Rick Neuheisel talks about the "Spread Offense"

Rick Neuheisel on "What do you think of the spread offense?" Neuheisel:

[T]here are times when I look at spread offenses and I see value. The key to the spread offense, and the reason why its successful, is that it adds an extra player. It diminishes the need for great offensive linemen, because you’ve got a little longer because you are always in the gun, and the quarterback’s a runner. So, in essence, he becomes a blocker, and can account for an extra defender. All great thoughts . . . . The problem at UCLA is that you have to beat the Trojans. And it's also the benefit at UCLA, because when you beat them, you’re going to be among the nation’s elite. So you have to be a physical offense. I know that two years ago SC got beat by Oregon up in Eugene, but his last year, SC with their physical defense was able to beat the heck out of a very, very good spread offense Oregon team.

You’ve also seen when you lose a quarterback in the spread offense, things can go awry, as happened with Oregon two years ago. They lost Dennis Dixon and then I think they lost their last three games to Arizona, to UCLA and then to Oregon State. It’s a difficult offense to have a lot players at the quarterback position because it’s so [much] decision making, which requires all the repetitions and, yet, you’re exposing them.

I was the benefactor of a type of spread offense, even though it was an option offense, it’s the same math in terms of the quarterback’s [being] a runner in Marcus Tuiasosopo at Washington which we took to the Rose Bowl. So, I understand the benefits and the virtues of having the extra guy. I just think you have to be careful about how often you expose that quarterback. [Jeremiah] Masoli at Oregon was maybe the player of the year had he burst onto the scene maybe a couple weeks earlier last year. But, if he’s gone, what happens to the offense?

That being said, the other thing that kids are interested in today is the chance to go to play on Sundays. You are not seeing spread offenses played on Sundays. Vince Young would have been the perfect guy to go and do it, but even Vince Young didn’t want to do it. And I have it on authority, because Norm was there, because he doesn’t want to get hit anymore. He doesn’t want to get beat up on an every-Sunday basis and shorten his career length. So, quarterbacks that are interested in going to the NFL would like to be in pro-style offenses. So, you can go and attract guys. [Likewise,] offensive linemen, frankly, would like to be in offenses that are going to be like the NFL because they’d like to have a chance to play in more of that scheme. It goes on down the line; the more you play like an NFL offense, the more the NFL can look and see your skill level and adapt it to that. That argument gets more watered down the further out you go because obviously receivers can still play receiver, and running backs can still play running back.

But it’s an interesting question, and I think you can never, ever stop investigating it, and researching it, and having some components of it. There were some components of the spread offense in what we did last year. We got into the old wildcat stuff, and it isn’t as though we’ve got our heads in the sand. I just think, to start with, we’ve got to be a physical running team that can handle the line of scrimmage with the likes of a very talented defensive team like USC.

(H/t: TeamSpeedKills and Bruins Nation.)

There's a lot going on there, to say nothing of the Norm Chow/Neuheisel sandbagging of Vince Young as "not wanting to get hit anymore." Team Speed Kills rightfully takes Pretty Ricky to task for conflating the "spread" -- which best describes certain formations with multiple receivers -- with an entire offensive philosophy: "Basically what he described is the Rich Rodriguez/Urban Meyer style offense (except for the part about the spread not being physical). However, that's not necessarily what a spread offense is."

That's true. And Neuheisel is all over the place in this answer. Yet, assuming that Neuheisel, when he says "spread" means that particular type of running QB spread, still identified some points worth addressing. He says the spread is great, but (a) it's not physical enough to be used to beat Southern Cal consistently, (b) it's too quarterback dependent and prone to injuries, (c) the pros don't use it so recruits might not want to, and (d) that said, it does have certain arithmetic advantages in terms of getting extra blockers or numbers.

This is a broad topic, about which I have previously had much to say already. And, though I agree that Neuheisel oversimplifies in equating the "spread" with the Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez/Oregon spread-to-run-the-QB offenses, it's not entirely fair to say that he's way off base. I take Neuheisel as understanding that, in its most general sense, "spread" is just a formation with some extra receivers. But it's also true that "spread offenses" -- often self-described -- have claimed an identity, and as lame, vague, and non-descriptive as the term is, what is the alternative? (Note my term above was "Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez/Oregon spread-to-run-use-the-QB offenses" -- hardly a model of clarity or brevity.)

So when someone asks Neuheisel, who for years has run a west coast or three-wide type pro-style pass attack, "What do you think of the spread?" naturally he's going to think of it as opposed to what he and Norm Chow do, which, at least at one time, people would have described as "spread" in the sense that the New England Patriots or Arizona Cardinals are spread. (Imagine if someone dropped Neuheisel and Chow's offense into 1983 -- they would undoubtedly be "spread.") Indeed, the core of Chow's offense is used by Mike Leach in his four-wide all the time Airraid; if Leach is "spread" and Chow is not, then that means we put a great deal of weight in the cosmetics of being in the shotgun, and it begs the question of at what point does your use of a tight-end make you "not spread"?)

In any event, this Wittgensteinian debate about defining "spread" versus "pro-style" versus "spread option" (Wait, is Florida "spread option" or is Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech?) obscures some of the actual points Neuheisel makes, which are worth addressing. For now, everyone should just understand that we have no good terms anymore, as "spread" and "pro-style" and even "option" (now co-opted from true triple option teams to anyone who pitches it after their zone-read, and sometimes announcers even refer to the zone-read as "option" which it is not -- it's just an amped up bootleg pass; more on this later) have bled their descriptive lives away. So let's get to the underlying issues, assuming we are all talking about this running QB spread -- which includes a wide swath of teams still -- as opposed to just multiple receiver formations.

Neuheisel's points

Here's Neuheisel's points, paraphrased, and my brief responses.

(a) The spread isn't physical enough to be used to beat Southern Cal consistently. False. USC is just a damn good team, so you can get by with this little fallacy since everyone loses to USC a lot anyway. It's really not worth wading into the spread being a physical or finesse offense argument right now, suffice to say that it is fairly silly. Now, Texas Tech is no smashmouth team, but Neuheisel was discussing the spread to run teams: who can say Florida was not physical enough? And he admits that Oregon beat USC, yet his reason that they lost later was not that they were less physical but that their quarterbacks were injured. I think some teams are more physical than others, but in this case the spread aspect doesn't change anything. Adding a tight-end for a wide receiver can't change your whole team dynamic, and neither does it define it.

(b) The spread is too quarterback dependent and prone to injuries. Well, there's an irony about this coming from Neuheisel whose first season was marred by a multitude of quarterback injuries, and then the subsequent horrendous play of the guy they were stuck with. So yes, I completely agree that the spread -- just ask Michigan -- requires excellent quarterback play. But that's the trend with all offenses now. The difference between the spread and some other offenses is that you look for a wider variety of skills in the quarterback, and a good team can play to them. The guy does need the ability to run a little bit (again, just ask Michigan), but neither does the guy have to be one of USC's 5-Star statuesque passers to succeed. In other words, the spread is a double-edged sword in this respect. Yes, you absolutely need a good quarterback to succeed with because it is so focused on him, you can have success with a wider variety of quarterbacks. Indeed, Oregon is exhibit A last year: they had great success despite losing several quarterbacks throughout the year.

(c) The pros don't use it so recruits might not want to either. I'm no recruiting guru, so I can't tell you what they want, but it's true that the Pros are never going to be truly spread in the sense of the zone-read or triple or all that. Now, with the wildcat maybe they see some arithmetic advantages (see below) while still keeping the ability to throw the ball a bit more. We'll see, in any event. But however true this argument is, it's not an argument about why you should or should not use the offense in college, other than the recruiting aspect. And again, in the last several years the National Champion has been quarterbacked by guys like Vince Young and Tim Tebow, so I'm not convinced that recruiting is really as bad as they say.

(d) That said, the spread does have certain arithmetic advantages in terms of getting extra blockers or numbers. This is of course the truest thing Neuheisel said. It was well summed up by one of Rick's mentors, Homer Smith, quoted in a recent post of mine:

The spread offense today features the running QB. Defensive problems come from not having a tackler ready for the QB at the line of scrimmage. . . . As long as running QBs keep winning the jobs, the spread will be the formation of choice. Someone has to tackle the QB. If that someone is looking for a post pass, the QB is going to have running room.

With this quote it's no surprise that Neuheisel equates "spread" with running QB. But Coach Smith's point is exactly right: if your quarterback is a threat to run, you can dramatically alter the defense's structure.

All this flows from the simple fact that there are eleven players on one side and eleven players on the other. Every ballcarrier necessarily has an unblocked counterpart: if you bunched up and tried to block everybody one guy is still unblocked. Maybe you can dictate who that is so he is too far away, but the defense will always have one guy.

In the NFL, the quarterback hands the ball off on a run play and stands there. The quarterback's counterpart is usually the deep safety -- he stays back in case there's a play action pass. The runningback's counterpart is still free to come up and make the tackle.

With the shotgun run game and great faking and reading, the quarterback can alter the assignments. He can occupy two defenders: the backside defensive end, who must watch him for a run, and the deep safety, who has to guard the post-pass. This opens up blocking in the run game. Note the two circled defenders.



Alternatively, you could also just look at it as a transfer of who is assigned to whom. Instead of the defensive end being unblocked and able to chase down the runningback, he must account for the quarterback. So even if the safety is responsible for the runningback (a tendency you can exploit with play-action), your runner is still through the hole before he gets tackled.

Thus, there are plenty more issues with the "spread" to work out, and in the process that term has quickly lost almost all use as a meaningful and descriptive term. I agree that it should probably be relegated to describing only a formation, but it's not easy to transfer everyone's lexicon, and it's not like I have a ready subsitute term in place. And Neuheisel raises some interesting -- and common -- points about the offense, but I can't say I agree with him up and down. It sounds more like he's trying to justify why they do what they do rather than what seems to be popular, and he shouldn't have to. That's his choice, and he will succeed or not on that basis.

Rick Neuheisel talks about the "Spread Offense"

Rick Neuheisel on "What do you think of the spread offense?" Neuheisel:

[T]here are times when I look at spread offenses and I see value. The key to the spread offense, and the reason why its successful, is that it adds an extra player. It diminishes the need for great offensive linemen, because you’ve got a little longer because you are always in the gun, and the quarterback’s a runner. So, in essence, he becomes a blocker, and can account for an extra defender. All great thoughts . . . . The problem at UCLA is that you have to beat the Trojans. And it's also the benefit at UCLA, because when you beat them, you’re going to be among the nation’s elite. So you have to be a physical offense. I know that two years ago SC got beat by Oregon up in Eugene, but his last year, SC with their physical defense was able to beat the heck out of a very, very good spread offense Oregon team.

You’ve also seen when you lose a quarterback in the spread offense, things can go awry, as happened with Oregon two years ago. They lost Dennis Dixon and then I think they lost their last three games to Arizona, to UCLA and then to Oregon State. It’s a difficult offense to have a lot players at the quarterback position because it’s so [much] decision making, which requires all the repetitions and, yet, you’re exposing them.

I was the benefactor of a type of spread offense, even though it was an option offense, it’s the same math in terms of the quarterback’s [being] a runner in Marcus Tuiasosopo at Washington which we took to the Rose Bowl. So, I understand the benefits and the virtues of having the extra guy. I just think you have to be careful about how often you expose that quarterback. [Jeremiah] Masoli at Oregon was maybe the player of the year had he burst onto the scene maybe a couple weeks earlier last year. But, if he’s gone, what happens to the offense?

That being said, the other thing that kids are interested in today is the chance to go to play on Sundays. You are not seeing spread offenses played on Sundays. Vince Young would have been the perfect guy to go and do it, but even Vince Young didn’t want to do it. And I have it on authority, because Norm was there, because he doesn’t want to get hit anymore. He doesn’t want to get beat up on an every-Sunday basis and shorten his career length. So, quarterbacks that are interested in going to the NFL would like to be in pro-style offenses. So, you can go and attract guys. [Likewise,] offensive linemen, frankly, would like to be in offenses that are going to be like the NFL because they’d like to have a chance to play in more of that scheme. It goes on down the line; the more you play like an NFL offense, the more the NFL can look and see your skill level and adapt it to that. That argument gets more watered down the further out you go because obviously receivers can still play receiver, and running backs can still play running back.

But it’s an interesting question, and I think you can never, ever stop investigating it, and researching it, and having some components of it. There were some components of the spread offense in what we did last year. We got into the old wildcat stuff, and it isn’t as though we’ve got our heads in the sand. I just think, to start with, we’ve got to be a physical running team that can handle the line of scrimmage with the likes of a very talented defensive team like USC.

(H/t: TeamSpeedKills and Bruins Nation.)

There's a lot going on there, to say nothing of the Norm Chow/Neuheisel sandbagging of Vince Young as "not wanting to get hit anymore." Team Speed Kills rightfully takes Pretty Ricky to task for conflating the "spread" -- which best describes certain formations with multiple receivers -- with an entire offensive philosophy: "Basically what he described is the Rich Rodriguez/Urban Meyer style offense (except for the part about the spread not being physical). However, that's not necessarily what a spread offense is."

That's true. And Neuheisel is all over the place in this answer. Yet, assuming that Neuheisel, when he says "spread" means that particular type of running QB spread, still identified some points worth addressing. He says the spread is great, but (a) it's not physical enough to be used to beat Southern Cal consistently, (b) it's too quarterback dependent and prone to injuries, (c) the pros don't use it so recruits might not want to, and (d) that said, it does have certain arithmetic advantages in terms of getting extra blockers or numbers.

This is a broad topic, about which I have previously had much to say already. And, though I agree that Neuheisel oversimplifies in equating the "spread" with the Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez/Oregon spread-to-run-the-QB offenses, it's not entirely fair to say that he's way off base. I take Neuheisel as understanding that, in its most general sense, "spread" is just a formation with some extra receivers. But it's also true that "spread offenses" -- often self-described -- have claimed an identity, and as lame, vague, and non-descriptive as the term is, what is the alternative? (Note my term above was "Urban Meyer/Rich Rodriguez/Oregon spread-to-run-use-the-QB offenses" -- hardly a model of clarity or brevity.)

So when someone asks Neuheisel, who for years has run a west coast or three-wide type pro-style pass attack, "What do you think of the spread?" naturally he's going to think of it as opposed to what he and Norm Chow do, which, at least at one time, people would have described as "spread" in the sense that the New England Patriots or Arizona Cardinals are spread. (Imagine if someone dropped Neuheisel and Chow's offense into 1983 -- they would undoubtedly be "spread.") Indeed, the core of Chow's offense is used by Mike Leach in his four-wide all the time Airraid; if Leach is "spread" and Chow is not, then that means we put a great deal of weight in the cosmetics of being in the shotgun, and it begs the question of at what point does your use of a tight-end make you "not spread"?)

In any event, this Wittgensteinian debate about defining "spread" versus "pro-style" versus "spread option" (Wait, is Florida "spread option" or is Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech?) obscures some of the actual points Neuheisel makes, which are worth addressing. For now, everyone should just understand that we have no good terms anymore, as "spread" and "pro-style" and even "option" (now co-opted from true triple option teams to anyone who pitches it after their zone-read, and sometimes announcers even refer to the zone-read as "option" which it is not -- it's just an amped up bootleg pass; more on this later) have bled their descriptive lives away. So let's get to the underlying issues, assuming we are all talking about this running QB spread -- which includes a wide swath of teams still -- as opposed to just multiple receiver formations.

Neuheisel's points

Here's Neuheisel's points, paraphrased, and my brief responses.

(a) The spread isn't physical enough to be used to beat Southern Cal consistently. False. USC is just a damn good team, so you can get by with this little fallacy since everyone loses to USC a lot anyway. It's really not worth wading into the spread being a physical or finesse offense argument right now, suffice to say that it is fairly silly. Now, Texas Tech is no smashmouth team, but Neuheisel was discussing the spread to run teams: who can say Florida was not physical enough? And he admits that Oregon beat USC, yet his reason that they lost later was not that they were less physical but that their quarterbacks were injured. I think some teams are more physical than others, but in this case the spread aspect doesn't change anything. Adding a tight-end for a wide receiver can't change your whole team dynamic, and neither does it define it.

(b) The spread is too quarterback dependent and prone to injuries. Well, there's an irony about this coming from Neuheisel whose first season was marred by a multitude of quarterback injuries, and then the subsequent horrendous play of the guy they were stuck with. So yes, I completely agree that the spread -- just ask Michigan -- requires excellent quarterback play. But that's the trend with all offenses now. The difference between the spread and some other offenses is that you look for a wider variety of skills in the quarterback, and a good team can play to them. The guy does need the ability to run a little bit (again, just ask Michigan), but neither does the guy have to be one of USC's 5-Star statuesque passers to succeed. In other words, the spread is a double-edged sword in this respect. Yes, you absolutely need a good quarterback to succeed with because it is so focused on him, you can have success with a wider variety of quarterbacks. Indeed, Oregon is exhibit A last year: they had great success despite losing several quarterbacks throughout the year.

(c) The pros don't use it so recruits might not want to either. I'm no recruiting guru, so I can't tell you what they want, but it's true that the Pros are never going to be truly spread in the sense of the zone-read or triple or all that. Now, with the wildcat maybe they see some arithmetic advantages (see below) while still keeping the ability to throw the ball a bit more. We'll see, in any event. But however true this argument is, it's not an argument about why you should or should not use the offense in college, other than the recruiting aspect. And again, in the last several years the National Champion has been quarterbacked by guys like Vince Young and Tim Tebow, so I'm not convinced that recruiting is really as bad as they say.

(d) That said, the spread does have certain arithmetic advantages in terms of getting extra blockers or numbers. This is of course the truest thing Neuheisel said. It was well summed up by one of Rick's mentors, Homer Smith, quoted in a recent post of mine:

The spread offense today features the running QB. Defensive problems come from not having a tackler ready for the QB at the line of scrimmage. . . . As long as running QBs keep winning the jobs, the spread will be the formation of choice. Someone has to tackle the QB. If that someone is looking for a post pass, the QB is going to have running room.

With this quote it's no surprise that Neuheisel equates "spread" with running QB. But Coach Smith's point is exactly right: if your quarterback is a threat to run, you can dramatically alter the defense's structure.

All this flows from the simple fact that there are eleven players on one side and eleven players on the other. Every ballcarrier necessarily has an unblocked counterpart: if you bunched up and tried to block everybody one guy is still unblocked. Maybe you can dictate who that is so he is too far away, but the defense will always have one guy.

In the NFL, the quarterback hands the ball off on a run play and stands there. The quarterback's counterpart is usually the deep safety -- he stays back in case there's a play action pass. The runningback's counterpart is still free to come up and make the tackle.

With the shotgun run game and great faking and reading, the quarterback can alter the assignments. He can occupy two defenders: the backside defensive end, who must watch him for a run, and the deep safety, who has to guard the post-pass. This opens up blocking in the run game. Note the two circled defenders.



Alternatively, you could also just look at it as a transfer of who is assigned to whom. Instead of the defensive end being unblocked and able to chase down the runningback, he must account for the quarterback. So even if the safety is responsible for the runningback (a tendency you can exploit with play-action), your runner is still through the hole before he gets tackled.

Thus, there are plenty more issues with the "spread" to work out, and in the process that term has quickly lost almost all use as a meaningful and descriptive term. I agree that it should probably be relegated to describing only a formation, but it's not easy to transfer everyone's lexicon, and it's not like I have a ready subsitute term in place. And Neuheisel raises some interesting -- and common -- points about the offense, but I can't say I agree with him up and down. It sounds more like he's trying to justify why they do what they do rather than what seems to be popular, and he shouldn't have to. That's his choice, and he will succeed or not on that basis.

A Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot - Part 1

The most famous game that involved a team running the run and shoot offense was one where that team lost: the infamous "greatest playoff comeback of all-time," where the Buffalo Bills came back from 35-3 down to beat the Houston Oilers in overtime. The storyline was, to many, that the Oilers' four-wide offense couldn't control the clock and gave up the lead. Maybe so. But something had to go right for them to get the 35-3 lead (and score 38 for the game to send it into overtime). Maybe the offense failed to prepare the defense -- that was a common meme for years, but seems to have receded when spread offense teams like the Florida Gators or the New England Patriots comebine great offenses and defenses.

And it's true, no NFL team runs the pure 'shoot anymore (though some high school and small colleges do, and of course June Jones does at SMU). But the concepts live on, and the "spread 'em and shred 'em" philosophy the 'shoot engendered has found more and more converts over the last two decades. But the offense is not particularly well understood; it is still considered an outlaw approach. And true, the dedication the offense requires to be run well also requires something approaching exclusivity: not much time is left to devote to doing other things.

But, I am a big believer that the 'shoot both can be a very viable offense in and of itself (hello June Jones!), and, even more than that, I think that understanding the offense is one of the best ways to really understand passing offense generally. This is evidenced by the fact that the offense's concepts live on in the playbooks of every NFL team and a great swath of college and high school ones.



So, this offseason I am starting a multi-part series on a "Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot." The series' purpose a few-fold: (1) to explain what makes the Run and Shoot distinct from the larger umbrella of "spread offenses" (including Mike Leach's Airraid, with which it is often compared and confused with); (2) to explain the offense's core tenets in a way could provide insight into all passing offenses; and (3) to provide a possible real-world system that distills the run and shoot's major points (and combines them with some of the best of the modern passing game) into something that could be used at the high school or small college level.

In this introduction, I will begin with some of the offense's core philosophy. In future posts I will address some of the specifics.

Philosophy and tenets

There are four major points that make the 'shoot the 'shoot, and then a few ancillary ones that have come into play over the years.

Pass-first offense. Not all spread offenses are pass-first, and not all teams that use run and shoot concepts are pass-first, but if you're going to commit to the offense, you begin with the past (and often end there too). When the Hawai'i coaching staff under Junes Jones gave a clinic talk to other coaches at the AFCA convention a few years back, they named their talk "For those who like to throw the ball." One of the major reasons for this is just practice time: you can only do so many things well. By specializing as pass-happy team they get an incredible amount of repetitions doing the things they do over and over and doing them well.

Four wide-receiver commitment. Now there's much debate within coaching circles if you can be a "run and shoot" team without being a four-wide receiver team. (Ironically, the Bills who beat the Oilers in that game and helped drive out the pure shoot were themselves a team that used primarily run and shoot concepts but with a tight-end, hence their nickname, the "K-Gun.") Moreover, run and shoot teams are actually far less multiple by formation than the typical spread team. They typically use a two-by-two spread look or a "trips" spread look with a single backside receiver and three to the other side. And they rarely go five-wides. There are many reasons for this -- including specialization of players -- but a big motivator is that their receivers and quarterback do so much reading after the snap they want to keep it simple before it; they want to see where the defense lines up and attack that. If you have fixed assignments, you are more concerned with moving the defense around to open those up; if you can adjust on the fly, that doesn't matter as much.

Receivers read the defense on the fly. This is probably the biggest difference between the modern "spread" and the 'shoot. Some of that distinction is a matter of shades of gray, but in other cases it is quite dramatic. The point about formations was made above, but the basic theory behind the offense goes back to the originator, Tiger Ellison. As the story goes, he wanted an offense that emulated what was most natural, so he observed playground and backyard football. He said you didn't see highly formalized lines and alignments or wedge plays and all that. Instead you saw a kid, on the run, tossing passes to receivers who would keep moving until they found open spots. To Ellison, if you didn't coach the kids too much they began "run and shooting" on their own, so he thought this was how people really want to play. Hence, his receivers would read and react on the fly to get open.

As Mouse Davis, who did as much to develop the modern 'shoot as any human could, has explained: "We are always going to adjust on the run to the defensive coverage," he said. "If the defense sets in one look, we are going to make one route adjustment. If the defense sets in another look, we are going to make another route adjustment."

There are a few ancillary points that have been part of the offense, but to a varying degree. For my purpose in this series they are important but not imperative.

Quarterback movement. In Ellison's original shoot and the versions used by Mouse Davis and in the NFL, the quarterback always began with a "half-roll" or semi-"sprint out," where he moved the pocket and attacked the corner. If you watch the video below of Portland State (now coached by run and shoot veterans Jerry Glanville and Mouse Davis; Portland State is in white and black), you'll clearly see what this looks like. This comported with Ellison's original vision of the run and shoot, and the fact that pass defenders had to contend with the threat of the quarterback running at them distorted the coverage. Nevertheless, some teams now have evolved to more of a dropback look, and June Jones now at SMU uses something of a hybrid. Moreover, what pass protection schemes you want to use will influence how you have your quarterback drop back.

Motion. This is probably one of the bigger changes with the 'shoot. In the original days, the idea was to have motion on every play, constantly moving from twins to balanced and back and forth. Now, however, defenses are better at disguising their reactions to motion and not giving away whether they are man or zone, so most teams have just disregarded it and just chosen to play. Nevertheless it is still a good tool to reveal certain techniques, and never underestimate how much it can affect a defense to change the strength of a formation.

Wrap-up

This is enough for now. In future parts of the series I will address topics like adjusting pass patterns on the fly, the basic run and shoot concepts like "switch," "go," and "choice," pass protection, marrying other pass concepts with the shoots, and quick passes and screens. Below are a few more run and shoot clips.

A Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot - Part 1

The most famous game that involved a team running the run and shoot offense was one where that team lost: the infamous "greatest playoff comeback of all-time," where the Buffalo Bills came back from 35-3 down to beat the Houston Oilers in overtime. The storyline was, to many, that the Oilers' four-wide offense couldn't control the clock and gave up the lead. Maybe so. But something had to go right for them to get the 35-3 lead (and score 38 for the game to send it into overtime). Maybe the offense failed to prepare the defense -- that was a common meme for years, but seems to have receded when spread offense teams like the Florida Gators or the New England Patriots comebine great offenses and defenses.

And it's true, no NFL team runs the pure 'shoot anymore (though some high school and small colleges do, and of course June Jones does at SMU). But the concepts live on, and the "spread 'em and shred 'em" philosophy the 'shoot engendered has found more and more converts over the last two decades. But the offense is not particularly well understood; it is still considered an outlaw approach. And true, the dedication the offense requires to be run well also requires something approaching exclusivity: not much time is left to devote to doing other things.

But, I am a big believer that the 'shoot both can be a very viable offense in and of itself (hello June Jones!), and, even more than that, I think that understanding the offense is one of the best ways to really understand passing offense generally. This is evidenced by the fact that the offense's concepts live on in the playbooks of every NFL team and a great swath of college and high school ones.



So, this offseason I am starting a multi-part series on a "Simple Approach to the Run and Shoot." The series' purpose a few-fold: (1) to explain what makes the Run and Shoot distinct from the larger umbrella of "spread offenses" (including Mike Leach's Airraid, with which it is often compared and confused with); (2) to explain the offense's core tenets in a way could provide insight into all passing offenses; and (3) to provide a possible real-world system that distills the run and shoot's major points (and combines them with some of the best of the modern passing game) into something that could be used at the high school or small college level.

In this introduction, I will begin with some of the offense's core philosophy. In future posts I will address some of the specifics.

Philosophy and tenets

There are four major points that make the 'shoot the 'shoot, and then a few ancillary ones that have come into play over the years.

Pass-first offense. Not all spread offenses are pass-first, and not all teams that use run and shoot concepts are pass-first, but if you're going to commit to the offense, you begin with the past (and often end there too). When the Hawai'i coaching staff under Junes Jones gave a clinic talk to other coaches at the AFCA convention a few years back, they named their talk "For those who like to throw the ball." One of the major reasons for this is just practice time: you can only do so many things well. By specializing as pass-happy team they get an incredible amount of repetitions doing the things they do over and over and doing them well.

Four wide-receiver commitment. Now there's much debate within coaching circles if you can be a "run and shoot" team without being a four-wide receiver team. (Ironically, the Bills who beat the Oilers in that game and helped drive out the pure shoot were themselves a team that used primarily run and shoot concepts but with a tight-end, hence their nickname, the "K-Gun.") Moreover, run and shoot teams are actually far less multiple by formation than the typical spread team. They typically use a two-by-two spread look or a "trips" spread look with a single backside receiver and three to the other side. And they rarely go five-wides. There are many reasons for this -- including specialization of players -- but a big motivator is that their receivers and quarterback do so much reading after the snap they want to keep it simple before it; they want to see where the defense lines up and attack that. If you have fixed assignments, you are more concerned with moving the defense around to open those up; if you can adjust on the fly, that doesn't matter as much.

Receivers read the defense on the fly. This is probably the biggest difference between the modern "spread" and the 'shoot. Some of that distinction is a matter of shades of gray, but in other cases it is quite dramatic. The point about formations was made above, but the basic theory behind the offense goes back to the originator, Tiger Ellison. As the story goes, he wanted an offense that emulated what was most natural, so he observed playground and backyard football. He said you didn't see highly formalized lines and alignments or wedge plays and all that. Instead you saw a kid, on the run, tossing passes to receivers who would keep moving until they found open spots. To Ellison, if you didn't coach the kids too much they began "run and shooting" on their own, so he thought this was how people really want to play. Hence, his receivers would read and react on the fly to get open.

As Mouse Davis, who did as much to develop the modern 'shoot as any human could, has explained: "We are always going to adjust on the run to the defensive coverage," he said. "If the defense sets in one look, we are going to make one route adjustment. If the defense sets in another look, we are going to make another route adjustment."

There are a few ancillary points that have been part of the offense, but to a varying degree. For my purpose in this series they are important but not imperative.

Quarterback movement. In Ellison's original shoot and the versions used by Mouse Davis and in the NFL, the quarterback always began with a "half-roll" or semi-"sprint out," where he moved the pocket and attacked the corner. If you watch the video below of Portland State (now coached by run and shoot veterans Jerry Glanville and Mouse Davis; Portland State is in white and black), you'll clearly see what this looks like. This comported with Ellison's original vision of the run and shoot, and the fact that pass defenders had to contend with the threat of the quarterback running at them distorted the coverage. Nevertheless, some teams now have evolved to more of a dropback look, and June Jones now at SMU uses something of a hybrid. Moreover, what pass protection schemes you want to use will influence how you have your quarterback drop back.

Motion. This is probably one of the bigger changes with the 'shoot. In the original days, the idea was to have motion on every play, constantly moving from twins to balanced and back and forth. Now, however, defenses are better at disguising their reactions to motion and not giving away whether they are man or zone, so most teams have just disregarded it and just chosen to play. Nevertheless it is still a good tool to reveal certain techniques, and never underestimate how much it can affect a defense to change the strength of a formation.

Wrap-up

This is enough for now. In future parts of the series I will address topics like adjusting pass patterns on the fly, the basic run and shoot concepts like "switch," "go," and "choice," pass protection, marrying other pass concepts with the shoots, and quick passes and screens. Below are a few more run and shoot clips.

The Lions' new coach Jim Schwartz: football pragmatist?

The Detroit Lions hired former Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz to be their new head coach. A daunting gig, to be sure: achieving success in Detroit might be beyond any coach's realistic hopes. But, insofar as they might have a shot, this is an excellent hire.

There are the obvious and ESPN-ready reasons to hire Schwartz: (a) that he has been defensive coordinator with the Titans under Jeff Fisher, running one of the league's best units there, and (b) that he has worked with Bill Belichick, which come NFL hiring time is like holding a golden ticket.

But there's a better reason, and it is one that should give Lions fans at least a glimmer of legitimate hope: the guy has a brain. Yes, he has a degree from Georgetown, which puts him ahead of most NFL coaches, but more importantly he has proven that he has an inquisitive, analytical mind, which is all-too-often in short-supply in the NFL.

This past fall, the New York Times ran an article on Schwartz saying he was like the NFL's version of Billy Beane, the empirically minded general manager of the Oakland A's made famous (and in some circles, infamous) in Michael Lewis' great book, Moneyball. Beane, as you may remember, helped revolutionize baseball by favoring detailed statistical analysis to aid him in determining his draft picks, batting order, and pitchers. It famously led him to pick up and use guys no one else had any interest in or had even heard of.

(A running theme in Moneyball was Beane's repeated failed attempts to trade for some then-unknown minor league player for the Red Sox that he nicknamed the "Greek God of Walks" for the player's ability to repeatedly get walked more than just about anybody, while also driving up the pitch-count and consistently getting on base. He even had trouble getting him because the then Red Sox's front-office couldn't even remember that he was on their roster. That player? 2008 All-Star Kevin Youkilis.)

The other thing Beane did was win against the odds. The A's repeatedly made the playoffs despite having a payroll a mere fraction not only of juggernauts like the Yankees, but most other teams in their division and around the league. Lewis' answer to the question "How was Beane doing it?" was that Beane was outsmarting his opponents. It was not necessarily that he was smarter, but his approach was: the A's were willing to do away with "common wisdom" and even the kind of impressions most scouts give regarding a prospect: "Wow, look at the guns on him. He just looks like a baseball player." As a result, the A's routinely beat teams with payrolls twice theirs. And, now, the so-called sabermetric revolution has almost entirely swept through baseball. Even teams that don't rely on it as heavily as the A's still have some guys with laptops and Ivy League degrees slipping around their front offices these days. (The Red Sox too are now somewhat considered a Moneyball based organization, though one with a rather large payroll.)

But football is a different animal. On the one hand, football coaches and aficionados were engaged with advanced statistics long before baseball. Virgil Carter, former quarterback under Bill Walsh, actually computed the "expected value" of field position back in the 1960s. (He actually did it while enrolled part time in Northwestern's MBA program while also a player with the Chicago Bears.) Yet, as I have previously written, football is the most complex sport of all. You cannot model the game as a series of one-on-one battles as you can with baseball; indeed, the goal for both offense and defense is often to get two on one or three on two. But that has led far too many coaches, fans, and commentators -- maybe it is the machismo, maybe it is just the complexity -- to denounce and deride statistics out of hand, without basis.

Enter Schwartz. As the New York Times reported:

Schwartz, now the defensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans, had an economics degree from Georgetown University, an abiding fascination with statistics and a preference for watching game film over television. That made him a kindred spirit with his first N.F.L. boss, Bill Belichick. But when Schwartz told Belichick his findings from an early N.F.L. research project almost 15 years ago, Belichick said he did not believe him.

“Fumbles are a random occurrence,” Schwartz said he told Belichick. “Being able to get interceptions or not throw interceptions has a high correlation with good teams. But over the course of a year, good teams don’t fumble any more or less than bad teams. Bill didn’t agree. He said, ‘No, good teams don’t fumble the ball.’ But actually, they fumble just as often as bad teams.”

With the Titans, Schwartz once encouraged the former offensive coordinator Norm Chow to run more on third-and-short because his research indicated that it was more effective than passing.

Unorthodox thinking like that has earned Schwartz, 42, a reputation as one of the N.F.L.’s leading practitioners of statistical analysis — “Moneyball” for the shoulder-pad set — using them in coaching the defense for the league’s only unbeaten team . . . . Belichick regards Schwartz as one of the smartest coaches he has been around.

As the Times points out, however, in the NFL, being known for your analytical skills is, strangely enough, not always a plus:

But being known as a “stats guy” is not necessarily a compliment, because statistics do not hold the romantic place in football that they do in baseball. Although every coach uses plenty of data — the Titans’ Jeff Fisher tracks how long his team takes to break the huddle — football is unlikely to bestow statistics-driven celebrity on anyone the way the baseball book “Moneyball” did on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

(Of course, as Salon's King Kaufman points out in his article "Ignorance is not a sportswriting skill," baseball isn't always that enlightened either.)

In a previous article I discussed the anti-stats view, which I said can be described as nothing but neanderthal in nature. But sometimes it is just inertia and an unwillingness to be beholden to anything that doesn't seem "up front" or real; to these people, they feel like they have the experience and perception to "just know" -- Hey, it's common sense. But as Lord Keynes warned, what many call "common sense" is often just some past blowhard's own shoddy analysis or comment preserved and repeated over time, without examination.

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. " - John Maynard Keynes

Think of the myriad examples, like "balance," play-calling, spiking the ball, or going for it on fourth-down. This is why Schwartz offers some hope. He may not succeed in Detroit, but, to me, he appears more likely to do so than anyone else. He will no doubt attempt to go in there and put together the best possible plan, not just a collection of truisms and cliches: Orwell's advice about writing can be applied to putting together a football team and organization; he discusses reading a writer who, in his opening paragraph, appears to have something important to say. But the rest of the writer's piece collapses because whatever fresh thought he began with was quickly replaced with a series of tired cliches and overused metaphors. The final product was thus imprecise, impersonal, and banal.

The analogy works for coaches. You might be talented and have a vision, but if all you can say is that we're going to "outwork our opponents," "we're going to have balance," "we will establish the run," or "we will be more disciplined than our opponents," then you're in trouble. All those are worthy goals (mostly), but they aren't always particularly constructive. Indeed, although in high school, maybe you can do these things because you might know the game more and be better organized, the NFL is a different animal. In the NFL, if a guy doesn't work he's cut; if a coach doesn't win he's fired. Rod Marinelli's Lions rarely lacked effort. They simply lacked wins.

In gleaning other hints about Schwartz's mindset and approach, I saw his name arise in the context of another Michael Lewis piece, this one about Texas Tech's Mike Leach:

At least one N.F.L. defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz of the Tennessee Titans, had stumbled upon Texas Tech accidentally and said, Oh, my. The surprise runner-up in the search earlier this year for a new San Francisco 49ers head coach, Schwartz had scrambled to answer a question: if he got the 49ers job, whom should he hire? He was just in his mid-30's, and his football career stopped at Georgetown (where he graduated with honors in economics), so he really hadn't thought about this before.

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.

... Whoever played quarterback for the Texas Tech Red Raiders was sure to create so much offense that he couldn't be ignored.

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. . . . Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."

. . . This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn't know if Leach's system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn't sure it wouldn't.

The takeaway is not that Schwartz will be hiring Mike Leach as offensive coordinator. (In fact, he has hired Scott Linehan, which -- despite some outcry -- is generally a good choice. Many coaches, including Urban Meyer, still think Linehan is a bright, bright guy, and as a coordinator his offenses always put up points.) But the fact that he'd even consider back then should be heartening: it means Schwartz is looking for results backed up by the numbers, appearances and cliches be damned. Leach's offense looks screwy: the linemen are linemen split out wide, four receivers line-up on nearly every play, yet it gets results, and results with inferior talent at that. Beane was derided and mocked when he'd pick up a pitcher with a funky sidearm delivery where the ball was released only a few inches from the ground -- a release no scout could ever condone. Yet the derision would fade when they realized that few hitters could hit that crazy delivery, at least for a time. Beane was shopping for discounts.

Schwartz, as head coach of a struggling team, no doubt will be looking at the bottom line, and he too will have to shop for discounts. Traditional or different, he wants results. He appears to be a pragmatist. In that job, he'll have to be.

Winning football games on Mondays through Saturdays

One part of the Times piece on Schwartz particularly struck me:



"Sometimes, [being statistics-driven is] an easy thing for people in the media to use against you,” Schwartz said. “ ‘Oh, yeah, he can’t adjust; he’s just a stats guy. They don’t really understand the game.’ That’s why sometimes, the whole stats thing is a dirty word.

“If you ask me, Would you rather have a great fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy on Sunday, a guy who can dial up plays and he’d be the best in league, or a guy who is best in the league from Monday to Saturday preparing, I respect the guy who prepares. You’re not always going to be rolling 7, 7, 7 and be hot every week. But if you prepare well during the week, you’ll be consistent from week to week.”

This exact sentiment formed the gravamen of Walsh's west coast offense. Quotes from Walsh:

I have been afforded the experience that allowed us to conceive an offense, a defense, and a system of football that is basically a matter of rehearsing what we do prior to the game. . . .

What we have finally done is rehearse the opening part of the game, almost the entire first half, by planning the game before it even starts. . . .

Now why would you do such a thing? I know this, your ability to think concisely, your ability to make good judgments is much easier on Thursday night than during the heat of the game. So we prefer to make our decisions related to the game almost clinically, before the game is ever played. We've scouted our opponent, we have looked at films, we know our opponent well. . . . To be honest, [in the heat of the game] you are in a state of stress, sometimes you are in a state of desperation and you are asked to make very calculated decisions. It is rarely done in warfare and certainly not in football; so your decisions made during the week are the ones that make sense. In the final analysis, after a lot of time and thought and a lot of planning, and some practice, I will isolate myself prior to the game and put together the first 25 plays for the game. They are related to certain things.

...But whatever you have, if you have planned it and fail, you can't blame yourself for losing your poise. You can't blame yourself for panicking if you have planned these things and they fail. You may really search yourself for the kinds of decisions you made on Thursday night, but you certainly can't make the decision during the game. As a coach, one of the things you are always fighting during the game is the stress factor, breaking your will. The stress factor will affect your thinking. I have been in situations where I could not even begin to think what to do. From that point on, I knew that I had better rehearse everything.

And, too, you can add in analysis that there is no time to do during the game. You analyze the probabilities, you remove the irrational choices like going for certain field goals on certain fourth and shorts.

A few years ago I wrote about the idea that gameplanning and weekday work is advantageous both because you can be meticulous but also because you gain important self-restraint capabilities. I drew on a lecture given by Nobel Laureate in Economics, Thomas Schelling (yes I know, it is not exactly the same as a Nobel Prize as established by Alfred Nobel). To illustrate, Schelling used a story about Captain Ahab; you can read it here.

But a similar story with the self-constraints that gameplanning puts on the coach (as compared with the seat-of-the-pants approach favored by so many) is the story of Odysseus (or Ulysesses) and the Sirens: when Odysseus's boat approached the sirens -- whose sweet singing had lured many sailors to their deaths -- he first put wax in his sailors' ears to block out the music, then had his crew tie him to the mast, thus making him powerless. In the moment, when his boat went by the sirens, he was irrational, and wanted nothing more than to steer the boat to him. But his rational self had already judged this, decided against it, and denied his later, weaker self the same choice.

Although not nearly so dramatic, gameplanning and the script often works the same way (though with slightly more flexibility than one has tied to the mast). Hopefully, for Lions fans, it is this methodical, analytical approach that Jim Schwartz offers.

Moreover, this story highlights the interdependent role that head and assistant coaches must have: they must take turns as Odyssesus and the crew, tying each other up, making the plans in advance, and even, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, entirely ignored, as Odysseus was.

As noted above, gameplans should nevertheless be contingency based; they must be flexible enough to respond to what an opponent does. But of course gameplans are based on this: those who reject scripting because they are too wooden just really don't understand what scripting is. But, a well crafted gameplan can still handle these scenarios and be created in a detached setting.

Moreover, the other important factor is that some information simply cannot be processed merely in-game; answers will only be yielded by careful study through the week. You simply don't have time to crunch all the numbers, assemble data on all the fronts and schemes, nor run down the variety of contingent scenarios. But if you do that, and then combine it with what you learn during a game, you have a chance to win. And, through your study, you might see options -- like maybe what Mike Leach does, the wildcat, or some other forward thinker -- that traditional football intertia blinds you to. As I wrote a few weeks back:

[F]rom Peter Bernstein's book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.

The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.

And it will remain controversial . . . because the future will be paved by numbers and judgment, marching, somewhat awkwardly, hand in hand.

Good luck to Jim Schwartz.

The Lions' new coach Jim Schwartz: football pragmatist?

The Detroit Lions hired former Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz to be their new head coach. A daunting gig, to be sure: achieving success in Detroit might be beyond any coach's realistic hopes. But, insofar as they might have a shot, this is an excellent hire.

There are the obvious and ESPN-ready reasons to hire Schwartz: (a) that he has been defensive coordinator with the Titans under Jeff Fisher, running one of the league's best units there, and (b) that he has worked with Bill Belichick, which come NFL hiring time is like holding a golden ticket.

But there's a better reason, and it is one that should give Lions fans at least a glimmer of legitimate hope: the guy has a brain. Yes, he has a degree from Georgetown, which puts him ahead of most NFL coaches, but more importantly he has proven that he has an inquisitive, analytical mind, which is all-too-often in short-supply in the NFL.

This past fall, the New York Times ran an article on Schwartz saying he was like the NFL's version of Billy Beane, the empirically minded general manager of the Oakland A's made famous (and in some circles, infamous) in Michael Lewis' great book, Moneyball. Beane, as you may remember, helped revolutionize baseball by favoring detailed statistical analysis to aid him in determining his draft picks, batting order, and pitchers. It famously led him to pick up and use guys no one else had any interest in or had even heard of.

(A running theme in Moneyball was Beane's repeated failed attempts to trade for some then-unknown minor league player for the Red Sox that he nicknamed the "Greek God of Walks" for the player's ability to repeatedly get walked more than just about anybody, while also driving up the pitch-count and consistently getting on base. He even had trouble getting him because the then Red Sox's front-office couldn't even remember that he was on their roster. That player? 2008 All-Star Kevin Youkilis.)

The other thing Beane did was win against the odds. The A's repeatedly made the playoffs despite having a payroll a mere fraction not only of juggernauts like the Yankees, but most other teams in their division and around the league. Lewis' answer to the question "How was Beane doing it?" was that Beane was outsmarting his opponents. It was not necessarily that he was smarter, but his approach was: the A's were willing to do away with "common wisdom" and even the kind of impressions most scouts give regarding a prospect: "Wow, look at the guns on him. He just looks like a baseball player." As a result, the A's routinely beat teams with payrolls twice theirs. And, now, the so-called sabermetric revolution has almost entirely swept through baseball. Even teams that don't rely on it as heavily as the A's still have some guys with laptops and Ivy League degrees slipping around their front offices these days. (The Red Sox too are now somewhat considered a Moneyball based organization, though one with a rather large payroll.)

But football is a different animal. On the one hand, football coaches and aficionados were engaged with advanced statistics long before baseball. Virgil Carter, former quarterback under Bill Walsh, actually computed the "expected value" of field position back in the 1960s. (He actually did it while enrolled part time in Northwestern's MBA program while also a player with the Chicago Bears.) Yet, as I have previously written, football is the most complex sport of all. You cannot model the game as a series of one-on-one battles as you can with baseball; indeed, the goal for both offense and defense is often to get two on one or three on two. But that has led far too many coaches, fans, and commentators -- maybe it is the machismo, maybe it is just the complexity -- to denounce and deride statistics out of hand, without basis.

Enter Schwartz. As the New York Times reported:

Schwartz, now the defensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans, had an economics degree from Georgetown University, an abiding fascination with statistics and a preference for watching game film over television. That made him a kindred spirit with his first N.F.L. boss, Bill Belichick. But when Schwartz told Belichick his findings from an early N.F.L. research project almost 15 years ago, Belichick said he did not believe him.

“Fumbles are a random occurrence,” Schwartz said he told Belichick. “Being able to get interceptions or not throw interceptions has a high correlation with good teams. But over the course of a year, good teams don’t fumble any more or less than bad teams. Bill didn’t agree. He said, ‘No, good teams don’t fumble the ball.’ But actually, they fumble just as often as bad teams.”

With the Titans, Schwartz once encouraged the former offensive coordinator Norm Chow to run more on third-and-short because his research indicated that it was more effective than passing.

Unorthodox thinking like that has earned Schwartz, 42, a reputation as one of the N.F.L.’s leading practitioners of statistical analysis — “Moneyball” for the shoulder-pad set — using them in coaching the defense for the league’s only unbeaten team . . . . Belichick regards Schwartz as one of the smartest coaches he has been around.

As the Times points out, however, in the NFL, being known for your analytical skills is, strangely enough, not always a plus:

But being known as a “stats guy” is not necessarily a compliment, because statistics do not hold the romantic place in football that they do in baseball. Although every coach uses plenty of data — the Titans’ Jeff Fisher tracks how long his team takes to break the huddle — football is unlikely to bestow statistics-driven celebrity on anyone the way the baseball book “Moneyball” did on Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

(Of course, as Salon's King Kaufman points out in his article "Ignorance is not a sportswriting skill," baseball isn't always that enlightened either.)

In a previous article I discussed the anti-stats view, which I said can be described as nothing but neanderthal in nature. But sometimes it is just inertia and an unwillingness to be beholden to anything that doesn't seem "up front" or real; to these people, they feel like they have the experience and perception to "just know" -- Hey, it's common sense. But as Lord Keynes warned, what many call "common sense" is often just some past blowhard's own shoddy analysis or comment preserved and repeated over time, without examination.

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. " - John Maynard Keynes

Think of the myriad examples, like "balance," play-calling, spiking the ball, or going for it on fourth-down. This is why Schwartz offers some hope. He may not succeed in Detroit, but, to me, he appears more likely to do so than anyone else. He will no doubt attempt to go in there and put together the best possible plan, not just a collection of truisms and cliches: Orwell's advice about writing can be applied to putting together a football team and organization; he discusses reading a writer who, in his opening paragraph, appears to have something important to say. But the rest of the writer's piece collapses because whatever fresh thought he began with was quickly replaced with a series of tired cliches and overused metaphors. The final product was thus imprecise, impersonal, and banal.

The analogy works for coaches. You might be talented and have a vision, but if all you can say is that we're going to "outwork our opponents," "we're going to have balance," "we will establish the run," or "we will be more disciplined than our opponents," then you're in trouble. All those are worthy goals (mostly), but they aren't always particularly constructive. Indeed, although in high school, maybe you can do these things because you might know the game more and be better organized, the NFL is a different animal. In the NFL, if a guy doesn't work he's cut; if a coach doesn't win he's fired. Rod Marinelli's Lions rarely lacked effort. They simply lacked wins.

In gleaning other hints about Schwartz's mindset and approach, I saw his name arise in the context of another Michael Lewis piece, this one about Texas Tech's Mike Leach:

At least one N.F.L. defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz of the Tennessee Titans, had stumbled upon Texas Tech accidentally and said, Oh, my. The surprise runner-up in the search earlier this year for a new San Francisco 49ers head coach, Schwartz had scrambled to answer a question: if he got the 49ers job, whom should he hire? He was just in his mid-30's, and his football career stopped at Georgetown (where he graduated with honors in economics), so he really hadn't thought about this before.

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.

... Whoever played quarterback for the Texas Tech Red Raiders was sure to create so much offense that he couldn't be ignored.

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. . . . Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."

. . . This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn't know if Leach's system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn't sure it wouldn't.

The takeaway is not that Schwartz will be hiring Mike Leach as offensive coordinator. (In fact, he has hired Scott Linehan, which -- despite some outcry -- is generally a good choice. Many coaches, including Urban Meyer, still think Linehan is a bright, bright guy, and as a coordinator his offenses always put up points.) But the fact that he'd even consider back then should be heartening: it means Schwartz is looking for results backed up by the numbers, appearances and cliches be damned. Leach's offense looks screwy: the linemen are linemen split out wide, four receivers line-up on nearly every play, yet it gets results, and results with inferior talent at that. Beane was derided and mocked when he'd pick up a pitcher with a funky sidearm delivery where the ball was released only a few inches from the ground -- a release no scout could ever condone. Yet the derision would fade when they realized that few hitters could hit that crazy delivery, at least for a time. Beane was shopping for discounts.

Schwartz, as head coach of a struggling team, no doubt will be looking at the bottom line, and he too will have to shop for discounts. Traditional or different, he wants results. He appears to be a pragmatist. In that job, he'll have to be.

Winning football games on Mondays through Saturdays

One part of the Times piece on Schwartz particularly struck me:



"Sometimes, [being statistics-driven is] an easy thing for people in the media to use against you,” Schwartz said. “ ‘Oh, yeah, he can’t adjust; he’s just a stats guy. They don’t really understand the game.’ That’s why sometimes, the whole stats thing is a dirty word.

“If you ask me, Would you rather have a great fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy on Sunday, a guy who can dial up plays and he’d be the best in league, or a guy who is best in the league from Monday to Saturday preparing, I respect the guy who prepares. You’re not always going to be rolling 7, 7, 7 and be hot every week. But if you prepare well during the week, you’ll be consistent from week to week.”

This exact sentiment formed the gravamen of Walsh's west coast offense. Quotes from Walsh:

I have been afforded the experience that allowed us to conceive an offense, a defense, and a system of football that is basically a matter of rehearsing what we do prior to the game. . . .

What we have finally done is rehearse the opening part of the game, almost the entire first half, by planning the game before it even starts. . . .

Now why would you do such a thing? I know this, your ability to think concisely, your ability to make good judgments is much easier on Thursday night than during the heat of the game. So we prefer to make our decisions related to the game almost clinically, before the game is ever played. We've scouted our opponent, we have looked at films, we know our opponent well. . . . To be honest, [in the heat of the game] you are in a state of stress, sometimes you are in a state of desperation and you are asked to make very calculated decisions. It is rarely done in warfare and certainly not in football; so your decisions made during the week are the ones that make sense. In the final analysis, after a lot of time and thought and a lot of planning, and some practice, I will isolate myself prior to the game and put together the first 25 plays for the game. They are related to certain things.

...But whatever you have, if you have planned it and fail, you can't blame yourself for losing your poise. You can't blame yourself for panicking if you have planned these things and they fail. You may really search yourself for the kinds of decisions you made on Thursday night, but you certainly can't make the decision during the game. As a coach, one of the things you are always fighting during the game is the stress factor, breaking your will. The stress factor will affect your thinking. I have been in situations where I could not even begin to think what to do. From that point on, I knew that I had better rehearse everything.

And, too, you can add in analysis that there is no time to do during the game. You analyze the probabilities, you remove the irrational choices like going for certain field goals on certain fourth and shorts.

A few years ago I wrote about the idea that gameplanning and weekday work is advantageous both because you can be meticulous but also because you gain important self-restraint capabilities. I drew on a lecture given by Nobel Laureate in Economics, Thomas Schelling (yes I know, it is not exactly the same as a Nobel Prize as established by Alfred Nobel). To illustrate, Schelling used a story about Captain Ahab; you can read it here.

But a similar story with the self-constraints that gameplanning puts on the coach (as compared with the seat-of-the-pants approach favored by so many) is the story of Odysseus (or Ulysesses) and the Sirens: when Odysseus's boat approached the sirens -- whose sweet singing had lured many sailors to their deaths -- he first put wax in his sailors' ears to block out the music, then had his crew tie him to the mast, thus making him powerless. In the moment, when his boat went by the sirens, he was irrational, and wanted nothing more than to steer the boat to him. But his rational self had already judged this, decided against it, and denied his later, weaker self the same choice.

Although not nearly so dramatic, gameplanning and the script often works the same way (though with slightly more flexibility than one has tied to the mast). Hopefully, for Lions fans, it is this methodical, analytical approach that Jim Schwartz offers.

Moreover, this story highlights the interdependent role that head and assistant coaches must have: they must take turns as Odyssesus and the crew, tying each other up, making the plans in advance, and even, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, entirely ignored, as Odysseus was.

As noted above, gameplans should nevertheless be contingency based; they must be flexible enough to respond to what an opponent does. But of course gameplans are based on this: those who reject scripting because they are too wooden just really don't understand what scripting is. But, a well crafted gameplan can still handle these scenarios and be created in a detached setting.

Moreover, the other important factor is that some information simply cannot be processed merely in-game; answers will only be yielded by careful study through the week. You simply don't have time to crunch all the numbers, assemble data on all the fronts and schemes, nor run down the variety of contingent scenarios. But if you do that, and then combine it with what you learn during a game, you have a chance to win. And, through your study, you might see options -- like maybe what Mike Leach does, the wildcat, or some other forward thinker -- that traditional football intertia blinds you to. As I wrote a few weeks back:

[F]rom Peter Bernstein's book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.

The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.

And it will remain controversial . . . because the future will be paved by numbers and judgment, marching, somewhat awkwardly, hand in hand.

Good luck to Jim Schwartz.