Big C_Cal;842526002 said:
3. I should probably know this better than I do, but... How does Oregon's offense differ from ours (in terms of scheme) and, historically, how did it evolve and how does its evolution fit into the "spread timeline" especially in its different evolution from the TFS/Air Raid?
This is an interesting question, and I'm actually working on an e-book exactly about this (which is why the blog's been slow lately). In a nutshell, the Air Raid developed out of the BYU offense of Lavell Edwards' teams (think Norm Chow). Leach and Mumme visited BYU a ton in their early coaching days, and basically chopped up and simplified what they were doing there into the Air Raid passing game. Fans call any spread offense that throws a lot Air Raid, but in actuality schematically, the Air Raid is probably best defined by a specific set of passing plays. For the plays themselves, I've got some old posts [URL="http://calfootballstrategy.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-bear-raid-quick-passing-game.html"]
[U]here[/U][/URL] and [URL="http://calfootballstrategy.blogspot.com/2014/03/downfield-passing-game.html"]
[U]here[/U][/URL]. Those plays aren't special or unique, and the individual plays will show up in plenty of systems. In the PAC-12, you'll see some overlap with Arizona and ASU, for example, but they also do other stuff that's different (ASU, in particular, has a fuller downfield passing game than Air Raid teams do but runs several of our concepts. Arizona runs a few of our concepts, but does some other stuff too). The Air Raid has just packaged a particular set of common plays as part of a broader offensive philosophy. This was all getting going in the 90's at schools like Kentucky and Valdosta St.
The big difference between our offense and Leach's is in the run game, which has a ripple effect. This is a simplification, but WSU only runs when the defense plays with a 5-man box, and it's usually packaged with a screen option. Their run game reflects this priority schematically, with everything being either an inside zone or a base play. This was implemented in the mid-2000's at Tech, and was actually a marked ADDITION to the historical Air Raid run game. Even now, the OL just fires out downhill at the defender that's covering them, and the RB finds the seam. Our offense, in contrast, incorporates a power play (with a variant run to the side of the RB's alignment to keep the defense honest), and we regularly run both inside and outside zone, with a pin-and-pull variant of the OZ for when a TE can get leverage. You'll see similar elements out of Utah, UCLA, Arizona, and ASU, for example. It doesn't matter what those play names are for now, but the point in listing the plays is to show that we have a real run-game playbook, which WSU really doesn't. That's just our base run offense, but we also have a variety of specialty plays from unbalanced formations, out of the bone, etc. Because we have a real run game, we were also one of the earlier offenses to get on the packaged play bandwagon, meaning that any time that we call a run play, there's a pass added onto it. In 2013 that pass was usually a screen, but in 2014 we started incorporating deeper routes. In the UCLA game, for example, we ran a packaged play with a go-route on the backside. UCLA showed all out blitz, which would've disrupted the run, so Goff just caught the ball and immediately cut it loose down the sidelines to the go route.
Oregon's a completely different thing, and the best way to describe it is that Chip Kelly's brilliant. After playing at New Hampshire, his coaching stops before Oregon were Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and New Hampshire, but somehow he got enough football experience and knowledge to develop an offense that he was recently able to bring to the NFL. Absolutely remarkable. If I remember the story correctly, Chip contacted Bellotti about the OC job at Oregon, Bellotti didn't even find him.
When you're talking about Oregon's offense broadly, you obviously have to start with the zone read, which is just a play. Rich Rodriguez (or rather, his QB at Tulane) invented it when they were "just trying to get a first down." They had no idea that it would take off. Basically, they wanted to run zone, which was (and is) all the rage in the NFL, but their RB kept getting tackled by the backside DE. The QB said, "Don't worry, I'll just read him," and it started to work a little bit. Now NFL teams run it, but before that it was obviously one of the things that Chip featured at Oregon. Oregon runs the zone read on steroids though, and I don't know that any team does it quite like them. For a long time already, they've been switching up who they read, so they can read a backside edge defender, but they can also read a NT or LB, which causes a number of schematic problems for the defense. I don't see a lot of other teams who go this far with it.
Oregon was also one of the earliest adopters of the packaged plays that I was talking about above, but Chip incorporated way more options than most teams in the package. So, there could be a RB run, a QB run, a screen, or a pop-pass to a TE in the seam, for example. UCLA and ASU, are the closest to Oregon in this particular regard. I need to look more at their actual, straight-up passing game, but my impression is that it's more complicated than, say, Arizona's or ours, including some pro-style stuff with route conversions based on coverage and all that. It's just a really, really good offense that takes a little bit from everyone while also innovating, and it's a lot more complicated than people think. Philosophically it's a lot like the old Wing-T in its sequencing, but it's obviously jazzed up for the 2000's to capitalize on recent trends.
