The Football Brainiacs

Image from Sesame Workship (Sesame Street)

I’ve been an Oklahoma fan as long as I can remember.  I grew up in a little town called Bearden, which lies between 72 and 78 miles almost due east of Norman depending on which route you take. To a small town kid the kids from bigger towns were cooler, “going to town” was an event and those guys I saw on Saturday afternoons wearing those shiny red helmets were like the gods of Greek mythology.  Besides the names I learned in Sunday school, names that were equally as full of wonder to a eight year old kid, I learned the names of players like Casillas, Holieway, Aikman, Jackson, Tillman, Reed, Dixon, and Bosworth.  I remember begging my mom for a Sports Illustrated subscription so I could get more information on those guys in the red helmets.  Right about the time that I became aware of what was going on just south of Oklahoma City, it was 1984.  Any Sooner fan who remembers the mid to late eighties remembers the powerhouse teams we had back then.  What those guys were able to do caused me to fall in love with the University of Oklahoma.  My University.  Our University.  Even through the lean years of the nineties, I still held Oklahoma in high regard.  More than high regard…reverence.  If you want to be a great doctor you go to Johns Hopkins.  If you want to be a great lawyer you go to Harvard or Yale.  If you want to be a great military leader, you go to West Point.  If you want to be considered a great player, you go to Oklahoma.  It’s where the best of the best play.  It’s where the best coaches coach.

I first started playing college ball in the fall of 1995, it only took me a semester to learn more about the game of football than I had learned in the previous eighteen years.  My position coach on the offensive line was Dan Scheible.  Sgt. Scheible, as we came to call him, had a way about him to make you respect him, fear him and love him all at the same time.  Coach Scheible had a way about him that made you want to play hard for him.  He was a guy’s guy.  If you were a starter for Coach Scheible, you were a tough guy.  You had to prove to him that you were going to do what you were supposed to do, be where you were supposed to be and do them both as hard and as fast as you could.  He was a great teacher.  I learned as a freshman in college that running the football is as much about outnumbering people at the point of attack as it is about being physical.  He was a student of the game, and he made us better, because he taught us.  Anyone who played for him and broke down film with him can see the things that I see when I watch the game now.  Back then, the option offenses of Nebraska and Kansas State were in high gear.  There weren’t a lot of schools out there slinging the pill around the yard, and if you were going to win football games, you had to be tougher, more physical and smarter than the other guy.

Approximately 2,500 years ago Sun Tzu wrote that  “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”  When I observe this offensive team we have lining up on Saturdays, it is clear to me that we are not strategists, and we are definitely not tacticians.  We had no plan last Thursday night, and we definitely did not maneuver our troops effectively.  It’s hard for me to watch a game like the one we saw in Waco.  Offensive linemen, former or present, are emotional beings.  We tend to be among the smartest people on the team most of the time as well.  That just makes it harder for us fat guys to see what’s happening and not get pissed off about it.  I get pissed off about it because I understand it.  I get ticked off because the school I love the most in this world does things that would indicate to anyone with an understanding of the game we don’t understand basic things. We aren’t devising sounds strategies or employing sound tactics.

At the University of Oklahoma, you expect your players to be bigger, faster and stronger than everybody else.  You expect your players to be better players because of those physical attributes, but you expect our team to be better because you expect them to be better educated about how to play the game.  More importantly how to win the game.

During my time in playing in college we could run the ball on anybody.  I don’t remember a time in my four years that we got stuffed on the goal line.  Don’t get me wrong, we lost some games, but we could run the ball on anybody.  We could run the football number one because our coaches put us in position to run it.  We could run the football, number two because by God you weren’t going to stop us!

What makes this offensive ineptitude in the run game harder to swallow is that we get the offensive play calls from the sideline.  One of the benefits we’ve been sold for the past few years regarding the no huddle is that you can get the defense to show their hand and then once they line up, get a better call and catch them at a disadvantage.  Sounds good right? Problem is, inn the run game I rarely see us do it.  We fail to adapt.  And whatever the reason is, it’s not acceptable.  Watching Bama/LSU Saturday night, I was watching a savant call a game running the ball. So many times I watched Bama run the football to the side that they had more players than LSU by formation, and they gashed them. Bama took the advantages presented to them. While Bama doesn’t need much help, their coaches put them in position to be dominant.

In the picture below you can see that to our offensive right, Baylor had six players, and to the offensive left, there are only four. The NG is shaded to Ikard’s right.  You would think that since the coaches in the booth are signaling in plays and audibles, they would be able to see that there is less resistance to the left than there is by running to the right. What speaks volumes about the level of ability of our players is the fact that the only player we left unblocked in running this play was Dixon, their free safety.  Very few running schemes account for the free safety in blocking.  The only mistake we made on this play was that Bronson didn’t stay square to the line of scrimmage off of his combo.  Every other player of the six we had blocking made their blocks.  So Stoops is right when he’s talking about execution, but going back to tactics, it’s much easier to block four players than it is six.  There is less chance of a mistake when you’re asking four guys to do things right instead of six. Anytime you have more moving parts there are more opportunities to fail. This is football 101.

Had we really wanted to ensure success on this play we would have gone back left (to the field) with Rip and Damien pulling and leading the way. We would have immediately had a plus two advantage!   All of those Baylor defenders to our right would have gotten caught up in the wash, and Dixon would have had no chance to do his best Ronnie Lott impersonation.  Our band would be tooting the abbreviated Boomer Sooner that they play on first downs, and the offense would have been off and rolling.  Stuff like this is what I can’t handle.  If we were putting it on the QB to change the play at the line and audible to run left, I could deal with it a little better.  I can’t accept it because we pause before every play and our offensive coordinator has a chance to see that we are outnumbered to one side or the other and yet we do nothing about it.