In my latest post for FishDuck.com, I’ve broken down a couple of plays in the Rose Bowl, and tried to tie them together with the philosophy behind using motion and shifting in football.
This post was actually put up on FishDuck Tuesday, but I almost forgot to link to it from my own site as well.
The impetus behind this article was repeatedly hearing Kirk Herbstreit use the phrase window dressing when speaking about the different motions that Oregon uses in their offense. As I say in the post, I’m not picking on him, since there’s really not a lot of time in between plays to go into detail. All that said, generalizations bother me more than they should, so I wanted to use a couple of examples from the game to explain why Oregon uses motion they way they do, as well as talk about why all offenses do it.
I’ve drawn up the first play of the game using DrawFootballPlays.com for the diagrams like the one below, and try to go into a little more detail about the thought process at the beginning of the game compared to the end of the game
It’s the first play in the game, so right now, the only thing the Ducks know about Florida State’s defense is what they’ve seen on film. Both teams have had nearly a month to prepare and add new things to the game plan, so while it’s unlikely that they’ll see something completely different from the Seminole defense, it’s very possible that Charles Kelly, the FSU defensive coordinator, has thrown in a few new wrinkles in the practices leading up to this game.
So we’ve established that one reason the offense will put a man in motion is to gain information, another more immediate reason is to force the defense to move with the man in motion, and hopefully show some weak spots. In the next few shots from the game we’ll go through exactly what happens from a defensive perspective that allows the TE to get so wide open.
You can read the whole thing here.
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