Breakdown Sports

On Saturday, Penn State pulled out a direct snap offense, in which they lined up initially like a normal shotgun snap, and then shifted late such that the RB was behind the Center and the QB aligned off set. This sets up for an offense where the QB can still be utilized as a run threat, but the RB can get the ball into his hands immediately and take advantage of some of the interior run schemes while the fairly mobile QB can still threaten the edge. More specifically in this instance, it allows you to run Power O with your RB without being forced to block the "kickout" defender (he's blocked with the read). It's an interesting wrinkle that puts a lot of pressure on the play side of the defense, but it isn't without it's limitations. Now on film, defenses can react based on those limitations. So how can the Nittany Lions grow this package to take advantage of what defenses may show going forward? Let's speculate.

Embed from Getty Images "Written in Chalk", get it? Like Written in Stone" or "Written in Blood" but chalk because chalk boards. Also a 'Buddy and Julie Miller' album , who I never heard of before but here's a plug. In reality it should probably be "Written in Dry Erase Marker or: Accidentally Written in Permanent Marker on a Dry Erase Board because Someone Put it Here and Now Look, I Can't Erase It, Damnit", but that wasn't as catchy. Anyway, the idea here is absolutely to be speculative. Yes, I'm going to try to ground this series in logic. No, it's not always going to be logical. That's how great ideas are made. "Written in Chalk" was always one of my favorite parts of coaching that wasn't the actual act of coaching. It was collaborating with the staff, it was drawing some things on the board and constantly asking "what if?" And once you did that someone else asked, "and what if w...

AP Photo/Al Goldis I got to rewatch the MSU-Iowa game in some detail. Here's my takeaways with some brevity (most of this comes from twitter with some edits, so sorry for it being poorly written. MSU D MSU DL did great job most of the game dealing with the Iowa stretch game. Did a great job getting helmet playside and limiting playside gaps  A bit of Iowa's success on ground game off gap schemes where DL overcommitted to what they thought was stretch; not really replicable for UM  Does mean something to UM tho: MSU is great at identifying/defending tendency. Need to strategically break tendency to get them out of pos (this is a common thing for all of Dantonio's good defenses, well schooled)  LBs/Safeties still flow very hard. Pursuit mostly disciplined but you can catch them out of gaps and can catch open grass away from action  And you can still play formation games to get matchups you want in secondary. Tight splits/TEs = knob adj = Safety on receiv...