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2022 Season: Week 10 Thread - Sara
- Thread starter bruin
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good article from the athletic
@Southpaw
@Southpaw
Baylor defensive coordinator Phil Bennett saw Alabama receivers coach Billy Napier walk into the high school in Shreveport, La.. He had an immediate question: “Is Nick here?”
Nick Saban was, in a car in the parking lot. And he wanted to talk to Bennett, a friend since they were running Big Ten defenses in the 1980s — Bennett at Purdue, Saban at Michigan State. It was early 2015, checking-on-recruits season, but Saban had also been thinking about Baylor’s field-stretching, hyper-pacing, record-breaking offense.
“He wanted to get together to talk about it,” Bennett recalled. “Nick and I are a lot alike in the things we do, the matchups we look for, and he wanted some insight, some ideas on how to stop it. He told me, ‘It hasn’t made it all the way to me yet. But I know what’s coming.’
“Isn’t that funny?”
Bennett is now the defensive coordinator at North Texas, and he was preparing for Western Kentucky and a similar offensive style when he spoke on the phone last week. He still found time amid his busy schedule to watch the complete tape of the moment the Baylor offense — the forefather of the offense Josh Heupel and Tennessee now run — truly made it all the way to Saban.
And yes, he found that funny as well, though Saban remains a friend and a comrade-in-defense.
“I mean, Tennessee just did an unbelievable job of creating matchups, getting Alabama out of position, out of the box,” Bennett said of UT’s sport-shaking 52-49 win, which has the No. 1 Vols in the national title hunt entering Saturday’s epic at No. 3 Georgia. “I laugh, I watched that and I told people, ‘Well, the Big 12 has finally made it to the SEC.’ One time (at Baylor) we beat TCU 61-58, people would make fun of us, say we had terrible defenses. Yeah, what was the score the other day? That’s the reality of this offense. It’s hell to stop.”
Josh Heuepel and the Vols are ranked No. 1 in the CFP rankings. (Randy Sartin / USA Today)
Especially the way Tennessee is running it, with the players Tennessee has running it. This offense, coming off a decent night in a 44-6 evisceration of then-No. 19 Kentucky, leads the nation in scoring (49.4 ppg), total offense (553.0 ypg), passing efficiency rating (198.51), receivers schemed completely wide open, touchdown drives completed in the time it takes to put a beer in a koozie and opposing coaches reduced to wild-eyed tantrums.
It has been thoroughly shut down once in Heupel’s two seasons, by the 2021 national championship Georgia team that had eight defenders drafted, a record five in the first round. It has advanced well beyond that form a year later, but Saturday represents the best chance of someone to get a handle on it this season. It needs its own name — how about Happy Fun Offense? (Do not taunt Happy Fun Offense.) It is both simple and complex, and somewhat misunderstood.
Here, through interviews with Tennessee coaches and several coaches who make their living defending, is what we can declare about it.
‘We evolve and change all the time’
Heupel is an Air Raid disciple, learning that offense as a junior college transfer quarterback at Oklahoma in 1999 under Mike Leach. Leach was the offensive coordinator, hired by new Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops because Leach’s pass-heavy offense at Kentucky gave Stoops’ Florida defenses so much trouble.
Leach got the head coaching job at Texas Tech in 2000, leaving Heupel behind to win the national championship with the Sooners. One of Leach’s first hires at Texas Tech was a running backs coach whose high school teams in Stephenville, Texas, were winning championships with a unique brand of spread offense. Art Briles, who played his college ball at Houston under the inventor of the veer triple-option offense, Bill Yeoman, went from Texas Tech running backs coach to Houston head coach in 2003. He turned around that dormant program, then did the same starting at Baylor in 2008.
His offense, often called the “veer and shoot” (though there isn’t much veer in it), is what Heupel has been running since after he was fired by Stoops as Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator in 2015. Basically.
“There’s portions of that — there’s also portions of what I did with Mike Leach as a player,” Heupel told The Athletic. “There’s portions of a little bit of everything. We evolve and change all the time. I mean, we’ve been different with every quarterback we have.”
Leach sees the same thing, saying Heupel “has always dabbled in (the Air Raid) and used some of the principles, but the offense he has now is a combination of things.”
The Air Raid gets the ball out quickly and essentially uses short passing as a run game.
“One of the most driving influences was the wishbone,” Leach said. “Because the wishbone and the Air Raid try to achieve the same things. Both offenses try to distribute the ball to all the skill positions. They personify every skill position touching the ball.”
The Tennessee offense, which is studied weekly and closely by Dave McGinnis for a Nashville radio show he does on the Vols, reminds him of something else. McGinnis, a longtime pro and college coach who was the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals from 2000 through 2003, gets flashbacks to the late 1980s when he was linebackers coach for the Chicago Bears.
“I’ve been dealing with this stuff since Mouse Davis,” McGinnis said of the man who brought the run and shoot offense to the NFL’s Detroit Lions, a scheme with four wide receivers out on every play, adjusting to coverage on the fly while Barry Sanders found open space as a runner.
This was a few years after Davis’ Toronto Argonauts offense — quarterbacked by former Tennessee star Condredge Holloway — got all the way to the Grey Cup before losing to the Warren Moon-led Edmonton dynasty.
“As I watch the iteration of what Josh Heupel is doing now, it’s really good, intricate stuff,” said McGinnis, game analyst on the Tennessee Titans Radio Network. “There’s much more to it than just lining up and spinning it. He’ll never tell you all that it is, and he doesn’t have to.”
The Tennessee offense looks most like the Briles offense with receivers split extremely wide, a relentless tempo that keeps defenses from substituting, frequent vertical shots and a devotion to running the ball. But Heupel hiring Iowa Statetight ends coach Alex Golesh to be his offensive coordinator at UCF — replacing Briles disciple and current Oklahoma OC Jeff Lebby — represented another shift. Golesh came with Heupel to Tennessee and has expanded the run game and added elements of burliness to help the Vols in short yardage and the red zone.
Golesh started studying the Baylor offense back when he was a grad assistant at Oklahoma State in 2008 and said he saw it change dramatically over several years.
Tennessee’s attack shares a lot of similarities with Art Briles’ offenses at Baylor. (John Weast / Getty Images)
“And we’ve also evolved drastically,” he said. “Adjustments in formations, the ability to play in condensed and open sets, the RPO (run-pass option) game is drastically different from what (Baylor) did. Schematically, those guys had three or four run schemes and moved on. We use tight ends in the pass game. We motion way more than anybody has done (in this offense), to try to create mismatches. What makes Josh unique is he’s lived, like, different lives offensively.”
The simplest form of the Air Raid as a player. The RPO and the zone read as an understudy to then-Oklahoma offensive coordinator (and current Ohio State OC) Kevin Wilson. Coordinating offenses at Utah State and Missouri, where he really embraced the Briles concepts. Molding things to quarterbacks with different skill sets, as he has done with current Heisman candidate Hendon Hooker. And some serious bully ball to complement the aerial assault.
“The biggest difference here is you’re not better than everybody you play at the skill spots,” Golesh said of a reality that was quite clear last year against Georgia. “So how do you develop, how do you stay ahead of people, how do you move the chains and score points?”
This offense, whatever you want to call it and however you want to trace its roots, is doing that at astounding levels entering Saturday.
It has been a nightmare for many a defensive coordinator
Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi wins the award so far this season as the defensive mind who has done the most figuring out of the Vols. They scored 27 points in regulation on the Panthers — the next-lowest was 38 against Florida — in a 34-27 overtime win in Pittsburgh, and Tennessee’s 91 rushing yards in that game was a season low by far. The next-lowest totals were 177 against Kentucky and 182 against Alabama. UT gouged LSU for 263 yards on the ground and the Gators for 227.
It was also early in the season, the Vols lost a fumble, Hooker missed a couple deep shots and Cedric Tillman dropped a long touchdown pass before atoning with the game winner.
“It’s not fun,” Narduzzi said of playing against this offense, and the sentiment was the same after Narduzzi’s Michigan State defense of 2014 gave up 41 points to Baylor in three quarters in the Cotton Bowl before a wild comeback and 42-41 win.
“They had all those good DBs,” Bennett said of that Spartans team, “and we just dominated them.”
But the Bears didn’t run the ball in the fourth quarter and opened the door to a comeback. That was one of the football criticisms of Briles, who a bit more than a year later lost his job in a sexual assault scandal involving his program and now coaches in Italy.
Two coaches who had to scheme to defend those teams, NC State defensive coordinator Tony Gibson and Wake Forest linebackers coach Glenn Spencer, say a lot of the same things Narduzzi, Bennett and McGinnis say about the offense. All were interviewed separately, but their comments can be stitched together in the form of a round table/support group.
McGinnis: “Oh, I would hate trying to defend this.”
Bennett: “The tempo takes all subbing out of the game, which makes you so stressed on defense, it’s unbelievable. And then they stretch you horizontally over and over again until the vertical passing game beats your ass.”
Gibson, who encountered the Baylor offense often as a defensive coach at West Virginia: “They get you on your heels as a defensive coordinator trying to call it, so now you’re just trying to get your base front lined up and coverage in. It’s really hard to blitz it.”
Narduzzi: “There’s really no disguising coverages against them because they split you out so wide.”
Bennett: “People say, ‘Oh it’s just a passing offense.’ Bull—-. It’s a numbers count. It’s an angles count. We had a few guys rush for more than 1,000 yards at Baylor.”
McGinnis: “The thing that happens a lot is you get a defensive coordinator chasing calls. And what I mean by that is, they’ll try to adjust the next play to try to take care of the play that just hurt them. That’s chasing calls, and if they start chasing calls, then what you can do offensively is set up and layer, or stack, calls. Heupel may run something early on to see how they’ll react. Then knowing they’ll chase that, he’ll have a counter punch off it. It’s very intricate. It may look simple, but there’s a lot to it. But the quarterback has to be able to handle it, and the receivers have to be able to read coverage after the ball is snapped. That’s critical.”
Bennett: “Everything you do almost has to be an automatic package. Brent Venables tried to have a big playbook against us (as Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator). You just can’t do it. Art would say, ‘I wish we could play Brent Venables every game.’”
Spencer, who coached against the Baylor offense for years at Oklahoma State: “They mastered how fast they could get set and get off a play, so your personnel is the same. Their splits are so wide, they define the box. They know the numbers you have, they know if it’s a light box and they can run it or if you’re trying to devote more coverage. Then the speed of the receivers, it’s the quick screen and deep ball game, and they’re gonna run you and run you and run you again. Can you tell I respect it?”
It must be stopped early
Not early in the game, though that’s also a good idea for Georgia — UT has outscored opponents 293 to 81 in the first quarter in Heupel’s two seasons, with a first-quarter scoring average of 13.95 points, tops in the nation.
But one thing every defensive coach referenced was first down. The first play of a Tennessee drive is the best opportunity to line up, attempt to disguise something and be aggressive. Each successive first down allows a few fractions of seconds more than normal — while the chains move — against a UT offense that leads the nation with 2.9 plays per minute in the past two seasons.
“If you stay ahead of the chains in this offense, the defense is going to be consistently on its left foot,” McGinnis said.
“Slowing them down on first down is the key to playing all tempo offenses,” Gibson said. “A negative play, a sack, anything that can get them off rhythm. Now they’re thinking a little bit more.”
This is, of course, difficult to achieve against the Vols. Their 7.93 yards per play on first down ranks third nationally (11.99 yards per pass is first, 4.16 per rush is 82nd), and they rank first with a 63.5 percent first-down success rate as defined by SportSource Analytics. That definition of success is any play that gains 40 percent or more of the required yardage or that results in a touchdown. The Vols get right after people.
All of these coaches have success stories against this kind of offense, by the way (though as McGinnis pointed out, the old NFL way of making teams pay for five-man protections by crushing quarterbacks, and deterring crossing routes with headhunting linebackers, doesn’t work today). Winning up front to limit the run and get quick pressure on the quarterback, plus winning outside with sticky man coverage are necessities. Tackling in the open field is critical.
Bennett said one advice he would give is to take away in-breaking routes with inside leverage and force perfect throws to the sideline. That also keeps defensive backs closer for run support. In UT’s 52-49 win over Alabama, the Crimson Tide played a lot of “man free” with one safety deep and inside releases permitted. But that safety didn’t get over fast enough on several big plays. And his alignment took him out of run support. It was like playing 10 on 11, which is not advisable against the Vols.
An aggressive scheme can help. Georgia has one. Pittsburgh has one. Narduzzi’s base coverage is “quarters,” which is essentially man coverage deep downfield. The Panthers safeties help hard against the run and dare you to throw perfectly over the top. The Vols made them pay at times, but at least defenders were in the area — as opposed to other games this season in which Jalin Hyatt and others have found themselves alone against crossed-up secondaries.
“Just man their ass up, it’s what you have to do,” Narduzzi said. “Our safeties are in man all day anyway, so at least this sort of fits what we do.”
What everyone must do to have any chance, of course, is get lined up before each snap. That’s why Georgia coach Kirby Smart said Monday: “We’re going to find out on Saturday if we’re in shape or not. I can promise you that because they’re going to try and get a lot of snaps in.”
Georgia held Tennessee to a Heupel-era low 17 points last season. (John David Mercer / USA Today)
“To try to replicate that offense in practice is really, really hard,” Kentucky defensive coordinator Brad White said after a performance in the 44-6 loss that did not appear to benefit from an extra week to prepare. “So you don’t really get the full effect until you’re on the field. Whether you have one week or two weeks or an entire offseason, the replication process is hard. So I don’t think you necessarily gain the advantage (of an off week) like you would with some other style offenses, where you have time to make certain checks, look at the formations, get yourself (in position), understand what’s coming.”
Preparing for Baylor and the Cotton Bowl eight years ago, Narduzzi had his defenders do three up-downs between each play in practice. In recent years, before taking on Heupel at both Tennessee and UCF (and going 2-1), he held the stopwatch in practice to ensure plays were being run quickly enough. Fresh receivers ran onto the field constantly to stress defensive backs, and much of the coaching staff was focused on different areas of the scout-team offense to make sure everything was operating at peak efficiency.
Spencer added a wrinkle when he was defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State — having his defense turn their backs after every play, then turn around right before the snap to force an even more frantic diagnosis of formation and personnel.
“If you had to pick one thing to help you stop this offense,” Spencer said, “it’s the week of preparation.”
It’s still mostly about the thing that defines all football schemes
It’s about talent and putting talent in position to succeed. Tennessee has a powerful offensive line with a few players, foremost among them right tackle Darnell Wright, elevating NFL stock with consistent excellence. Running backs Jabari Small and Jaylen Wright form an effective combo. Tight ends Princeton Fant and Jacob Warren block, catch and sometimes run. The receiving trio of Tillman, Hyatt and Bru McCoy — who haven’t been together much because of the high-ankle sprain Tillman just returned from last week — may be as good as any three in the country.
And Hooker, the Heisman favorite until further notice?
“Oh, there’s no doubt he’s special,” Bennett said.
“Is he an NFL quarterback? Yes,” said McGinnis, who has been calling Titans games since 2017, after 31 straight years coaching in the league. “Look, you’ve got to be accurate, you’ve got to be smart and you’ve got to have some toughness to you. He’s all of that.”
The charge of Heupel and his offensive staff is to build the offense, weekly, around Hooker and how he can exploit an opponent.
“It’s amazing some of the things they come up with,” said Hooker, who has 52 touchdown passes and three interceptions since becoming UT’s starter early last season.
“What we do with Hendon is different than what we did with Dillon (Gabriel at UCF) and different than what we did with (McKenzie Milton at UCF) and different than what we did with Drew (Lock at Missouri),” Heupel said. “Your job as a coach is not to look at what they can’t do. It’s to find out what they can do and then put them in position to do that at a really high level.”
Hooker is doing that, heading into a game at Georgia that could put him in position to be the first Heisman winner in Tennessee history. The way Hyatt is playing — five touchdowns against Alabama, a UT single-season record of 14 with a lot of football left — he might need to jump on that charter flight to New York with Hooker. This is why the Vols can win the SEC and win it all. It’s why the Bulldogs did those things and crushed the Vols a year ago.
“How many defensive players were drafted from Georgia? So come on,” McGinnis said. “Doing it with dudes. If you can do it with dudes, always go that way. If not, then you’ve got to find another way.”
Nick Saban was, in a car in the parking lot. And he wanted to talk to Bennett, a friend since they were running Big Ten defenses in the 1980s — Bennett at Purdue, Saban at Michigan State. It was early 2015, checking-on-recruits season, but Saban had also been thinking about Baylor’s field-stretching, hyper-pacing, record-breaking offense.
“He wanted to get together to talk about it,” Bennett recalled. “Nick and I are a lot alike in the things we do, the matchups we look for, and he wanted some insight, some ideas on how to stop it. He told me, ‘It hasn’t made it all the way to me yet. But I know what’s coming.’
“Isn’t that funny?”
Bennett is now the defensive coordinator at North Texas, and he was preparing for Western Kentucky and a similar offensive style when he spoke on the phone last week. He still found time amid his busy schedule to watch the complete tape of the moment the Baylor offense — the forefather of the offense Josh Heupel and Tennessee now run — truly made it all the way to Saban.
And yes, he found that funny as well, though Saban remains a friend and a comrade-in-defense.
“I mean, Tennessee just did an unbelievable job of creating matchups, getting Alabama out of position, out of the box,” Bennett said of UT’s sport-shaking 52-49 win, which has the No. 1 Vols in the national title hunt entering Saturday’s epic at No. 3 Georgia. “I laugh, I watched that and I told people, ‘Well, the Big 12 has finally made it to the SEC.’ One time (at Baylor) we beat TCU 61-58, people would make fun of us, say we had terrible defenses. Yeah, what was the score the other day? That’s the reality of this offense. It’s hell to stop.”
Josh Heuepel and the Vols are ranked No. 1 in the CFP rankings. (Randy Sartin / USA Today)
Especially the way Tennessee is running it, with the players Tennessee has running it. This offense, coming off a decent night in a 44-6 evisceration of then-No. 19 Kentucky, leads the nation in scoring (49.4 ppg), total offense (553.0 ypg), passing efficiency rating (198.51), receivers schemed completely wide open, touchdown drives completed in the time it takes to put a beer in a koozie and opposing coaches reduced to wild-eyed tantrums.
It has been thoroughly shut down once in Heupel’s two seasons, by the 2021 national championship Georgia team that had eight defenders drafted, a record five in the first round. It has advanced well beyond that form a year later, but Saturday represents the best chance of someone to get a handle on it this season. It needs its own name — how about Happy Fun Offense? (Do not taunt Happy Fun Offense.) It is both simple and complex, and somewhat misunderstood.
Here, through interviews with Tennessee coaches and several coaches who make their living defending, is what we can declare about it.
‘We evolve and change all the time’
Heupel is an Air Raid disciple, learning that offense as a junior college transfer quarterback at Oklahoma in 1999 under Mike Leach. Leach was the offensive coordinator, hired by new Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops because Leach’s pass-heavy offense at Kentucky gave Stoops’ Florida defenses so much trouble.
Leach got the head coaching job at Texas Tech in 2000, leaving Heupel behind to win the national championship with the Sooners. One of Leach’s first hires at Texas Tech was a running backs coach whose high school teams in Stephenville, Texas, were winning championships with a unique brand of spread offense. Art Briles, who played his college ball at Houston under the inventor of the veer triple-option offense, Bill Yeoman, went from Texas Tech running backs coach to Houston head coach in 2003. He turned around that dormant program, then did the same starting at Baylor in 2008.
His offense, often called the “veer and shoot” (though there isn’t much veer in it), is what Heupel has been running since after he was fired by Stoops as Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator in 2015. Basically.
“There’s portions of that — there’s also portions of what I did with Mike Leach as a player,” Heupel told The Athletic. “There’s portions of a little bit of everything. We evolve and change all the time. I mean, we’ve been different with every quarterback we have.”
Leach sees the same thing, saying Heupel “has always dabbled in (the Air Raid) and used some of the principles, but the offense he has now is a combination of things.”
The Air Raid gets the ball out quickly and essentially uses short passing as a run game.
“One of the most driving influences was the wishbone,” Leach said. “Because the wishbone and the Air Raid try to achieve the same things. Both offenses try to distribute the ball to all the skill positions. They personify every skill position touching the ball.”
The Tennessee offense, which is studied weekly and closely by Dave McGinnis for a Nashville radio show he does on the Vols, reminds him of something else. McGinnis, a longtime pro and college coach who was the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals from 2000 through 2003, gets flashbacks to the late 1980s when he was linebackers coach for the Chicago Bears.
“I’ve been dealing with this stuff since Mouse Davis,” McGinnis said of the man who brought the run and shoot offense to the NFL’s Detroit Lions, a scheme with four wide receivers out on every play, adjusting to coverage on the fly while Barry Sanders found open space as a runner.
This was a few years after Davis’ Toronto Argonauts offense — quarterbacked by former Tennessee star Condredge Holloway — got all the way to the Grey Cup before losing to the Warren Moon-led Edmonton dynasty.
“As I watch the iteration of what Josh Heupel is doing now, it’s really good, intricate stuff,” said McGinnis, game analyst on the Tennessee Titans Radio Network. “There’s much more to it than just lining up and spinning it. He’ll never tell you all that it is, and he doesn’t have to.”
The Tennessee offense looks most like the Briles offense with receivers split extremely wide, a relentless tempo that keeps defenses from substituting, frequent vertical shots and a devotion to running the ball. But Heupel hiring Iowa Statetight ends coach Alex Golesh to be his offensive coordinator at UCF — replacing Briles disciple and current Oklahoma OC Jeff Lebby — represented another shift. Golesh came with Heupel to Tennessee and has expanded the run game and added elements of burliness to help the Vols in short yardage and the red zone.
Golesh started studying the Baylor offense back when he was a grad assistant at Oklahoma State in 2008 and said he saw it change dramatically over several years.
Tennessee’s attack shares a lot of similarities with Art Briles’ offenses at Baylor. (John Weast / Getty Images)
“And we’ve also evolved drastically,” he said. “Adjustments in formations, the ability to play in condensed and open sets, the RPO (run-pass option) game is drastically different from what (Baylor) did. Schematically, those guys had three or four run schemes and moved on. We use tight ends in the pass game. We motion way more than anybody has done (in this offense), to try to create mismatches. What makes Josh unique is he’s lived, like, different lives offensively.”
The simplest form of the Air Raid as a player. The RPO and the zone read as an understudy to then-Oklahoma offensive coordinator (and current Ohio State OC) Kevin Wilson. Coordinating offenses at Utah State and Missouri, where he really embraced the Briles concepts. Molding things to quarterbacks with different skill sets, as he has done with current Heisman candidate Hendon Hooker. And some serious bully ball to complement the aerial assault.
“The biggest difference here is you’re not better than everybody you play at the skill spots,” Golesh said of a reality that was quite clear last year against Georgia. “So how do you develop, how do you stay ahead of people, how do you move the chains and score points?”
This offense, whatever you want to call it and however you want to trace its roots, is doing that at astounding levels entering Saturday.
It has been a nightmare for many a defensive coordinator
Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi wins the award so far this season as the defensive mind who has done the most figuring out of the Vols. They scored 27 points in regulation on the Panthers — the next-lowest was 38 against Florida — in a 34-27 overtime win in Pittsburgh, and Tennessee’s 91 rushing yards in that game was a season low by far. The next-lowest totals were 177 against Kentucky and 182 against Alabama. UT gouged LSU for 263 yards on the ground and the Gators for 227.
It was also early in the season, the Vols lost a fumble, Hooker missed a couple deep shots and Cedric Tillman dropped a long touchdown pass before atoning with the game winner.
“It’s not fun,” Narduzzi said of playing against this offense, and the sentiment was the same after Narduzzi’s Michigan State defense of 2014 gave up 41 points to Baylor in three quarters in the Cotton Bowl before a wild comeback and 42-41 win.
“They had all those good DBs,” Bennett said of that Spartans team, “and we just dominated them.”
But the Bears didn’t run the ball in the fourth quarter and opened the door to a comeback. That was one of the football criticisms of Briles, who a bit more than a year later lost his job in a sexual assault scandal involving his program and now coaches in Italy.
Two coaches who had to scheme to defend those teams, NC State defensive coordinator Tony Gibson and Wake Forest linebackers coach Glenn Spencer, say a lot of the same things Narduzzi, Bennett and McGinnis say about the offense. All were interviewed separately, but their comments can be stitched together in the form of a round table/support group.
McGinnis: “Oh, I would hate trying to defend this.”
Bennett: “The tempo takes all subbing out of the game, which makes you so stressed on defense, it’s unbelievable. And then they stretch you horizontally over and over again until the vertical passing game beats your ass.”
Gibson, who encountered the Baylor offense often as a defensive coach at West Virginia: “They get you on your heels as a defensive coordinator trying to call it, so now you’re just trying to get your base front lined up and coverage in. It’s really hard to blitz it.”
Narduzzi: “There’s really no disguising coverages against them because they split you out so wide.”
Bennett: “People say, ‘Oh it’s just a passing offense.’ Bull—-. It’s a numbers count. It’s an angles count. We had a few guys rush for more than 1,000 yards at Baylor.”
McGinnis: “The thing that happens a lot is you get a defensive coordinator chasing calls. And what I mean by that is, they’ll try to adjust the next play to try to take care of the play that just hurt them. That’s chasing calls, and if they start chasing calls, then what you can do offensively is set up and layer, or stack, calls. Heupel may run something early on to see how they’ll react. Then knowing they’ll chase that, he’ll have a counter punch off it. It’s very intricate. It may look simple, but there’s a lot to it. But the quarterback has to be able to handle it, and the receivers have to be able to read coverage after the ball is snapped. That’s critical.”
Bennett: “Everything you do almost has to be an automatic package. Brent Venables tried to have a big playbook against us (as Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator). You just can’t do it. Art would say, ‘I wish we could play Brent Venables every game.’”
Spencer, who coached against the Baylor offense for years at Oklahoma State: “They mastered how fast they could get set and get off a play, so your personnel is the same. Their splits are so wide, they define the box. They know the numbers you have, they know if it’s a light box and they can run it or if you’re trying to devote more coverage. Then the speed of the receivers, it’s the quick screen and deep ball game, and they’re gonna run you and run you and run you again. Can you tell I respect it?”
It must be stopped early
Not early in the game, though that’s also a good idea for Georgia — UT has outscored opponents 293 to 81 in the first quarter in Heupel’s two seasons, with a first-quarter scoring average of 13.95 points, tops in the nation.
But one thing every defensive coach referenced was first down. The first play of a Tennessee drive is the best opportunity to line up, attempt to disguise something and be aggressive. Each successive first down allows a few fractions of seconds more than normal — while the chains move — against a UT offense that leads the nation with 2.9 plays per minute in the past two seasons.
“If you stay ahead of the chains in this offense, the defense is going to be consistently on its left foot,” McGinnis said.
“Slowing them down on first down is the key to playing all tempo offenses,” Gibson said. “A negative play, a sack, anything that can get them off rhythm. Now they’re thinking a little bit more.”
This is, of course, difficult to achieve against the Vols. Their 7.93 yards per play on first down ranks third nationally (11.99 yards per pass is first, 4.16 per rush is 82nd), and they rank first with a 63.5 percent first-down success rate as defined by SportSource Analytics. That definition of success is any play that gains 40 percent or more of the required yardage or that results in a touchdown. The Vols get right after people.
All of these coaches have success stories against this kind of offense, by the way (though as McGinnis pointed out, the old NFL way of making teams pay for five-man protections by crushing quarterbacks, and deterring crossing routes with headhunting linebackers, doesn’t work today). Winning up front to limit the run and get quick pressure on the quarterback, plus winning outside with sticky man coverage are necessities. Tackling in the open field is critical.
Bennett said one advice he would give is to take away in-breaking routes with inside leverage and force perfect throws to the sideline. That also keeps defensive backs closer for run support. In UT’s 52-49 win over Alabama, the Crimson Tide played a lot of “man free” with one safety deep and inside releases permitted. But that safety didn’t get over fast enough on several big plays. And his alignment took him out of run support. It was like playing 10 on 11, which is not advisable against the Vols.
An aggressive scheme can help. Georgia has one. Pittsburgh has one. Narduzzi’s base coverage is “quarters,” which is essentially man coverage deep downfield. The Panthers safeties help hard against the run and dare you to throw perfectly over the top. The Vols made them pay at times, but at least defenders were in the area — as opposed to other games this season in which Jalin Hyatt and others have found themselves alone against crossed-up secondaries.
“Just man their ass up, it’s what you have to do,” Narduzzi said. “Our safeties are in man all day anyway, so at least this sort of fits what we do.”
What everyone must do to have any chance, of course, is get lined up before each snap. That’s why Georgia coach Kirby Smart said Monday: “We’re going to find out on Saturday if we’re in shape or not. I can promise you that because they’re going to try and get a lot of snaps in.”
Georgia held Tennessee to a Heupel-era low 17 points last season. (John David Mercer / USA Today)
“To try to replicate that offense in practice is really, really hard,” Kentucky defensive coordinator Brad White said after a performance in the 44-6 loss that did not appear to benefit from an extra week to prepare. “So you don’t really get the full effect until you’re on the field. Whether you have one week or two weeks or an entire offseason, the replication process is hard. So I don’t think you necessarily gain the advantage (of an off week) like you would with some other style offenses, where you have time to make certain checks, look at the formations, get yourself (in position), understand what’s coming.”
Preparing for Baylor and the Cotton Bowl eight years ago, Narduzzi had his defenders do three up-downs between each play in practice. In recent years, before taking on Heupel at both Tennessee and UCF (and going 2-1), he held the stopwatch in practice to ensure plays were being run quickly enough. Fresh receivers ran onto the field constantly to stress defensive backs, and much of the coaching staff was focused on different areas of the scout-team offense to make sure everything was operating at peak efficiency.
Spencer added a wrinkle when he was defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State — having his defense turn their backs after every play, then turn around right before the snap to force an even more frantic diagnosis of formation and personnel.
“If you had to pick one thing to help you stop this offense,” Spencer said, “it’s the week of preparation.”
It’s still mostly about the thing that defines all football schemes
It’s about talent and putting talent in position to succeed. Tennessee has a powerful offensive line with a few players, foremost among them right tackle Darnell Wright, elevating NFL stock with consistent excellence. Running backs Jabari Small and Jaylen Wright form an effective combo. Tight ends Princeton Fant and Jacob Warren block, catch and sometimes run. The receiving trio of Tillman, Hyatt and Bru McCoy — who haven’t been together much because of the high-ankle sprain Tillman just returned from last week — may be as good as any three in the country.
And Hooker, the Heisman favorite until further notice?
“Oh, there’s no doubt he’s special,” Bennett said.
“Is he an NFL quarterback? Yes,” said McGinnis, who has been calling Titans games since 2017, after 31 straight years coaching in the league. “Look, you’ve got to be accurate, you’ve got to be smart and you’ve got to have some toughness to you. He’s all of that.”
The charge of Heupel and his offensive staff is to build the offense, weekly, around Hooker and how he can exploit an opponent.
“It’s amazing some of the things they come up with,” said Hooker, who has 52 touchdown passes and three interceptions since becoming UT’s starter early last season.
“What we do with Hendon is different than what we did with Dillon (Gabriel at UCF) and different than what we did with (McKenzie Milton at UCF) and different than what we did with Drew (Lock at Missouri),” Heupel said. “Your job as a coach is not to look at what they can’t do. It’s to find out what they can do and then put them in position to do that at a really high level.”
Hooker is doing that, heading into a game at Georgia that could put him in position to be the first Heisman winner in Tennessee history. The way Hyatt is playing — five touchdowns against Alabama, a UT single-season record of 14 with a lot of football left — he might need to jump on that charter flight to New York with Hooker. This is why the Vols can win the SEC and win it all. It’s why the Bulldogs did those things and crushed the Vols a year ago.
“How many defensive players were drafted from Georgia? So come on,” McGinnis said. “Doing it with dudes. If you can do it with dudes, always go that way. If not, then you’ve got to find another way.”
Finished reading this sitting in court. Had to wipe away a tear.good article from the athletic
@Southpaw
Baylor defensive coordinator Phil Bennett saw Alabama receivers coach Billy Napier walk into the high school in Shreveport, La.. He had an immediate question: “Is Nick here?”
Nick Saban was, in a car in the parking lot. And he wanted to talk to Bennett, a friend since they were running Big Ten defenses in the 1980s — Bennett at Purdue, Saban at Michigan State. It was early 2015, checking-on-recruits season, but Saban had also been thinking about Baylor’s field-stretching, hyper-pacing, record-breaking offense.
“He wanted to get together to talk about it,” Bennett recalled. “Nick and I are a lot alike in the things we do, the matchups we look for, and he wanted some insight, some ideas on how to stop it. He told me, ‘It hasn’t made it all the way to me yet. But I know what’s coming.’
“Isn’t that funny?”
Bennett is now the defensive coordinator at North Texas, and he was preparing for Western Kentucky and a similar offensive style when he spoke on the phone last week. He still found time amid his busy schedule to watch the complete tape of the moment the Baylor offense — the forefather of the offense Josh Heupel and Tennessee now run — truly made it all the way to Saban.
And yes, he found that funny as well, though Saban remains a friend and a comrade-in-defense.
“I mean, Tennessee just did an unbelievable job of creating matchups, getting Alabama out of position, out of the box,” Bennett said of UT’s sport-shaking 52-49 win, which has the No. 1 Vols in the national title hunt entering Saturday’s epic at No. 3 Georgia. “I laugh, I watched that and I told people, ‘Well, the Big 12 has finally made it to the SEC.’ One time (at Baylor) we beat TCU 61-58, people would make fun of us, say we had terrible defenses. Yeah, what was the score the other day? That’s the reality of this offense. It’s hell to stop.”
Josh Heuepel and the Vols are ranked No. 1 in the CFP rankings. (Randy Sartin / USA Today)
Especially the way Tennessee is running it, with the players Tennessee has running it. This offense, coming off a decent night in a 44-6 evisceration of then-No. 19 Kentucky, leads the nation in scoring (49.4 ppg), total offense (553.0 ypg), passing efficiency rating (198.51), receivers schemed completely wide open, touchdown drives completed in the time it takes to put a beer in a koozie and opposing coaches reduced to wild-eyed tantrums.
It has been thoroughly shut down once in Heupel’s two seasons, by the 2021 national championship Georgia team that had eight defenders drafted, a record five in the first round. It has advanced well beyond that form a year later, but Saturday represents the best chance of someone to get a handle on it this season. It needs its own name — how about Happy Fun Offense? (Do not taunt Happy Fun Offense.) It is both simple and complex, and somewhat misunderstood.
Here, through interviews with Tennessee coaches and several coaches who make their living defending, is what we can declare about it.
‘We evolve and change all the time’
Heupel is an Air Raid disciple, learning that offense as a junior college transfer quarterback at Oklahoma in 1999 under Mike Leach. Leach was the offensive coordinator, hired by new Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops because Leach’s pass-heavy offense at Kentucky gave Stoops’ Florida defenses so much trouble.
Leach got the head coaching job at Texas Tech in 2000, leaving Heupel behind to win the national championship with the Sooners. One of Leach’s first hires at Texas Tech was a running backs coach whose high school teams in Stephenville, Texas, were winning championships with a unique brand of spread offense. Art Briles, who played his college ball at Houston under the inventor of the veer triple-option offense, Bill Yeoman, went from Texas Tech running backs coach to Houston head coach in 2003. He turned around that dormant program, then did the same starting at Baylor in 2008.
His offense, often called the “veer and shoot” (though there isn’t much veer in it), is what Heupel has been running since after he was fired by Stoops as Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator in 2015. Basically.
“There’s portions of that — there’s also portions of what I did with Mike Leach as a player,” Heupel told The Athletic. “There’s portions of a little bit of everything. We evolve and change all the time. I mean, we’ve been different with every quarterback we have.”
Leach sees the same thing, saying Heupel “has always dabbled in (the Air Raid) and used some of the principles, but the offense he has now is a combination of things.”
The Air Raid gets the ball out quickly and essentially uses short passing as a run game.
“One of the most driving influences was the wishbone,” Leach said. “Because the wishbone and the Air Raid try to achieve the same things. Both offenses try to distribute the ball to all the skill positions. They personify every skill position touching the ball.”
The Tennessee offense, which is studied weekly and closely by Dave McGinnis for a Nashville radio show he does on the Vols, reminds him of something else. McGinnis, a longtime pro and college coach who was the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals from 2000 through 2003, gets flashbacks to the late 1980s when he was linebackers coach for the Chicago Bears.
“I’ve been dealing with this stuff since Mouse Davis,” McGinnis said of the man who brought the run and shoot offense to the NFL’s Detroit Lions, a scheme with four wide receivers out on every play, adjusting to coverage on the fly while Barry Sanders found open space as a runner.
This was a few years after Davis’ Toronto Argonauts offense — quarterbacked by former Tennessee star Condredge Holloway — got all the way to the Grey Cup before losing to the Warren Moon-led Edmonton dynasty.
“As I watch the iteration of what Josh Heupel is doing now, it’s really good, intricate stuff,” said McGinnis, game analyst on the Tennessee Titans Radio Network. “There’s much more to it than just lining up and spinning it. He’ll never tell you all that it is, and he doesn’t have to.”
The Tennessee offense looks most like the Briles offense with receivers split extremely wide, a relentless tempo that keeps defenses from substituting, frequent vertical shots and a devotion to running the ball. But Heupel hiring Iowa Statetight ends coach Alex Golesh to be his offensive coordinator at UCF — replacing Briles disciple and current Oklahoma OC Jeff Lebby — represented another shift. Golesh came with Heupel to Tennessee and has expanded the run game and added elements of burliness to help the Vols in short yardage and the red zone.
Golesh started studying the Baylor offense back when he was a grad assistant at Oklahoma State in 2008 and said he saw it change dramatically over several years.
Tennessee’s attack shares a lot of similarities with Art Briles’ offenses at Baylor. (John Weast / Getty Images)
“And we’ve also evolved drastically,” he said. “Adjustments in formations, the ability to play in condensed and open sets, the RPO (run-pass option) game is drastically different from what (Baylor) did. Schematically, those guys had three or four run schemes and moved on. We use tight ends in the pass game. We motion way more than anybody has done (in this offense), to try to create mismatches. What makes Josh unique is he’s lived, like, different lives offensively.”
The simplest form of the Air Raid as a player. The RPO and the zone read as an understudy to then-Oklahoma offensive coordinator (and current Ohio State OC) Kevin Wilson. Coordinating offenses at Utah State and Missouri, where he really embraced the Briles concepts. Molding things to quarterbacks with different skill sets, as he has done with current Heisman candidate Hendon Hooker. And some serious bully ball to complement the aerial assault.
“The biggest difference here is you’re not better than everybody you play at the skill spots,” Golesh said of a reality that was quite clear last year against Georgia. “So how do you develop, how do you stay ahead of people, how do you move the chains and score points?”
This offense, whatever you want to call it and however you want to trace its roots, is doing that at astounding levels entering Saturday.
It has been a nightmare for many a defensive coordinator
Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi wins the award so far this season as the defensive mind who has done the most figuring out of the Vols. They scored 27 points in regulation on the Panthers — the next-lowest was 38 against Florida — in a 34-27 overtime win in Pittsburgh, and Tennessee’s 91 rushing yards in that game was a season low by far. The next-lowest totals were 177 against Kentucky and 182 against Alabama. UT gouged LSU for 263 yards on the ground and the Gators for 227.
It was also early in the season, the Vols lost a fumble, Hooker missed a couple deep shots and Cedric Tillman dropped a long touchdown pass before atoning with the game winner.
“It’s not fun,” Narduzzi said of playing against this offense, and the sentiment was the same after Narduzzi’s Michigan State defense of 2014 gave up 41 points to Baylor in three quarters in the Cotton Bowl before a wild comeback and 42-41 win.
“They had all those good DBs,” Bennett said of that Spartans team, “and we just dominated them.”
But the Bears didn’t run the ball in the fourth quarter and opened the door to a comeback. That was one of the football criticisms of Briles, who a bit more than a year later lost his job in a sexual assault scandal involving his program and now coaches in Italy.
Two coaches who had to scheme to defend those teams, NC State defensive coordinator Tony Gibson and Wake Forest linebackers coach Glenn Spencer, say a lot of the same things Narduzzi, Bennett and McGinnis say about the offense. All were interviewed separately, but their comments can be stitched together in the form of a round table/support group.
McGinnis: “Oh, I would hate trying to defend this.”
Bennett: “The tempo takes all subbing out of the game, which makes you so stressed on defense, it’s unbelievable. And then they stretch you horizontally over and over again until the vertical passing game beats your ass.”
Gibson, who encountered the Baylor offense often as a defensive coach at West Virginia: “They get you on your heels as a defensive coordinator trying to call it, so now you’re just trying to get your base front lined up and coverage in. It’s really hard to blitz it.”
Narduzzi: “There’s really no disguising coverages against them because they split you out so wide.”
Bennett: “People say, ‘Oh it’s just a passing offense.’ Bull—-. It’s a numbers count. It’s an angles count. We had a few guys rush for more than 1,000 yards at Baylor.”
McGinnis: “The thing that happens a lot is you get a defensive coordinator chasing calls. And what I mean by that is, they’ll try to adjust the next play to try to take care of the play that just hurt them. That’s chasing calls, and if they start chasing calls, then what you can do offensively is set up and layer, or stack, calls. Heupel may run something early on to see how they’ll react. Then knowing they’ll chase that, he’ll have a counter punch off it. It’s very intricate. It may look simple, but there’s a lot to it. But the quarterback has to be able to handle it, and the receivers have to be able to read coverage after the ball is snapped. That’s critical.”
Bennett: “Everything you do almost has to be an automatic package. Brent Venables tried to have a big playbook against us (as Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator). You just can’t do it. Art would say, ‘I wish we could play Brent Venables every game.’”
Spencer, who coached against the Baylor offense for years at Oklahoma State: “They mastered how fast they could get set and get off a play, so your personnel is the same. Their splits are so wide, they define the box. They know the numbers you have, they know if it’s a light box and they can run it or if you’re trying to devote more coverage. Then the speed of the receivers, it’s the quick screen and deep ball game, and they’re gonna run you and run you and run you again. Can you tell I respect it?”
It must be stopped early
Not early in the game, though that’s also a good idea for Georgia — UT has outscored opponents 293 to 81 in the first quarter in Heupel’s two seasons, with a first-quarter scoring average of 13.95 points, tops in the nation.
But one thing every defensive coach referenced was first down. The first play of a Tennessee drive is the best opportunity to line up, attempt to disguise something and be aggressive. Each successive first down allows a few fractions of seconds more than normal — while the chains move — against a UT offense that leads the nation with 2.9 plays per minute in the past two seasons.
“If you stay ahead of the chains in this offense, the defense is going to be consistently on its left foot,” McGinnis said.
“Slowing them down on first down is the key to playing all tempo offenses,” Gibson said. “A negative play, a sack, anything that can get them off rhythm. Now they’re thinking a little bit more.”
This is, of course, difficult to achieve against the Vols. Their 7.93 yards per play on first down ranks third nationally (11.99 yards per pass is first, 4.16 per rush is 82nd), and they rank first with a 63.5 percent first-down success rate as defined by SportSource Analytics. That definition of success is any play that gains 40 percent or more of the required yardage or that results in a touchdown. The Vols get right after people.
All of these coaches have success stories against this kind of offense, by the way (though as McGinnis pointed out, the old NFL way of making teams pay for five-man protections by crushing quarterbacks, and deterring crossing routes with headhunting linebackers, doesn’t work today). Winning up front to limit the run and get quick pressure on the quarterback, plus winning outside with sticky man coverage are necessities. Tackling in the open field is critical.
Bennett said one advice he would give is to take away in-breaking routes with inside leverage and force perfect throws to the sideline. That also keeps defensive backs closer for run support. In UT’s 52-49 win over Alabama, the Crimson Tide played a lot of “man free” with one safety deep and inside releases permitted. But that safety didn’t get over fast enough on several big plays. And his alignment took him out of run support. It was like playing 10 on 11, which is not advisable against the Vols.
An aggressive scheme can help. Georgia has one. Pittsburgh has one. Narduzzi’s base coverage is “quarters,” which is essentially man coverage deep downfield. The Panthers safeties help hard against the run and dare you to throw perfectly over the top. The Vols made them pay at times, but at least defenders were in the area — as opposed to other games this season in which Jalin Hyatt and others have found themselves alone against crossed-up secondaries.
“Just man their ass up, it’s what you have to do,” Narduzzi said. “Our safeties are in man all day anyway, so at least this sort of fits what we do.”
What everyone must do to have any chance, of course, is get lined up before each snap. That’s why Georgia coach Kirby Smart said Monday: “We’re going to find out on Saturday if we’re in shape or not. I can promise you that because they’re going to try and get a lot of snaps in.”
Georgia held Tennessee to a Heupel-era low 17 points last season. (John David Mercer / USA Today)
“To try to replicate that offense in practice is really, really hard,” Kentucky defensive coordinator Brad White said after a performance in the 44-6 loss that did not appear to benefit from an extra week to prepare. “So you don’t really get the full effect until you’re on the field. Whether you have one week or two weeks or an entire offseason, the replication process is hard. So I don’t think you necessarily gain the advantage (of an off week) like you would with some other style offenses, where you have time to make certain checks, look at the formations, get yourself (in position), understand what’s coming.”
Preparing for Baylor and the Cotton Bowl eight years ago, Narduzzi had his defenders do three up-downs between each play in practice. In recent years, before taking on Heupel at both Tennessee and UCF (and going 2-1), he held the stopwatch in practice to ensure plays were being run quickly enough. Fresh receivers ran onto the field constantly to stress defensive backs, and much of the coaching staff was focused on different areas of the scout-team offense to make sure everything was operating at peak efficiency.
Spencer added a wrinkle when he was defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State — having his defense turn their backs after every play, then turn around right before the snap to force an even more frantic diagnosis of formation and personnel.
“If you had to pick one thing to help you stop this offense,” Spencer said, “it’s the week of preparation.”
It’s still mostly about the thing that defines all football schemes
It’s about talent and putting talent in position to succeed. Tennessee has a powerful offensive line with a few players, foremost among them right tackle Darnell Wright, elevating NFL stock with consistent excellence. Running backs Jabari Small and Jaylen Wright form an effective combo. Tight ends Princeton Fant and Jacob Warren block, catch and sometimes run. The receiving trio of Tillman, Hyatt and Bru McCoy — who haven’t been together much because of the high-ankle sprain Tillman just returned from last week — may be as good as any three in the country.
And Hooker, the Heisman favorite until further notice?
“Oh, there’s no doubt he’s special,” Bennett said.
“Is he an NFL quarterback? Yes,” said McGinnis, who has been calling Titans games since 2017, after 31 straight years coaching in the league. “Look, you’ve got to be accurate, you’ve got to be smart and you’ve got to have some toughness to you. He’s all of that.”
The charge of Heupel and his offensive staff is to build the offense, weekly, around Hooker and how he can exploit an opponent.
“It’s amazing some of the things they come up with,” said Hooker, who has 52 touchdown passes and three interceptions since becoming UT’s starter early last season.
“What we do with Hendon is different than what we did with Dillon (Gabriel at UCF) and different than what we did with (McKenzie Milton at UCF) and different than what we did with Drew (Lock at Missouri),” Heupel said. “Your job as a coach is not to look at what they can’t do. It’s to find out what they can do and then put them in position to do that at a really high level.”
Hooker is doing that, heading into a game at Georgia that could put him in position to be the first Heisman winner in Tennessee history. The way Hyatt is playing — five touchdowns against Alabama, a UT single-season record of 14 with a lot of football left — he might need to jump on that charter flight to New York with Hooker. This is why the Vols can win the SEC and win it all. It’s why the Bulldogs did those things and crushed the Vols a year ago.
“How many defensive players were drafted from Georgia? So come on,” McGinnis said. “Doing it with dudes. If you can do it with dudes, always go that way. If not, then you’ve got to find another way.”
Still can't believe the success of the team. It's crazy and doesn't feel real. I still expect them to lose damn near every game too.
Mame YO
slings rocks
I got bant
silverwheels
PLAY LA BAMBA BABY
Don't you want to see the squad?
CJ_24
Well-Known Member
No, I don't think I will
Best outcome for Oregon is to get left out of the playoffs. Nobody wants to see that ass whipping again.
Mame YO
slings rocks
Nix has 31 TDs. Ignoring rushing stats is going to favor pure pocket passers every time and it’s dumb and borderline dishonest to exclude those stats in 2022.
Also, 2 of those ints are off tipped passes and one was from a Hail Mary pass at the end of the half.
Nix > Williams and it isn’t even close.
Mame YO
slings rocks
i didn’t say Caleb Williams is a pocket passer, I said that omitting rushing stats favors pocket passers. I’m just repeating myself again because you’ll have now tried to do that multiple times since I initially stated that nix should be a heisman candidate alongside hooker and stroud. Sure, if you omit 11 rushing TDs nix looks arguably not as great as other candidates lol. That’s fucking dumb though you fucking trogs.
nix has a higher passer rating on ESPN’s stats than Williams so it doesn’t even help in this case anyway.
nix has a higher passer rating on ESPN’s stats than Williams so it doesn’t even help in this case anyway.
Mame YO
slings rocks
The thing is, I’m more annoyed that my arguments are being dismissed because I’m mame and it’s Oregon more than on the merit. Williams isn’t a better candidate. @Brick claimed a few days ago that several QBs had better resumes and then declined to name a single example. It’s fucking nonsense.
Mame YO
slings rocks
Being serious, it’s one thing to disagree with me or to have a bit of fun with the schtick - and I don’t fault anyone for doing that. It’s another thing to smugly declare “I know more than you” (@Brick), refuse to support your argument in any meaningful way, and then continue to take cheap shots and talk down at me like I’m a fucking moron at every opportunity.
Mr. Radpants
Trog Five Standing By
Caleb Williams has been a noted pocket passer for years in this league
silverwheels
PLAY LA BAMBA BABY
Yes.
Brick
Well-Known Member
nix looked like a complete bum against the only defense he faced. williams out here against Utah throwing for 411 yards and a 5/0 ratio against Utah in his. loss. lol. usc haș allowed 16 sacks. oregon has allowed 1 and is having a historic year in that category. they are 4th in the country in yards per carry. it's a lot easier for nix and no wonder he is having a career year.
nothing sets nix apart at all here for like the top 20-30 guys: http://www.cfbstats.com/2022/leader/national/player/split01/category02/sort02.html
drake maye blows nix's numbers out of the fucking water btw.
your argument is basically nix running for a bunch of TDs. glad he got 8 TDs against BYU (118th rush D), Arizona (123), Stanford (120). most of them 1 or 2 yard runs which is coach's STAT PADFORD choice good for him.
nothing sets nix apart at all here for like the top 20-30 guys: http://www.cfbstats.com/2022/leader/national/player/split01/category02/sort02.html
drake maye blows nix's numbers out of the fucking water btw.
your argument is basically nix running for a bunch of TDs. glad he got 8 TDs against BYU (118th rush D), Arizona (123), Stanford (120). most of them 1 or 2 yard runs which is coach's STAT PADFORD choice good for him.
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Now the 4th largest economy in the world, sweetie.
Mame YO
slings rocks
was this hard?
Even setting that aside, I can pick apart most of these guys in one way or another. Several of them appear to have higher passer ratings based purely off of INTs. To me to me I think we all know the difference between a bad pass and unlucky tip drill situations or meaningless Hail Mary picks or whatever. My point being that voters could easily see this as statistical noise because those INTs aren’t products of bad decision making. So we have a situation where several dudes have lower completion percentages, less yards, fewer TDs, but they have 1 int so their passer rating is higher. Grayson McCall, for example. Or KJ Jefferson. And that’s before we consider rushing stats.
first point, obviously true. Second point, both teams will play Utah by the end of the season so we’ll have a direct comparison soon. Third point, also true, but let’s not pretend like the cupboard is bare for Williams because it isn’t. Fourth point, it is easier for Nix, he is also showing very good decision making. The comparison in rushing stats between the two is staggering and you can attribute a lot of that to the line but Nix running for nearly twice as many yards and nearly 4x the scores in fewer attempts? At some point you have to give credit where it is due. Look at those completion percentages too. Like I noted previously, nix has a higher QB rating on ESPN (what are they basing this off of anyway? It doesn’t appear to be the same as QBR?) so he is a statistically better passer overall by that metric while also producing way more in the run. I don’t see an argument for Williams that isn’t just a list of excuses.
I think I mentioned Maye before. He is lights out this season. Also, we’re talking about the heisman so it’s hard to see him as a serious candidate because UNC. This whole thing was always in the context of heisman consideration, and many of these guys don’t have the right level of team success or visibility to be serious candidates (whether you think that’s good or bad, it’s baked into my argument that nix is a top 3ish candidate).
Even setting that aside, I can pick apart most of these guys in one way or another. Several of them appear to have higher passer ratings based purely off of INTs. To me to me I think we all know the difference between a bad pass and unlucky tip drill situations or meaningless Hail Mary picks or whatever. My point being that voters could easily see this as statistical noise because those INTs aren’t products of bad decision making. So we have a situation where several dudes have lower completion percentages, less yards, fewer TDs, but they have 1 int so their passer rating is higher. Grayson McCall, for example. Or KJ Jefferson. And that’s before we consider rushing stats.
You keep saying this but he is averaging 7.3ypc lol. Sure he has some short yardage TDs but it isn’t like he is a statue that only has 11 rushing TDs because of QB sneaks.
Brick
Well-Known Member
I remember in the 90s our friend had the college football game that didn't have oregon in it (BRAND NOT GOOD ENOUGH) so he chose Baylor and acted like their QB was Tony Graziani and literally dove forward for 3 yards on a QB sneak every play so he would win the heisman. that is basically mame's argument for nix.
Brick
Well-Known Member
nix has been sacked once. all these other dudes have been sacked 10 times or more. his decision making isn't better he is just going untouched. his picks have been awful.
Brick
Well-Known Member
Mame YO
slings rocks
Which picks? Unless I am mistaken he has 2 tipped passes and another from a Hail Mary at the end of the half vs cal that meant nothing. He has 5 picks total.
2 picks were against Georgia.
Newton had ~4300 total yards, 52 TDs, 7 INTs at the conclusion of his 2010 heisman season. Those stats include the shampionship game.
Nix is on pace for ~4300 total yards, 50 TDs, 8 INTs going into bowl season.
2 picks were against Georgia.
Yeah, see the caveat above about their similarities in production. The overall yardage would be similar but nix is on pace for fewer rushing yards and more passing yards. Similar total TD count. Arguably better passing efficiency assuming he keeps that 73% completion rate up.
Newton had ~4300 total yards, 52 TDs, 7 INTs at the conclusion of his 2010 heisman season. Those stats include the shampionship game.
Nix is on pace for ~4300 total yards, 50 TDs, 8 INTs going into bowl season.
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You should be banned for this
adchester
A-1 From Day 1
Jesus christ this take is bad