion of the short passing game which is supposed to the staple of it.
Some of my comments are based on claims made by Dykes about the offense. From what I remember, a big key was winning match-ups. Due to the practice style alluded to by slider above, players become experts at executing plays through sheer repetition. Then they can win those match-ups in space because of perfect timing. In this sense, the claim was/is that it doesn't matter if teams know what's coming, the perfect execution would win out. But this is not what I saw at all. Maybe it was because it was the first year. Maybe it was because, as slider said, we lacked the OL and running game. But the short passing game did not work very well even if we executed the play well because defenses closed quickly knowing it was coming. When we ran misdirection plays, we tended to fool the defense and got more yardage.
To me this shows that it does matter whether or not the defense knows what is coming. It also shows that creating mismatches on paper and running tons of reps in practice does not really translate to the field when defensive players are good enough to compensate with great individual effort. And Dykes admitted that practices were not translating to games. For example, there are players that simply blow through a double team block to make the tackle. That doesn't show up on paper. And it seems that there are plenty of defenses with those type of players in the pac-12.
I'll admit that part of the problem with the quick out was that our inside receivers didn't block well much of the time. But I don't get how those failures could happen if players are practicing their blocking assignments with a great deal of repetitions involved.
The upshot is that, while the offense looks good in theory, the ability of the bear-raid to win matchups and get YAC just wasn't happening. It was especially disappointing since Cal used the quick out on first down, in lieu of a running game. Too often, those plays resulted in 2nd and long, a situation that, as you mentioned, resulted in pressure on our QB.
Until we have a proven OL, I really don't see any of this changing at Cal. And will improvements with our OL effctively compensate for the trend towards better defensive fronts in the conference?
The bottom line is that, right now Cal is losing physical matchups because they are not as strong, fast or tough and no amount of reps is going to change that. That is not to say Cal is a weak team, but it does point to Dykes unfamiliarity with how good the conference is now. Hopefully a full year of off-season work after that dismal season will prove that Dykes and the Cal team learned where the bar is set when it comes to conditioning. But I'm not expecting much.
