CFB51 College Football Fan Community
The Power Five => Big Ten => Topic started by: OrangeAfroMan on May 31, 2020, 11:15:41 PM
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Just wondering.
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The program I want is my alma mater, Purdue.
I believe a high variance display of offensive firepower is our best chance of "punching up". So I voted for a pass heavy spread.
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Some is program dependent.
If I'm at a lesser one, say Cal, I'm running the triple. Probably a flexion variation.
If I'm at a bigger school, I'm running whatever we call Dan Mullin's offense. I guess it's a run spread, but it's versatile.
I can't logically run the single wing as a primary college offense, but I'd want to. All that said, Wisconsin should only run what it does now, which is run-heavy, I and double tight wing, with a passing game that spends a little time in the gun. It's interestingly a whole offense that runs off run-run-pass and remains effective.
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Balanced spread, which is not a choice.
I'd love to see somebody run the single-wing and succeed with it, though.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=241CC0jhsdk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=241CC0jhsdk)
1944 Army training video of the single-wing. It's long, has the play graphic, and commentary.
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I’m having whatever Lincoln Riley or Ryan Day are running. Thanks.
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Nice video. I watched about 8:20 of it. I'll have to get back to it and watch the remaining two hours plus.
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Balanced pro-style / spread hybrid, which is basically what Michigan finally has since last year.
Pound bad/mediocre teams into submission with the running game and then open up the playbook against top 25 teams. There's no reason to run too many passing plays against other teams and risk getting the QB hurt unless/until they stack the box.
I realize that's a somewhat oversimplified explanation, but that's the essence of what seems to work best along with a strong defense.
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I think it's highly dependent on situation. A program like Georgia Tech or Army has no chance to get enough 4-5 star players to play man on man, it won't work. Programs that are top ten in recruiting each year can run some version of what pros run so they can continue to attract players who want to play on Sunday.
I think if Ohio State started a gimmicky offense, they would lose some ability to attract high level skill players and OLs.
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I'd run something very similar to what Scott Frost is running
heavy on the run game with plenty of QB run
plenty of option in the run game and run/pass option
a lot of traditional option in a more spread formation
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power I with option elements and leverage of play action passing... that said, I'm not sure you can recruit to that today. Therefore, I'd run a offense like OSU had under Urban... power spread with deep passing threats.
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1983
Grimminger, Tranowich, and Stienkuhler
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One offense I admired what that WVU spread they used to beat us in the bowl game. (I thought our defense was completely unprepared, but whatever.). The UGA strength was the secondary, so WVU lined up 4 WRs as wide as possible and played 7 on 7 up the middle with a very fast QB and RB. If our LBs missed a tackle, and they did ....
It was 28-0 before I had my first beer.
You play to your strengths. Richt was way out coached for that game, not for the first time. Or last.
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I think it's highly dependent on situation. A program like Georgia Tech or Army has no chance to get enough 4-5 star players to play man on man, it won't work. Programs that are top ten in recruiting each year can run some version of what pros run so they can continue to attract players who want to play on Sunday.
I think if Ohio State started a gimmicky offense, they would lose some ability to attract high level skill players and OLs.
The cool part of this thread is that you can pick your situation and be specific :)
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Does anyone think there was a player/moment/season where HCs went from fearing for his QB's health to using them as a main ball-carrier (aside from traditional option teams, of course)? Was it Harris at BG with Urban Meyer? Someone before then?
Pre-Tebow, there's Pat White (WV) and Brad Smith (MIZ) for sure. I put Vince Young separately, because so many of his runs were scrambles. I think most HCs would hate that, except for VY, the scrambles were obviously effective.
Josh Cribbs at Kent St.
Was there someone pre-mid 2000s?
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Antwaan Randle El comes to mind
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Obviously, back in the 30s and 40s, there was often little distinction between the RB and QB positions.
Ray Goff in 1975 ran the ball about ten times a game, designed plays.
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The Split-T offense, started by Don Faurot at Missouri and popularized by Bud Wilkinson at OU, used the QB as a runner a lot, but it was an option-ish offense.
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I feel like option QBs could risk injury because they weren't great passers to begin with. Most everyone ran the option in the 70s and into the 80s, where most teams broke away from it and started passing more in the 90s.
When that happened, it seems like HCs treated their QBs with kid gloves - (perhaps) over-valuing the pocket-passers and wishing they could put their QB in a green, no-hitting jersey in games.
But then that changed. I know for certain Meyer threw his QBs to the wolves, but I'm not sure who did it before him, in the early 2000s or even the 90s maybe.
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A mobile QB is a nightmare for defenses, even today. He doesn't have to run a designed play, but if can seriously scramble on a pass play, you almost need to spy on defense.
And the QB draw is always a threat. A guy like Fields who is big and used to contact as well as elusive and unafraid if very tough to defend (duh, great insight CD).
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Well I think Meyer utilized his QB as a running threat due to the numbers game. Instead of the QB being a fragile piece you want out of harm's way, which virtually makes the game 11 defenders vs 10 on offense, he figured "No," it needs to be 11 on 11.
Running with the QB makes the RB an 'extra' blocker - extra when compared to traditional running plays.
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Tom Osborne and Barry Switzer understood this in the 70s
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Tom Osborne and Barry Switzer understood this in the 70s
Right, but sometime between Red Blaik running the single-wing in the 40s with half the offense tossing the occasional forward pass and the option attacks of the 70s, with athleticism trumping arm talent, the passing QB became a thing. And post-option college football held that thing on a pedestal...until it didn't.
I'm just thinking about when it started taking passing QBs off that pedestal.
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Switzer and Osborne didn't have many passing QBs, thanks to recruiting, but they had a few
Troy Aikman comes to mind
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Switzer and Osborne didn't have many passing QBs, thanks to recruiting, but they had a few
Troy Aikman comes to mind
He's included in the 1985 Whoa Nellie team set for OU. He was running that option, too, if you watch old videos, pre-injury.
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Well I think Meyer utilized his QB as a running threat due to the numbers game. Instead of the QB being a fragile piece you want out of harm's way, which virtually makes the game 11 defenders vs 10 on offense, he figured "No," it needs to be 11 on 11.
Running with the QB makes the RB an 'extra' blocker - extra when compared to traditional running plays.
Absolutely. It's not like the spread is rocket science - it's a lot of similar concepts to old option attacks just with guys spread out so there are fewer defenders in the middle of the field.
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CFB oscillates, I think, between some basic concepts, QBs running fairly often and QBs running only on broken plays. The read option is a useful device, I don't know when that started, or if it was used in the 40s. Obviously the triple option was a read option, but I think most of the reading was after the snap.
I guess many plays are "read options" other than a simple handoff, and even there the QB is reading at the line.
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I feel like option QBs could risk injury because they weren't great passers to begin with. Most everyone ran the option in the 70s and into the 80s, where most teams broke away from it and started passing more in the 90s.
When that happened, it seems like HCs treated their QBs with kid gloves - (perhaps) over-valuing the pocket-passers and wishing they could put their QB in a green, no-hitting jersey in games.
But then that changed. I know for certain Meyer threw his QBs to the wolves, but I'm not sure who did it before him, in the early 2000s or even the 90s maybe.
It's hard to get an overall read because by the time the option was fully getting chased out (late 90s), the run spreads were starting up with Northwestern and Clemson under Rich Rod.
But they have kind of variations. Are we talking high-usage QBs? Medium-usage QBs next to a single high-usage tailback? QBs next to a fleet of medium-to-low-usage tailbacks? It gets wonky.
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I forgot about N'Western using it. And those WV RichRod teams were magic - run-heavy spread. How could it work so well at WV and so poorly at UM?
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Swinging gate.
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I forgot about N'Western using it. And those WV RichRod teams were magic - run-heavy spread. How could it work so well at WV and so poorly at UM?
He had Woody Dantzler at Clemson, who had the first 2,000/1,000 season (I think). Carried a team-high 206 times as a senior.
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I forgot about N'Western using it.
The great Randy Walker. I went to Miami when he was there and dated a friend of his daughter.
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This becomes an interesting question is you put yourself as head coach at say Kansas or NW or GaTech or Purdue or Cal or Oregon State, etc.
I think the BIGS all will stay largely vanilla because they can, with a few variations.
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Balanced spread, which is not a choice.
I'd love to see somebody run the single-wing and succeed with it, though.
this, kinda. i'd like a mix of pro set and spread, with a balance playcalling (not necessarily balanced play results). i like the offenses we see today a lot, but some commit so much to spread passing that they can't run when needed. i still want that capability.
also would heavily depend on personnel available. taking last 2 years of bama roster, i'd lean spread much more. if it's 2011 bama roster, much more pro set.
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I've just been continually creating teams for the Whoa Nellie game, and I watch a bit of each team's offense and it's incredible how homogeneous they are these past few years.
Shotgun, one-back, read-option....dive plays, quick slants,...it's all everyone's doing.
And today I work on the top 10 teams from 1976, and it's 80% option/veer teams.
We all know there tends to be copycatting, but it's perhaps a certainty/inevitability.
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when something is working, that's what you do.
football is cyclical too. offenses develop new trends, defenses adjust to stop it, offense changes to take advantage of new defensive weaknesses, so forth...
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I can recall when "The Spread" was going to change football forever and make defense irrelevant. Then the read option. Then the Single Wing. I may have the order wrong.
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Several of you have specified that it would depend on your program strength.
What I don't understand is that if there are offenses that minimize talent disparities, then an elite program running that type of offense would be unstoppable.
In previous conversations, recruiting has been cited as an issue. But if Alabama suddenly started running the option, I don't see their recruiting suffering at all. Their elite WR recruits would become wingbacks. Now, there may be a fear that they'd no longer be an NFL factory for some positions.....but I'm not sure that would actually occur.
If a certain method is a great equalizer, then elite programs should implement it.
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Obviously, programs that have superb talent want to maximize talent disparities.
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Several of you have specified that it would depend on your program strength.
What I don't understand is that if there are offenses that minimize talent disparities, then an elite program running that type of offense would be unstoppable.
In previous conversations, recruiting has been cited as an issue. But if Alabama suddenly started running the option, I don't see their recruiting suffering at all. Their elite WR recruits would become wingbacks. Now, there may be a fear that they'd no longer be an NFL factory for some positions.....but I'm not sure that would actually occur.
If a certain method is a great equalizer, then elite programs should implement it.
And I've argued many times WHY this doesn't make sense. If a strategy introduces higher variance, it can be a negative in a sport where one loss a season makes your road to the CFP difficult, and two losses in a season are almost assured to exclude you.
For a school like Purdue, a high-variance offense that has "higher highs" but also "lower lows" might lead to a situation where it nets you 2-3 additional wins per year over a low-variance offense, but also then loses you a game you should win because it's just not clicking.
For a team like Alabama or OSU which is legitimately expected to be better talent-wise than at least 11 of their regular-season opponents, they don't have a 2-3 game upside from a high-variance offense, but they definitely still have the downside.
When you have the talent you want an offense that minimizes turnovers and three-and-outs / stalled drives. You want to stay ahead of down-and-distance, trust your talent, and wear down the opponent over 4 quarters. IMHO that is incompatible with pass-heavy spread attacks.
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One caveat... It's my bias / prior belief that variance is higher in these offenses. I don't have empirical evidence of this. So my argument is based on a premise that I think makes logical sense, but could be completely wrong.
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Bwarb: You might be the most careful, conscientious arguer that I've ever seen on a message board. And that's a high standard, because there are a lot of very careful, conscientious arguers right here on this board.
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I get all that, we've discussed that before.
But if there's something that outmanned teams do in order to 'sneak' closer to upset victories, then if the favored programs do those same things, it will always negate any advantage sought out by the underdog.
Running the option is a widely accepted offense that allows outmanned programs (ie service academies) to do better than they would otherwise.
So if an elite program, with all its advantages - talent, coaching, etc - decided to commit to it, too...how would a team sneak any closer to upsetting them?
If controlling the clock to limit your opponent's scoring opportunities is good for Army and tilts things slightly in their favor running the option, then it would similarly help Alabama's odds of winning, too. If preparing for an option team within the framework of one week in your season is tricky, isn't that an advantage a Clemson program should employ?
It's about maintaining that disparity and not allowing anything to shorten it. Keeping your opponent at arm's length by employing their own ways.
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And I've argued many times WHY this doesn't make sense. If a strategy introduces higher variance, it can be a negative in a sport where one loss a season makes your road to the CFP difficult, and two losses in a season are almost assured to exclude you.
For a school like Purdue, a high-variance offense that has "higher highs" but also "lower lows" might lead to a situation where it nets you 2-3 additional wins per year over a low-variance offense, but also then loses you a game you should win because it's just not clicking.
For a team like Alabama or OSU which is legitimately expected to be better talent-wise than at least 11 of their regular-season opponents, they don't have a 2-3 game upside from a high-variance offense, but they definitely still have the downside.
When you have the talent you want an offense that minimizes turnovers and three-and-outs / stalled drives. You want to stay ahead of down-and-distance, trust your talent, and wear down the opponent over 4 quarters. IMHO that is incompatible with pass-heavy spread attacks.
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One caveat... It's my bias / prior belief that variance is higher in these offenses. I don't have empirical evidence of this. So my argument is based on a premise that I think makes logical sense, but could be completely wrong.
Yeah, you'd need to show that a "high-variance" offense even exists, when you may simply be mislabeling ineffective offenses, lol.
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OAM, you seem to be positing that there is some magic-bullet offense that is good no matter whether your talent is rich or poor, no matter what kinds of defense you will face, and whether you have a good depth of talent or not.
But the reality is that some offensive schemes are better against some defenses than other offensive schemes are against those same defenses, and those other offensive schemes may be better than the original offensive schemes against different defenses.
Also, you seem to be saying that getting better at one phase of offense doesn't mean that you likely are going to get worse at another phase. Passing teams tend to have different types of guys on the OL than running teams do, for example. The guys who are best at pass-blocking are not necessarily the guys who are best at run-blocking. Run-heavy teams may not have enough skilled receivers to shift into a 4-wideouts formation. Pass-heavy spread teams may not have the personnel to line up and eat clock to close out the game.
There's no free lunch.
To me, what Bwarb argued makes perfect sense. A Purdue is more willing to run a riskier offense than Ohio State is because it has to do that to have a reasonable chance to beat Ohio State.
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I get all that, we've discussed that before.
But if there's something that outmanned teams do in order to 'sneak' closer to upset victories, then if the favored programs do those same things, it will always negate any advantage sought out by the underdog.
There you go. Your use of the term "always" suggests you completely missed the variance point of my argument.
I've used the 2018 Purdue upset of Ohio State, where they won in a 49-20 rout, as an example of this. Ohio State was running a high-variance spread offense.
- Ohio State slightly outgained Purdue.
- Ohio State had more first downs than Purdue.
- Ohio State had a higher 3rd down conversion rate than Purdue.
- Ohio State slightly edged Purdue in TOP.
- Ohio State ran 98 offensive plays to Purdue's 72.
Ohio State couldn't run the ball against Purdue's weak defense. They averaged 3 ypc, and only ran the ball 25 times against 73 pass attempts.
So what was the difference? For all that offensive success, they bogged down in the red zone and then were only 2/3 on their FG attempts. Purdue hit on big plays, so despite having a worse offense against a better defense, they got lucky when it mattered.
It's like boxing. If you're outmatched, you need to throw some haymakers and pray they connect, because if you fight a technical battle against a technician, they'll slowly wear you down.
In this case, both the outmanned and the favorite were throwing haymakers, except it was only the outmanned fighter that was landing them.
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To me, what Bwarb argued makes perfect sense. A Purdue is more willing to run a riskier offense than Ohio State is because it has to do that to have a reasonable chance to beat Ohio State.
And hopefully my last post (crossed in the mail) points out the corollary to that...
That Ohio State running a riskier offense ALSO increases the chance that Purdue beats Ohio State.
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I'm not understanding 2 things here:
1 - high variance offense.....what's the variance? What does that mean?
2 - how was OSU's offense "risky"? It's the offense they practice every day. It's the one the HC installed on purpose.
CWS, saying I'm suggesting there's a magic bullet offense is missing what I'm saying. Maybe I'm putting it poorly.
We all know that (let's just grab 2 programs) - when New Mexico plays Oklahoma, if NM does what OU does, they lose every time. If the coaches at NM just did the same thing as OU, they'd be fired, because anyone could just do the same things as your opponents and lose. They need to do something different. No, NM may never be on the same level as OU, but if winning is the goal, NM is going to take measures and do things to gain little advantages here and there.
All I'm saying is if OU did the same measures and things, their inherent advantage would remain unchanged. They'd keep NM at arm's length. Type of offense is one of those measures/things.
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I don't think a 1-game upset of PU over OSU is meaningful here. Sample size.
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A team with elite talent should be able to run a plain Jane offense, as noted many times, and beat 9 teams on their schedule consistently, with very very few upsets. Run the ball effectively and mix in a few passes.
A Purdue or Georgia Tech may well do better over time with a "gimmicky" offense that is riskier. I thought the Johnson offensive scheme at Tech was exactly what they needed. Tech is going to suffer with the new approach. Tech was able to upset UGA a few times despite an enormous talent disparity.
And at times they got blown out as well.
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I'm afraid the term "risky offense" may not be an actual thing. And how do we define a "gimmicky" offense? One that gives you an advantage? A rare one? One that's hard to prepare for? All of these seem like a good idea for an elite program to employ.
I'm not sure I buy any offense that you're practicing everyday as being risky or gimmicky. ?
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The Tech offense was risky, obviously. Any "Air Raid" offense is risky. An offense predicted on handing the ball off to a tailback and throwing the occasional pass is not as risky.
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I don't think a 1-game upset of PU over OSU is meaningful here. Sample size.
Purdue is like 5-8 vs OSU since 2000, with a lot of close losses. That's MUCH better than anyone else in the Big Ten during that timeframe.
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Why is it risky?
Air raid teams trade the lower risk of turnovers and lower average yardage for the slightly higher risk of turnovers and almost universal higher average yardage of short passing to replace running the ball.
I understand I literally just used the word risk, but if it's a net positive, then the risk is annulled, is it not? Those air raid offenses have lower INT rates than traditional passing games, and would argue less risk is involved.
I guess I'm focusing on the net risk/reward and benefit......if it's a net plus, then the better program doing it makes sense.
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Purdue is like 5-8 vs OSU since 2000, with a lot of close losses. That's MUCH better than anyone else in the Big Ten during that timeframe.
Well if it's offense is "risky," then this is a data point FOR risky offenses.
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If you don't think the Paul Johnson is offense is riskier than a standard offense, well, I'll just disagree. Same with any gimmick offense.
High risk, high reward. That is why we see them at programs that can't recruit.
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Yeah, "just because I think so" isn't persuasive.
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I like this discussion, and in some spots, I disagree with OAM, others with bwarbiany.
The riskier offense thing doesn't make all that much sense to me. The option teams turnover rates fluctuate all over. Shoot, even Wisconsin's does, and that's despite relying heavily on a run game that involves no pitches.
The question as to why would the option be less effective at Bama is because Bama has access to higher end QBs and WRs. The best offense is throwing more, but having a level of physicality in the back pocket Something like Navy works because it's weird and because it's just really well run. If you can run a spread that leans pass as cleanly as Navy's offense, you can have the most efficent offense in the country. Bama running the option would probably have more of a ceiling with where passing is (the option also relies on a lot of reading big linemen, which solves a problem Bama doesn't have, since it can just block them).
But if you can't get good to goodish QBs, you see the ceiling of passing offenses fall. Sometimes you can get around it with parred back playbooks and excellent execution (Leach).
The tempo part is more interesting and where bwarbiany isn't super correct. Lower tempo is good for underdogs. It's good because if three big weird things happen, that can swing an eight possession game more easily than a 15 possession game. This actually fed into some of the more historic OSU upsets because they always played slow, so a few weird things could befall them (it also meant they needed a slew of weird things to help them, which often happend with Tress). The analog is this. If you pay 1-on-1 against a better player, you'd prefer to play to 3 rather than 15. You might be able to luck into three points first, but the longer it goes, the more things slide toward the average outcome of you bleeding points.
But on top of that, there's another factor to tempo: extremity. If you are comfortable at extremes and can pull opponents into that, you create conditions where you feel better with the flow of the game. If Army can force Michigan to have the ball 6 times, Michigan isn't super happy about it. Likewise, if you are Kliff Texas Tech and can get 18 possessions in a game, you can in theory make someone else uncomfortable. The issue is that if a normal team can push you off your slow and fast approach, you're out of your element AND at a talent disadvantage, which means you lose like you were supposed to.
Anywho: OSU lost to Purdue in 2017 because its good offense played bad, it's bad defense played bad and Purdue's OK offense played out of its mind.
(It's interesting to look at this on the HS level. Talent is usually king, but a QB is this interesting factor. If you have a kid who can throw and receivers that can catch, your ceiling is higher. But lots of schools don't and try anyway. Others will go option or single wing because they know they can get the 1-3 athletic kids the ball and teach the other 8 to block much more often than they can get kids good at throwing and catching)
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Purdue is like 5-8 vs OSU since 2000, with a lot of close losses. That's MUCH better than anyone else in the Big Ten during that timeframe.
That spans five OSU coaches and four for PSU. It's hard to draw too much there.
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Yeah, "just because I think so" isn't persuasive.
I already clarified that I don't have empirical evidence that pass-heavy spread offenses are inherently higher variance / more risky than traditional ball control offenses... But it makes logical sense. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
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1 - high variance offense.....what's the variance? What does that mean?
2 - how was OSU's offense "risky"? It's the offense they practice every day. It's the one the HC installed on purpose.
Ok, think of it this way...
You have $10,000. That's a nice chunk of change, but we're a long way from "F you money". You're presented two investment opportunities.
- A single investment that has a 60% chance of tripling your money, but a 40% chance of losing $8K leaving you with only $2K left over.
- An investment strategy that has an 90% chance of giving you 10% returns, and a 10% chance of losing you 20% in any given year.
Well, if you don't have a lot of money, and you're looking to get rich rather than to slowly build wealth, the first option is better.
Now imagine you have $10M dollars. That's enough to comfortably retire.
If you choose investment strategy #1, you could be MUCH richer--imagine what you could do with $30M??? But if you fail, and you're down to $2M in the bank, you might have to consider working for several more years to bring back your nest egg.
If you choose investment strategy #2, you have up to a $1M annual income that you can live off of, and a very low chance of complete failure. Oh, and with this strategy, win or lose you're still MILES ahead of the guy who only started with $10K.
Teams like Alabama/OSU are already multi-millionaires. They can use conservative strategies and expect good outcomes. Risky strategies can potentially increase their upside, but because they're already at the top of the heap, what more upside do they need? Avoiding downside is much more important.
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so, i wanted to "test" the theory of "high risk" offenses.
so i took last 5 years average turnovers. here are the numbers (note, a few schools, like idaho, uab, etc, are NOT included due to not competing in div1 for entire 5 year period).
rank - school - 2019 - 2018 - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - - - total average
(https://i.imgur.com/tTgbEcA.png)
looking at those, it does seem to have a correlation between conservative offenses being lower and "higher risk" offenses being higher. and there are outliers as well.
also consider, this needs to be taken with more than a little grain of salt. it's missing quite a few data points that should be considered. like if the risk of turnovers is worth more points. talent level. total plays ran. effect on defense and total plays faced against. etc. it'd be an interesting study, but i don't have time to do it right now.
but it'd be interest to see if we can come up with a decent data set that we think might give us a logical result. any suggestions?
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data taken from cfbstats.com, if anyone is interested.
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Raw turnovers can be tricky because it's also a little tempo-based and games based. It's kinda a clunky number.
That said, it's remarkable how low LSU was considering that spans 3.5 OCs with four or so changes, including one mid-season.
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very true on turnovers. spreading it over several seasons should normalize it some, though.
as for lsu, 3-4 new oc's or not, they ran the same offense for basically the last decade... until 2019.
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very true on turnovers. spreading it over several seasons should normalize it some, though.
as for lsu, 3-4 new oc's or not, they ran the same offense for basically the last decade... until 2019.
No, no, no.
They were in the Cam Cameron pro-style till they fired him. Then tinkered with what they could for the last 8 games that year, then Matt Canada, then back to Ensminger. Then Ensminger/Brady with the 2009 stuff.
Some different stuff in there.
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Risk is more than turn over potential obviously.
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Risk is more than turn over potential obviously.
Yeah, I wonder if you can ferret out average plays per drive from this the available data.
Or ratio of 3 and out drives to drives which get at least one 1st down.
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That spans five OSU coaches and four for PSU. It's hard to draw too much there.
PSU?
Do you mean Purdue?
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PSU?
Do you mean Purdue?
Yep. That’s the one.
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a gimmick offense is simply an offense that is not popular and not run by the majority of programs
the triple option was not a gimick offense in the 70s
in the 70s, the big boys that recruited better than their peers ran the option (Teaxs, Oklahoma, Nebraska) they had more talent and ran a gimmick offense?
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Again, I'm not understanding what a "risky" offense is. Army and its option attack would be using a risky offense by going air-raid between game 3 and game 4. But no one does that. You have your offense and you practice it until it's automatic. A Mike Leach offense is no more risky than a Barry Alvarez offense.
Here, let me see if I can provide an example of what you're trying to say.
Alabama threw a lot more in 2018 than in 2017. Makes sense, they had a better passer at QB, going from Hurts to Tua. Tagovailoa threw the ball 100 more times than Hurts did just the year before. And you can even think back further - Saban wanting to minimize risk (perceived risk), throwing the ball some, but relying on 2 good RBs, a great OL, and his special defenses every year to win rings.
You guys are saying pre-Tua Saban had a less risky offense. And thus, with Tua, he opened his offense up with more passing, so it became riskier. <<<< Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
If I'm right, then I still disagree.
Alabama passed more because Tua was a much better passer. Hurts only threw 1 INT in 2018! OMG how safe! How risk-adverse! Then why in the holy hell would Bama throw 100 additional times the next season? Answer: because they could, because it was worth it, and because it expanded the advantage they already had vs everyone on their schedule.
No, Bama didn't stand pat. Yes, they threw more INTs in 2018. But their offense was on jet fuel.
Look:
2017 Hurts
0.4 INT Rate
60.4% completion rate
8.2 yards per attempt
150.2 rating
2017 Offense overall
6.6 yards per play
37.1 points per game
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2018 Tagovailoa
1.7 INT Rate (omg, 4x more than in 2017)
69.0% completion rate
11.2 yards per attempt
199.4 rating
2018 Offense overall
7.8 yards per play
45.6 points per game
Obviously, there's plenty of noise in these numbers. But, Alabama had every incentive to stand pat - to avoid risk, as you say. But there was incentive to pass more. NOT run a riskier offense, but to simply pass more, with a better QB.
The additional turnovers (only 6 INT) was well worth the better completion percentage, massive improvement in yards per attempt, and an all-time great QB rating.
Doing what they did wasn't risky, it was smart. They had an advantage over everyone on their schedule doing what they had done every year on offense under Saban, but they saw a way to extend that advantage and did so.
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Tua probably isn’t the best qb to use when trying to find riskiness of and offense. Kids was literally the most efficient qb in the history of the game.
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Right, but Saban had gone 89-9 the previous 7 seasons with what many here are labeling a "less risky" offense. And everyone to a man would say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
You'd have to be a crazy person to change to a riskier offense.
And what I'm saying is that Saban didn't do that. He allowed more passing AND it wasn't any riskier.
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Saban offense ranking percentage of non-garbage time or clock kill drives that end in turnovers (high rankings are good. FBS games only)
2007: 35
2008: 12
2009: 6
2010: 9
2011: 10
2012: 7
2013: 65
2014 (the spread arrives): 43
2015: 5
2016: 65
2017: 1
2018: 22
2019: 8
The difference is maybe a little slight. Average rank was 18.16 with pro-style (excluding Year 1). Average spread rank was 24th.
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Right, but Saban had gone 89-9 the previous 7 seasons with what many here are labeling a "less risky" offense. And everyone to a man would say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
You'd have to be a crazy person to change to a riskier offense.
And what I'm saying is that Saban didn't do that. He allowed more passing AND it wasn't any riskier.
right, but a huge reason why it wasn't any riskier is because he had the most efficient qb in the history of cfb making those reads/throws. put in the average qb, or even just a good qb, and it's probably quite a bit riskier.
that's not to say there isn't a big benefit of taking those risks.
also, it's a bit of a misnomer to call saban conservative offensively. when the game is on the line, he's pretty aggressive. he only goes into a shell once the game is out of reach and he can shorten game and go home with a w. which lends credence to risky vs less risky offenses, btw. but saban teams hold most of the passing records for both bama and lsu (until this year, which i'm guessing burrow owns most of them now). bama's passing record books are basically all saban qb's, and lsu's top 5 were mostly saban qb's.