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So, what are the Oregon Ducks going to do about their RichRod problem?
DerekJohnson
Administrator, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 64,057 
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Holding my breath
Mariota has lost four times, twice each to the same staff. Stanford plays an NFL style gap control 3-4 which if manned by the right people just crushes spread offenses. It contains the QB, allows a free LB for every running play, etc. Stanford had the right kind of kids the last two years, but this year not so much.
Casteel plays a front help 3-3-5, by that I mean they don't use the free safety as the hitter like most small colleges and high schools do that Rocky Hinds invented. They use one of their dogs as the hitter based on alignment and side of the field which is much harder to predict because it could be one of two instead of one of one. Football is a retardedly easy game so when you double the odds of something people get massively confused.
This defense also always sends four or five on running downs but you never know which four or five and there is also gap switching on every play between the DL and LB's. For power running teams this defense can really struggle unless you have a legit 2-gap nose tackle and UA will never have one of those so the USC's and Stanford's of the world will give them fits even if they are a shitty team record wise. For an offense like Oregon you are either going to guess wrong a lot of the time on which gap to zone making your offense inept like the last two seasons or you will just be better than them man vs man and you crush them like Rich Rod's first year.
The zone read/spread option against a front end 3-3-5 has two possible outcomes of either a fuck ton of points or very few. If turnovers are excessive that makes everything null and garbage time also doesn't count. We know Oregon isn't that much better physically than UA so a blowout simply won't happen unless UA turns it over a ton.
It has nothing to do with zone reading, it's zone blocking in general. All a zone read does as far as blocking scheme is takes a man that would normally block first level and send him the second, which is the definition of option blocking. Power zone was effective during its creation in Denver, but Dick Lebeau invented Zone Blitzing and fucking crushed it.
Oregon's offense is built around being simple so athletes can just play and not think. Real power sets now employ different terminology, technique, and calls. It's a lot to ask for kids that only get 20 hours to prepare total and can't work with coaches in the off season.
The two back set and even three back sets (Diamond) can have some use in the option game but you put yourself in a disdvantage long term because any time a defense can bring another defender in without an offensive threat to fill that space the offense is behind in the numbers game.
Sorry, I forgot that no one actually talks about football on football boreds.
I'm still learning to think in schemes.
Why, so we would have a permanent Stanford and USC Problem? The adaptive 4-2-5 is the wave of the future.