Expanding Our Football Knowledge

Football Outsiders is always the place to start. Their stats aren’t all definitive, but often give a much more accurate picture than the traditional NFL stats, also known as “counting stats.” it has articles covering all sorts of “new looks” into football strategy, often from a coaching and scouting point of view, while “Word of Muth” has to be the current best offensive line focused writing that is out today.

Link

It seems to be a little more strongly focused on the added value player and the plays made have towards a win, similar to the easier to accomplish and more mature baseball advanced statistics. Brian Burke uses statistics in every way he can, often to the conclusion that head coaches are risk-averse, and should be taking more risks that would allow the great chance of winning. This site does lot of work on situational decisions in a game based on what the expected success rate of different plays.

This site is really heavy on the numbers, but also on the voice analyzing the numbers and giving a real understanding to what they are studying if it is possible. This is the site John Morgan went to for a time after he left here, although I’m haven’t seen him write on there for a while. Some of the writers on there are connected with their own blogs, and in general reading this level of conversation about football is helpful, but is not the basics.

Both of these sites run into the problem of football stats being the result of multiple players and the inability to assign positive or negative statistical value to an offensive player’s block, or a defender taking on a block. Football is a team sport, where players influence plays without earning statistics. There are tons of examples of this, too many to get into all of them here.

trojanfootballanalysis has added some diagrams to transcripts of Pete Carroll teaching the 4-3 under defense he played at USC. Mostly, this is a look in Pete Carroll’s brain into what he knows about defense. Not all of his secrets, but a really good way to learn how flexible a defense can be.

USC 4-3 Under Defense
USC 4-3 Under Defense Blitz Plays

He has a Monte Kiffin section I have never actually seen before, just found it looking this up for you. I’m very excited to read on that. This is one of the best 4-3 defensive minds professional and college football has ever seen.

Monte Kiffin Defensive Philosophy – Part 1
Monte Kiffin Defensive Philosophy – Part 2

Tamahawk Nation is a SBN blog for Florida State, a ZBS team. Bud Elliot is a writer there, who wrote a piece on the scheme that helps understand a lot of the principles that you see in our run game. We aren’t as pure in the scheme as Denver was in the Alex Gibbs days, Tom Cable incorperates bigger OL with power into his version of it. However, the concepts learned in this reading help understand the traditional assignment blocking as well as zone blocking, the types of runner who works best in a ZBS, and some other interesting ideas that come up along the way.

The Texans, Seahawks, and Redskins all run some zone blocking currently, I’m not sure which other teams are doing this right now, but Tom Cable did run this scheme with the Oakland Raiders in the past few years. Shanahan runs it, with the Broncos as his previous experience with it. Greg Knapp had experience with it from Atlanta during the DVD days when they were leading the league in rushing. I don’t know who is the coach actually leading it for the Texans at the moment, but they had Alex Gibbs there in 2008-2009 to start them into being real good at it.

Definitely a good concept to know, and a great article.

Almost any John Wooden book is well worth the read. He revolutionized how coaches are today.