Mailbag question: Great defense and traditional offense wins NC
Hello,
Well another football season is past and another national champion has been crowned. Have you guys noticed that once again a team won the national championship by playing a traditional style offense, along with having a great defense?
Teams can score many points, but you still need to play defense.
Jim R.
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Thanks for the question/comment and you might want to duck the incoming "hater bombs."
You are preaching to the choir my friend. WE at GBMW Blog have been preaching that mantra for some time. Even through all the slings and arrows, being called haters, old school, behind the times, or whatever, we consistently have stood behind the philosophy that defense wins championships.
Both Alabama and Texas were rated in the top five defenses and will have multiple players drafted early in the NFL draft.
Playing a pro style/traditional offense makes it easier to play/employ a great defense. A team can control the clock, play field position, and generally help the defense more so than in what has been called modern “Star War’ offense by Bob Davies.
Our elders of the last few decades have put forth many common sayings that, while ignored by many, still hold value and truth. One such pearl of wisdom is this: If it is not broke, don’t fix it. The reason teams went to “Star War” offenses was to make up for deficiencies, that is, a team could not play a standard offense or defense against a good team and have a chance to win. Northwestern has adapted such “equalizing systems in both basketball and football. Simply put it provides a better chance for winning by incorporating a different scheme to make up for athletic shortcomings. Not all teams need to go hi-tech to make up for athletic deficiencies.
This is not a knock on Michigan, but talking about a lot of college football teams in todays world.
Written by GBMW Staff
Go Blue -- Wear Maize!
7 comments:
absolutely spot on. I don't know why that concept is so hard to grasp.
We needed tweaking, not an overhaul. However, make no mistake, now that we are on this path, I am behind RR all the way.
Come On. Great Teams win NC. You can have any system you want, you just need talented committed kids and some luck. Florida runs a running spread, Oklahoma runs a mix of spread and power, Texas runs a spread. USC and Alabama run more a traditional power game. Georgia Tech looked prety good out of a flexbone. Funny how that power game for USC blew this year with a young team and freshmen qb. Talent and experience. Forget all this garbage about styles. Basing an opinion off 1 game is stupid. Texas Tech shredded MSU so that means having 3 foot splits between lineman is the best way to win the Alamo Bowl.
Let's not forget, the B10 bowl wins were also a showing of great defenses against "explosive" offenses like Oregon, Miami, LSU, and GT. Defenses controlled the clock and effectively shut down offenses. UM's defense should be everyone's #1 concern. Unfortunately, I think the power FB has effectively gone from our playbook, just look back to the 4 attempts to get into the endzone from the 1 yd line in the ILL game.
Great post. I like this question and the answer posted. I'm an admirer of both smash mouth pro-set/traditional I formation and spread option offenses myself.
I do not think that 2005 Texas, 2006 Florida, 2007 LSU and 2008 Florida teams were trying covering up any athletic deficiencies when they selected to run a more spread option style offense (i.e. not pro-style offenses). They chose this attack wisely, given their past coaching philosophy and attempts to leverage the talent of players they had in place at each position.
I believe that Texas, LSU and Florida alone have already exploded the theory that running a spread offense and contending for or winning a national championship are mutually exclusive. If the right players you need are in place, it really doesn't matter what offense you choose run.
I do agree with the idea that even if you succeed in forming a high-octane, high-scoring offense that just murders opponents with speed and power on every down, you still have to play very good defense to win a national championship. To me that's the common denominator I see when I look at all of the past NC teams. And this is especially sobering for Michigan fans if we consider just how far away 2009-2010 Michigan may actually be from playing like 1991 Washington, 1997 Michigan, 2000 Oklahoma, 2004 USC or a 2006 Florida defense.
Go Blue!
Once again? Last I remember, Florida runs a run based options and is more or less the most dominant team in the last 5 years....Traditional offense, spread, wishbone, it doesn't matter. It is all about the players and the talent....
Florida is basically a West Coast offense, short controlled passing game out of the gun. They use short passes to control the clock and field position along with a strong running game. heck, tebow is basically a FB playing QB. But Florida plays great defense. When they won their two NCs they held opponents to 14 points each. Check the NFl draft over the last 3 or 4 years and check the the Gators who were drafted high. And we expect another Florida defender darafted high this season.
I wish there weren't so many misunderstandings about "spread offense" vs. so called conventional or pro set offenses.
It's probably due to the complexity out there. To me, there's no purebred "spread offense" anymore. Today there's a very wide spectrum of spread offenses out there now.
There's a high school coach who's recently improvised, of all things, a Wing-T Spread offense with the QB in the shotgun, passing like crazy, but running all of the original bucksweeps, WB counters. Really creative stuff and they're kicking butts.
The original question came across somewhat as a rhetorical one perhaps indicating that "conventional" offensive sets(i.e. pro set, simple I-formation, 4-wide pro shotgun) lead to more national titles.
Since about 1984, it does appear that more pro-style offenses (without QB option run plays as a base) have been very successful at the college level. Before that, there was a lot of Multiple I or wishbone. Since 1998 Texas, Florida and LSU are the main teams that ran spread option offenses and won NCs. OU's spread was more pass-centric in 2000.
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