Broncos Monday Ramblings (BMR): August 4 edition If you’re like me, you are ready for the doggone season to get going. Man! This pre-season has seemed to drag on and on and on! Maybe it’s the construction project that the Broncos are undertaking which has kept the fans away from Dove Valley, but it just hasn’t seemed normal this year. Still, it will be good to see the boys of Orange and Blue charging around Mile High again this Thursday. As last weeks tome primarily concerned defense, I thought Id talk a little about offense in todays column today. It might be a rambling style column but I do want to examine what I think is a paradigm shift in offensive thinking in the NFL today. In the late 1950s, the Pro style offense (two running backs, a tight end and two wideouts) became the standard and it was so successful that that offense filtered down from the pros to the colleges to the high schools and into youth football. In this phase Pro Style essentially referred to a dominant FORMATION (or alignment) from which virtually all NFL offenses operated. Essentially, that formation was an optimal set from which offenses could run from AND throw from as well. Now, it never completely controlled all offensive football at every level, but its appeal at the grassroots level was that in a world increasingly dominated by television, any young player could switch on the TV on Sunday and watch how that offense operated at the most efficient level. The other main attraction to the Pro Offense was that it offered incredible financial compensation if a player learned how to play one of the important positions such as Quarterback. Even though the skills that were required to play Quarterback in the Wishbone offense were equally demanding, the fact that no one in the NFL was willing to commit to the Wishbone made it harder for college recruiters from option schools to lure the best athletes. A quarterback who could efficiently operate the Pro style attack was eventually going to make a LOT more money, so naturally the John Elways, the Steve Youngs, and the Troy Aikmans of the world gravitated to schools where they ran the NFL offense and threw the football. (Elway and Young would have been very able Wishbone QBs and Troy Aikman even went to Oklahoma in his Freshman year.) Eventually, this same phenomenon was true for talented linemen, especially left tackles, and for wide receivers also. This dynamic caused most option-oriented universities (even wildly successful ones) to switch to the Pro Style attack. A prime example of this was in the mid 1990s, when CUs Bill McCartney scrapped the Powerbone offense which had won a National Championship and switched to a more Pro style offense. By the 1980s, with the success of the San Francisco 49ers, a variation of the Pro style offense: the West Coast Offense, became the dominant force in football. There were, and are, many opinions about what the West Coast offense actually is, but in its purest form, the West Coast Offense concentrated on throwing short, easily completed passes and then utilized the yards gained in the run after the catch (RAC) to be even more efficient than actually running the ball from the line of scrimmage. It was essentially a commitment to the short passing game. When the Washington Redskins showed that a strong basic running game (Zone blocking) could be combined with the West Coast passing philosophy, the course of NFL offense wa set for decades to come. The Broncos Super Bowl Champions of the late 1990s were the epitome of this style of offense. The West Coast Offense attacked defenses with a specific METHOD. Today, the paradigm of a dominant offensive system is again being challenged. The new dominant offense in all of football is the Spread Offense. Over the past ten years, this new offense has become all the rage and has come to dominate football at almost every level, but especially, it has become the overwhelming dominant offense of Division IA college football. It has made the QB under Center exchange almost a lost art and has nearly made the position of Pro Offense Running Back obsolete. Ironically, because it forces defense to spread themselves thin all over the field, it has aided QBs who are actually less skilled passers to rack up incredible passing numbers in college, even though what they are doing is ridiculously more simple and easy than what QBs like Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers do to move their teams. So, how does this relate to the Broncos in todays NFL? Overall, I think that even though it would appear that they are are on the wrong side of this paradigm shift, I really believe that with Peyton pulling the trigger for their offense, they are handling this dynamic better than most of their opponents, especially their immediate rivals in the AFC West. Now its absolutely true that in the NFL, superior personnel is the most important factor in winning. And despite the fact that Peyton is very much in the traditional Pro Offense mold and doesnt fit the Spread QB template at all (great, fluid athlete who possesses great running ability as well as the ability to throw on the run), he still operates many facets of the Spread Offense very efficiently. The Broncos have evolved their offense to incorporate features of the Spread Offense partly because Peyton is versatile enough to adapt efficiently. Contrary to what many people believe, when Peyton actually does retire, it wont be all that difficult to transition into a more modern version of the Spread. Hes already got them on that path. On the league scale, the most fascinating element in this transition is what is happening with the Philadelphia Eagles and Chip Kelly. Chip (whose offensive innovations at Oregon knocked College Football on its ear) and has been very different from most college football coaches who previously came from bigtime College Football to the NFL. In the past, guys like Chuck Fairbanks, Dennis Erickson and John McKay came into the NFL from wildly successful careers and almost immediately (and unsuccessfully) adapted their offenses to the NFL template. A notable exception to this trend was when Jimmy Johnson brought his College style 4-3 Defense to Dallas and proceeded to revolutionize how NFL defense was played. Kelly came into Philadelphia and didnt change a thing about his offense. To his credit, he believed in his system enough to realize that if he was going down in flames, it would be with what HE knew best. And it was revolutionary, if not blatantly obvious. The truly revolutionary nature of the Chip Kelly System has much less to do with the formation used, as with how he utilizes the PACE of his attack to overwhelm the defense. The pace of the Eagles offense often prevents defenses from even getting properly aligned and Kelly will force the opponents to defend every square yard of the field without giving them a chance to catch their collective breath. The way that Kellys Eagles play offensive football has never been done before with such a complete commitment to such a challenging pace. It virtually dictates that defenses will disintegrate from being exhausted, disorganized and unable to match the relentless, grueling pace of the offense. Equally important is the fact that Kelly uses a revolutionary, much different approach to how practice is conducted, how players are conditioned (he even designs their diet!) and even what positions are vital to the success of the offense. It may be that in the New World Spread Offense, quarterback will become a less vital position than it is in the Pro Offense. How does this affect the Broncos? It already has and although John Fox is about as different from Chip Kelly as can be, we can already see that the manipulation of pace has become a valuable weapon in the Broncos offense. A major difference, is that Peyton controls the pace with the Broncos; on the Eagles, that is the vital province of Chip Kelly alone. But, ultimately, the pace at which the Broncos offense operates is not the major characteristic of that offense. With the Eagles, it is, by far, the most important element in what makes the offense succeed. In the next few years, it will be fascinating to see if the Chip Kelly System becomes the West Coast Offense of the 2010s. Is this the style which will become the face of NFL offense? Who knows? Thats one mans opinion anyway. :-)
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 15:02:17 +0000
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