Breakdown Sports

Ohio State has been feasting through in the pass game with one of the core tenets of the Air Raid offense: drag routes. Go into any Air Raid passing playbook from Kevin Wilson (or Mike Leach), or looking back at Chip Kelly's Oregon offenses (the current OSU QB coach is Kelly's former QB coach) and you'll notice that probably 50% of the pass plays contain some sort of drag route. Go to your basic pass game concepts  and you'll see that these playbooks are littered with Over, Cab, Crash, Crease, Mesh , and NCAA concepts . Air Raid coaches love these concepts, and so they rep these concepts constantly, because in man coverage their better athletes can run away from LBs or safeties or get beneficial rubs to allow them to run away from CBs. Against zone you can find a void and settle there and wait for the QB to throw you open. In theory, it works against everything. Yet, it still has it's detractors, because if you don't practice it enough, if you don't put in t...

The focus of most route combinations is attacking one side of the field, mostly toward the outside. That's well and good, but if you don't attack the center of the field with the pass than you've failed to threaten a lot of grass. We've looked at several route combinations now, and that will come in handy now that we are going a little further in depth.  TE/Flanker combinations ,  Twins combinations , and  2x2 and Mirrored combinations  all make it easier to define the basic concepts that attack the middle of the field. So let's take a look, first starting with the NCAA route combination.