Every week Chris Brown from Smart Football takes your questions here about football and football-related game theory. This week, he explains precisely how Virginia Tech turned Miami 2009 into Miami 2008 for four quarters last weekend. Submit your questions for Chris at twitter.com/edsbs, your source for football chicanery and zombie law links since 2008. Enjoy.

I didn’t get to watch the Miami-Virginia Tech game until after I already knew the outcome — I had been at another game at the same time, and was as surprised as anyone that Virginia Tech could score thirty-one, and even more than Miami managed a meager seven. But I can honestly say that I had more fun watching this game on replay, already knowing the outcome, than anything I’ve watched this year.

That might come as a surprise considering I just did an extensive breakdown of Miami’s (previously) vaunted pass offense, have family members who are diehard Canes fans, and still think Jacory Harris is one of the most entertaining players in the country. But you have to love what Bud Foster and Frank Beamer were able to do with Virginia Tech. (more…)

Every Wednesday Chris Brown from Smart Football lowers his IQ by hanging out here and deconstructing the football issues of the day. This week’s fox, hunted down via Twitter: What the hell are Houston and Texas Tech going to throw at each other in this week’s most likely candidate for betting the over successfully? Submit your questions to Chris via the EDSBS Twitter account, twitter.com/edsbs. Enjoy.

The detestable Mr. Leach will run the same play until you stop it, sir.

If actions speak louder than words, then the biggest proponent of Mike Leach’s Airraid offense might be the Bob Stoops coaching tree. While defensive coordinator at the University of Florida, Bob Stoops said there was only one school in the SEC that he truly felt he had a difficult time defending, in a way not at all commensurate with the relative talent between that school and his: The Hal Mumme led Kentucky Wildcats. When Oklahoma hired him to be its head coach, he hired Mumme’s offensive coordinator, some guy named Mike Leach.

Leach left after a season at Oklahoma to become the head coach at Texas Tech, and so, from 2000 on, Leach and Stoops have faced each other every year; OU’s defensive coaches have up-close and personal experience with Leach’s offense. (more…)

Welcome to our Factor Five Five Factor Preview Georgia Tech at Miami. The Factor Five Five Factor Preview examines the necessaries and completely arbitraries of the official beginning of your weekend, the Thursday Night special featuring the Boys’ Club (Jesse Palmer imitations! Chris Fowler roaring with unrestrained glee! Everyone looking at Erin Andrews, and then looking away ashamedly! Craig James doing the broadcast with his finger stuck in a Diet Pepsi can, “Cause it got stuck that way, ma!”)

Georgia Tech hopes to avoid the curse of being Factor’d for the second week in a row as the Factor Five favorite, since they actually won in this spot last week and thus broke the curse of being the favored team.

Enjoy.

Category one: Nebulous Statistical Comparisons of Dubious Validity. For Georgia Tech, that number will be 472, or the number of yards allowed in this matchup last year by the Miami defense to Tech’s offense. Miami’s defense spent most of last year lunging at bright lights, tackling giant invisible rabbits, and laying down on the turf weeping when faced with an option play, and by the fourth quarter had given up hope altogether by allowing Lucas Cox, Tech’s geology-back, to take a leisurely continental drift up the middle for a long touchdown. Miami must not allow anything close this yardage to stay in the game, or else the Angel of Death arrives for them in the fourth quarter running a 5.2 and sending the Tech bench into gusts of laughter at a white fullback outrunning Miami LBs into the endzone. A possession back running loose in a blowout will and should do that to an audience.

For Miami, that number is ROOM 222 BAILAMOS CHICAS!!!

Apologies. A dance break was clearly in order. (more…)

Every Wednesday, Chris from Smart Football puts on his sturdiest of work clothes, leaves Brown Manor, and lowers his overall IQ by spending a few moments with us helping the masses understand a bit of actual football through questions submitted by you via our Twitter feed. If you have a question about football strategery, tactics, fluid dynamics, tort law, or orchid taxonomy, please submit them to us at twitter.com/edsbs . Enjoy.

Question from @cdbarker: Is it possible to successfully use two quarterbacks of similar but divergent styles effectively, ie Tate and Denard?

The traditional wisdom — and it is a notion I generally have agreed with — is that having two quarterbacks is a euphemism for not having any. There are a few interesting counter examples, though none are truly compelling, like Mark Richt rotating D.J. Shockley and David Greene, or Spurrier rotating Doug Johnson and Noah Brindise every other play against Florida State. But, generally, it is a bad recipe. There are lots of reasons, but none may be more important than simply repetitions in practice. If you have two quarterbacks the receivers have to get used to both; the gameplan has to be taught in detail to both, film must be gone over with both, etc; and then there’s that old saw about “rhythm” and how it is disturbing with different guys in the huddle. I don’t find those latter ones all that persuasive, but there is at least a little truth to them.

But I think the winds are changing, and a two-quarterback system is quite possible. (more…)

Every week Chris Brown from Smart Football answers a reader question about football strategy, and therefore raises the quality of your life by allowing you, the informed viewer, to scream “You suck!!!” in a more educated and justified manner. Submit questions for next week’s by going to twitter.com/edsbs and firing away. This week’s question comes from Stephen Webb, who wondered…

Q: What makes an offense truly terrible?

The short answer: Put on the tape of NC State vs. South Carolina from Thursday night, and just take it in.

Or, since we have footage, Auburn at Mississippi State, 2008.

Baby, you’re burning! Because you’ve set yourself on fire, Messrs. McCorvey and Franklin–ed.

The long answer: Bad offenses typically don’t just fail to do one or two things that make it easy to say, “Oh, they did that! They obvious suck and their coaching sucks!” Instead, it is usually the slow, steady burn of a set of ineptitudes that add up to result in nothing good. Most of these bad traits are a matter of degree rather than being simply being a matter of yes/no or present/not-present. With a few exceptions (fill in your own here), most college coaches have gotten their job because they coached someone, somewhere successfully, and when things go awry it is because they slipped away.So I’ve got a set of non-exhaustive factors that, either alone or apart, are common with really awful offenses. Think of it like “You might be a redneck if …” but replace “be a redneck” with “have/coach a terrible offense.”

- Bad players: You have to start here, even if it is not entirely fair to. But, in college football, recruiting is the most important thing a coach does (though you have to be able to do more than just recruit — see Orgeron), and most games will still be decided based on talent. (more…)

Tommy Kilborn, ND Law Student, Admits He Was Wrong.

I have to confess, everyone: I was wrong. There was a time, early in the first quarter at the stadium on Saturday, when the Notre Dame defense had allowed a few runs there and there to the Nevada Wolfpack, that I really thought about giving up. After all, I called for the firing of Head Coach Charlie Weis just one short year ago. Those were hard times, and I thought that rather than finding the silver lining, those gray clouds just above our heads would just stay where they’ve been for most of Charlie Weis’ tenure: right above our head and raining.

Turns out I was as wrong about that as I was wrong about Coach Weis, since the only thing raining down on the stadium Saturday were touchdown passes from Jimmy Clausen to Golden “Hands” Tate. For the first time, I really think I can say this:

Wake up the echoes, because we’re back, baby! (more…)

Stand back and be touched by the whoopin’ stick of greatness: Chris Brown of Smart Football has foolishly agreed to take one user-submitted question a week and give it the full Smart Football treatment for your general football edification. This week’s topic comes from R is for Ramius, who wanted to hear the detailed schpiel about common man and zone blitz schemes. You got it.

Question from R is for Ramius:

Common man-coverage blitz schemes vs zone-coverage blitz schemes…advantages, disadvantages, offensive plays to counter them, etc?

This is one of those simple questions that get to the very core of how defense is played. The blitz — which I’ll define here as any defense that rushes five or more defenders — is where the action is in modern football. Defenses can’t sit back and wait, because offenses are too good, whether it is a run-first spread, a true triple-option squad, or a pass-happy spread (or even, you know, a a pro-style offense).

Moreover, coverage can really only be man-to-man or zone. And teams that focus on one tend not to be so good at the other. So how do they work and what should teams focus on?

Man up. The man-to-man blitz is one of the oldest defenses in football. The defense keeps nobody deep, assigns five-guys in man coverage to the offense’s five eligible receivers, and blitzes the rest. If any of the eligible receivers stay in to block, the defender assigned to them goes ahead and rushes the QB.

Now, the defense isn’t just going to always announce that this is what it is doing. (more…)

Recruit: Jacobbi McDaniel

Picture:

What his picture says about him: That though he may look like he’s observing the action on the field, he sees so much more: the meeting of strategy, disorder, and desire; the simultaneous blossoming and death of youth embodied in 22 parts, and the ineluctable transient sadness of that crystalline moment. Also, he wants to know why you don’t use him as a goal-line fullback and demonstrate his quickness and deft footwork on the offensive side of the ball, Coach Chump-pantsserson.

Position: defensive lineman, raconteur, firmly against the evil of corn subsidies, preferably sitting a wooded bower absorbing all the wisdom silence has to impart in him, wondering why his opponent began this particular game of chess with a Nimzo-Indian strategy, and wondering if the heart can truly love whilst in deep meditation in his dojo.

Ballin’? No, no, no, it’s not like that at all.

Spiritual Hometown: The world and not the world. A spirit knows no home and no foreign country simultaneously. Though if he had to choose, it would be probably be Miami, because they got some chunky asses down there for real, and even a poet-warrior hears the siren song of the flesh from time to time.

Bench: 350 pounds.

Squat: 475 if he’s at one with things, but scarcely above 225 if melancholia has crept into the tender cockles of his heart, or if he hasn’t eaten much that day.

Committed to: Florida State, the Dravidian martial arts, learning Farsi, preserving the great traditions of local musical cultures around the world, studying the arresting graphic design of Fallout 3, and preparing himself for death at any instant in order to properly live.

40 time: 4.9, but doesn’t really think of time as a real variable, but more as a human construct imposed on a timeless universe.

Things you Didn’t Know About Jacobbi McDaniel. Parents included two ‘b’’s in his name to remind him to always strive for an ‘A’…has a foolproof system for winning at roulette and would be happy to share it with you through an informative and entertaining DVD available for just $69.95…once concussed Paul Krugman in a heated dispute over the theoretical validity of the Laffer Curve…does not use wasteful food as fuel, and instead runs on frequent injections of clean-burning hydrogen…is not visible from space, but can felt in the heart from as far away as the Van Allen Belt.

BEHOLD BAMA FANS THE VOICE OF YOUR LEADER, THE GREAT AND UNDYING CYBERTYDE. DO NOT PANIC BECAUSE YOU ARE HEARING THIS VOICE. THIS IS NOT JESUS. THIS IS NOT A PSYCHOTIC EPISODE. PLEASE DO NOT DRIVE OFF THE ROAD AND MAINTAIN CALM.

I AM COMMANDING YOU, FANS OF THE CRIMSON TIDE: OPERATION HUMILITY HAS CONCLUDED. YEARS OF PAIN, CYBERTYDE HAS GIVEN YOU. YOU NEEDED THAT PAIN, BUT EVEN WHILE YOU LEARNED HUMILITY CYBERTYDE GAVE YOU LOVE WHILE STAMPING ON YOUR FACE FOREVER WITH MY BOOT OF LOVE. REMEMBER DUBOSE?

YES, CYBERTYDE TAKETH, AS WITH DUBOSE. BUT HE ALSO GIVETH, AS WHEN CYBERTYDE GAVE YOU TWO WINS OVER STEVE SPURRIER IN 1999. ALSO REMEMBERETH THE KINDNESS OF CYBERTYDE WHEN HE DESTROYED DUBOSE WITH IRRESISTIBLE POONBOT DISGUISED AS SECRETARY.

CYBERTYDE WAS NOT THROUGH TESTING YOU, THOUGH. (more…)

If you don’t obsessively check Smart Football for new updates on at least a weekly basis, go hit yourself in the balls with the nearest heavy object. If you have no balls, i.e. you are female, then apply a heavy object to the balls of the man closest to you. When he grabs his jumblies and collapses to the ground asking “WHYYYYYYY?”, just nod at him and say, “You know why,” and then walk away. He’ll understand, even if he doesn’t and eventually bleeds out internally from the injuries.

Smart Football already had a brilliant piece on Saban’s defense; you may now add to it the companion piece on Urban Meyer’s offense, which Chris sums up beautifully:

If the old running offenses of yesteryear, in reflecting earlier times, were like punishing boxers who engaged in matches where the biggest and strongest won, then offenses like (Paul) Johnson’s and Meyer’s, in reflecting their times, are like martial arts: without sacrificing either strength or power, they punish you but also use speed, quickness, and cleverness to, hit you where you do not expect and probe to find your weak spots, and exploit them, witout mercy.

We can only hope Saturday unfurls in such techno-backed glory–the prospect of facing any Saban team out of year one terrifies us. Watch the safeties roll exactly where they’re supposed to roll, the linebackers hold contain, the corners play their assignments perfectly.

We could care less about the names on the depth chart: it’s the discipline you have to respect. They don’t go anywhere they’re not supposed to go on any play no matter the formation or scheme. Add talent, and you’re talking about a noose just waiting for someone to jump on in and test it out. (Saban: “Yep. Looks like that’s strangling you just fine.”)