Breakdown Sports

Introduction Ohio State and Urban Meyer are best known for their spread offense. Meyer though, has taken the run-based spread and brought it full circle. Today what I want to do is compare Ohio State's offense to Michigan's offense. No, not to Al Borges's offense. No, not even to Rich Rodriguez's offense. I want to compare Ohio State to Fritz Crisler's 1947 Single Wing offense. In this article we're going show you one of the most innovative offenses of the day, by comparing it to one of the most explosive offenses of yesteryear. It will be light on words, but heavy on diagrams and old timey video. Getting the Differences Out of the Way Let's start by getting the differences out of the way. No offense to Crisler, but his passing concepts wouldn't cut it in today's game. While Meyer has a relatively simply passing playbook, it's vastly more advanced than the single wing playbook. Well, besides the jump pass; that's straight from the single ...

LINK to full article. In 2013, Ohio State had one of the best run offenses in the nation. Part of their success came from two-back sets, or more accurately, by motioning a slot receiver - their Percy Harvin role - into the backfield. Losing, in my opinion, the best college RB in football last year, but returning the dynamic Braxton Miller and all their Harvinites, two back sets will likely become more prominent in this year's offensive iteration. In this piece, we will look at why these sets are so difficult for defenses to defend, both from a pre-snap standpoint, and after the snap. Pre-snap Dilemma The Buckeyes base set will present four vertical threats. Often times, this will be with 11 personnel, with two split ends, a slot, an H-back, and a RB. At times Meyer will deploy more of a true TE look, and involve a flanker and slot or show a trips type set. Motioning 11 personnel or 10 personnel to 21 or 20 personnel presents a very different look for defenses. Let me explai...

Originally Posted at Maize n Brew on July 26, 2013 Background In the summer of 2013, Nebraska was coming off of one of their worst seasons in terms of run defense. Their DTs struggled mightily, their DEs weren't enough to counter the problems on the interior. This post discusses some of the basic Pelini defenses, and the adjustments he made when he realized his team struggled to stop the run. While Nebraska's run defense improved over the course of '13, these are still tactics that Pelini will go to in times of need. For what it's worth, an added bit of information is that Pelini prefers to 2-gap his two DTs on the interior. By the time much of the film seen below was taken, it had appeared the Nebraska defensive staff had stopped asking the Nebraska DTs to 2-gap, and instead focus on maintaining a single gap. This simplification of the defense makes it easier for the DTs to do their job, but tends to make the defense as a whole a bit less effective. Introductio...

Originally published at Maize n Brew Note This information is applied to the Bill O'Brien PSU teams, but the concepts are familiar throughout the Big Ten. Many teams, such as Iowa, Wisconsins, etc, will utilize zone running schemes. And the mesh concept described below will apply to many teams with young QBs, and will be utilized by coordinators throughout the Big Ten. Introduction This piece will be a bit shorter today, but hopefully it will still be informative. Penn State has given me absolutely no full game footage, making it very difficult to grasp a whole lot about scheme and patterns. But they do have some pretty good game highlights, and for whatever reason some guy from Nebraska has some all 11 footage from when they played Penn State, so I got some nice stuff coming your way (thanks Alonzo Whaley ). Anyway, Bill O'Brien has done a great job in a short time taking many of the offensive philosophies from the Patriots, very much simplifying them, and then teachin...

First image that comes up on Google for "Buck Around", probably associated with the Wisconsin Blog linked below... their Podcasts go pretty hard. Over at Buck Around, I took part in my first podcast, discussing the X's and O's of Wisconsin's run game. LINK