That’s the title, and it’s by me. It’s available on Amazon, in paperback, and will be available in various eBook forms (Kindle, as well as hopefully Nook and iTunes/iBooks) sometime in the next couple of weeks, but you can order a paperback copy today either here or here.

Loyal readers may use the coupon code “KD3MBZGV” for a discount on the CreateSpace link; the code will expire early next week. In the next few weeks I will post additional details on the book and my process in putting it together, but it is a collection of pieces, roughly two-thirds of which consist of older works that have been expanded and professionally edited, and another one-third of which are new. If you’ve read every single thing I’ve ever written you will recognize the portion of the book that is not all new, though as I said I have expanded and edited each piece. But this book  is my considered judgment of what I think constitutes the best and most essential of my thoughts on football — The Essential Smart Football.

I chose to publish this myself for a variety of reasons, among them the evolving landscape of the publishing industry, but I still had a great deal of help — including from my loyal readers — for which I am truly thankful.

If you have any marketing inquiries, please don’t hesitate to contact me at chris [at] smartfootball.com. I truly hope everyone enjoys the book.

Greg Schiano’s two-drink rule. I think this is fantastic: Every Tampa Bay Bucs player is required, during team meetings prior to workouts or practice, to drink two “drinks,” i.e. water or Gatorade. In modern football, meetings make up an ever larger portion of a player’s day, and increasingly the kind of technical “no-you-step-this-way” sort of teaching takes place in the meeting room, while watching film. As a result practices are more fast paced and frenetic than ever — every moment on the practice field is extremely valuable. And, of course, players’ health and hydration, particularly in places like Tampa Bay, are crucial. There’s not a pro, college, or high school team in the country that couldn’t have a manager put two cups of water at every single seat for meetings, with the requirement that players drink the water before heading off to practice. As Schiano says, “Doctors I’ve talked to say if you are too thirsty, it’s too late.”

- Notre Dame’s 2012 football clinic notes. I was pleased to see new Notre Dame offensive coordinator Chuck Martin has added in the best new offensive idea of the last couple of seasons, the idea of “packaged concepts” that include run and pass plays in the same play.

- Clemson’s tackle over formation.

- Runningback drills.

- Interview with economist Ronald Coase. He’s 101.

- Three more concussion lawsuits filed versus the NFL.

- In that vein, this week’s episode of Shutdown Fullback.

- Paying free agent runningbacks.

- Are smart phones spreading faster than any technology in human history?

From an excellent interview Texas’s defensive coordinator did with LonghornDigest.com:

But statistics were also changing for in-game analysis. Whereas it might once be considered an advanced metric to look at red zone efficiency, Diaz said Texas is focused on red zone touchdown efficiency.

“You can win a national championship by making people kick field goals in the red zone,” Diaz said. “And you can finish last, in theory, in red zone defense. It just doesn’t make sense.”

[...]

That phenomenon has given rise to statistics like Slow Grind — the number of plays a defense forces an offense to take to score — and the FootballOutsiders.com S&P+ Ratings, a play-by-play success rate that factors for situation and competition. Looking at the latter rating, you can see Diaz’s 2011 Texas defense come to life through the numbers. The Longhorns finished No. 4 nationally in the statistic, but were especially good on running plays — a major Diaz focus — and on winning passing situations (defined as second down with eight or more yards to go, or third or fourth down with five or more yards to go). Texas was third nationally in Rushing S&P+, and second only to national champion Alabama in Passing Downs S&P+.

“Those are the tenets of our defense,” said Diaz, who follows both S&P+ and Slow Grind. “We’ll show those kinds of things to our players during the season just to reinforce what we already know. There aren’t usually any ‘eureka’ moments, but it works more side-by-side with what we see on film.”

. . . That’s why Diaz said the film is important, and why players are coached to focus on their performance, rather than the play’s outcome. “Last year, everybody was wondering six games into the season why our defensive ends couldn’t get sacks, and then the next couple games they started getting sacks,” Diaz said. “But we were also covering better those games. Quarterbacks maybe held onto the ball a half-second longer. All of a sudden the defensive ends get the plaudits, but a lot of it was maybe because of the coverage.

“Nothing happens to a defensive player in a bubble,” Diaz said. “That’s what makes college football the opposite of baseball. Because in baseball, everything happens in a bubble: this guy pitches, this guy hits and the ball is hit to that guy.”

Read the rest here.

The below cut-ups are of Purdue’s quick passing game from the 2006 season. Although Purdue threw for 4,000 yards that season, they’re not the greatest cut-ups in terms of offensive execution as it was Painter’s first year as a starter and Purdue had begun its decline under Tiller. But I think it’s very good teaching tape because the the passing concepts are very common ones, the formations — two-by-two, ace, trey, trips, etc — are used by virtually every team in football, and as a result the film is very good for studying the defenses. And in that vein if you watch the film by studying the alignment and techniques of the safeties, whether you can spot the blitzes pre-snap, and where the soft spots in the defense are, you can then begin analyzing where you would’ve gone with the football. Many of these quick passes here are checks at the line; as a result it’s good to think about whether they were the right checks and the right decisions on where to throw the ball.

I’ll also say that some of the struggles in the clips are good evidence of why I think pass concepts need to be “packaged” so that there are frontside and backside concepts. They do this a couple of times with X-Choice and X-Smash, but they don’t control the middle of the field. In any event it’s good film. Below I’ve included diagrams of the major pass concepts used in the clips.

Part 2 is below:

On the heels of the news that Warren Sapp — who made over $60m during his pro football career — has filed for bankruptcy, this is of interest:

Through the injury-plagued seasons — the first signs that his career may be coming to a close — and two years after his retirement, Searcy still lived as if he were untouchable. His denial that the end was near became clear in several real estate transactions.

In 1998, Searcy bought a condo in Miami for $865,000. In 2000, he bought a house in Clermont, Fla., for $399,900. In 2001, he bought another house in Baltimore for $870,000. “I was punch drunk,” Searcy says. “It was a facade, what I was living. I still wanted to give people the impression that I was big-time. I’d see the guys who were still in the league in the night clubs, and I had to look the look. I was in character.”

In 2002, the bank foreclosed on Searcy’s Baltimore property for $550,632. In 2003, another bank foreclosed on his Miami condo for $568,263.

Read the whole thing.

It’s now up over at Grantland:

The Cleveland Browns had an interesting first day of the 2012 NFL draft. On the one hand, Cleveland got two of the draft’s most productive players: Brandon Weeden, quarterback from Oklahoma State, who threw 71 touchdowns over the past two seasons, and Trent Richardson, an absolutely ferocious running back who rushed for more than 1,600 yards as the offensive centerpiece for Alabama’s championship squad.

And yet, we’re starting to see that drafting a running back so high — the Browns traded up to get Richardson — is typically not a great idea. And Weeden? Well, let’s just say that picking a rookie quarterback who is 28 years old is not exactly without risk.

Read the whole thing.

It’s now up over at Grantland:

Ever since the rise of the T-formation and the modern notion of the quarterback as passer and team leader, young QBs have received varying amounts of training for the position. If his father was a coach — like Elway’s was — or if he happened to live in Granada Hills, California, he might learn the sophisticated skills necessary to continue developing. But if not, it was unlikely that he’d ever receive that sort of necessary coaching. The long history of quarterback draft busts has taught us that athletic ability alone does not make a quarterback. A great quarterback is instead one of sport’s oddest confections: He is the athlete whose success depends as much on his brain as on his body. One can’t help but wonder how many would-be great quarterbacks never had the chance to develop because no one taught them the intricacies of the position; like some football equivalent of Gray’s Elegy, who knows how many mute inglorious Mannings remain forever obscure to history.

In recent years, however, the situation has changed. Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III are harbingers of an approaching age of quarterbacks who are both better athletes and better trained at a young age than ever before. In a decade or so, the debates about a player like Tim Tebow — that NFL teams must choose between quarterbacks who are passers and quarterbacks who are athletes — will seem quaint and ridiculous. Nowadays, coaches at the lower levels put their best, smartest, most charismatic kids at quarterback and develop them. The new age we’re entering will be something of a Hunger Games for young quarterbacks: By the time they reach the NFL draft, they will be among the best, most talented, brightest, and best-trained candidates we’ve ever seen. Instead of asking ourselves what traits we prefer, we’ll be asking why we ever thought we had to choose.

Read the whole thing here.

In honor of the yearly spectacle of reading name off of a list as prime time television event, do yourself a favor and just watch clips of Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, two total maestros of the art of quarterbacking. In terms of the draft, I don’t think you can go wrong with either one, but feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. Happy drafting.

Spring games typically don’t make for very compelling watching, but anytime you have a new coaching staff, the interest is heightened somewhat because it’s the first and often only glimpse at how the new staff’s schemes will mesh with the existing talent. And of course I’ve been looking forward to the return of Mike Leach to the sideline, and to see how his offense may have evolved in his couple of years away from the game.

As expected, one answer is simple: Not much, nor should it be much different. The offense got lots of mileage early out of four verticals and the mesh concept, for example. But there’s some somewhat new stuff here, primarily in the use of pistol sets from the backs, some multiple runningback sets and motion with those guys in the backfield, and even some play-action and “pop” passes. Much of it is familiar to offenses run by other Airraid graduates, but is somewhat new to Coach Leach’s more traditional attack. I expect Washington State to have a few struggles in the fall, but it should be fun to see how quickly the offense comes together and what new wrinkles Leach adds in.

The title is a quote from former Stanford and current San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator Greg Roman, from the video clip below. And it’s absolutely true. While much is rightfully made about whether a quarterback does an effective job of selling a run fake on play-action, the reality is that the offensive line plays just as big of a role in convincing a defense that a play is a run. Indeed, the play-action pass is probably the best weapon offenses have, one far too often underutilized by modern spread offenses. As Bill Walsh once explained:

Let's go deep

The Play-Pass is the one fundamentally sound football play that does everything possible to contradict the basic principles of defense. I truly believe it is the single best tool available to take advantage of a disciplined defense. By using the play-pass as an integral pant of your offense you are trying to take advantage of a defensive team that is very anxious very intense and very fired-up to play football. The play-pass is one of the best ways to cool all of that emotion and intensity down because the object of the play-pass is to get the defensive team to commit to a fake run and then throw behind them. Once you get the defensive team distracted and disoriented, they begin to think about options and, therefore, are susceptible to the running game.

It is no surprise then that maybe the two best play-action teams in college football season were Stanford and Baylor, two teams that just so happened to produce the two best quarterbacks in college football, Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III. In reviewing the game film of both players, I couldn’t help but marvel at how many of their touchdown passes were well designed, well executed “shot plays” that, while impressive, pretty much just required both quarterbacks to throw the ball to wide open receivers. And a huge part of that was because both of their offenses involved heavy doses of play-action with pulling linemen.

Just think about what kind of effect that has on the defense. While both players were impressive in their play-action fakes — and someone like Peyton Manning is even more impressive — if you’re a linebacker or safety and you see a pulling guard, you basically can’t help but tell yourself: “It’s a run.” Especially since run plays that involve a pulling guard means one thing: “power,” in the lowercase sense of lots of bodies will be at the point of attack so the defense needs to match numbers as well. And in the case of both Stanford and Baylor it also means “power” in another sense: the “Power-O” play where the linemen block down and a backside guard pulls to lead. Stanford, being a more of a pro-style offense, runs the traditional Power-O numerous times every game. Baylor, being a spread team, typically used the vaunted “inverted veer” play, which is the spread offense’s read-based adaptation of the old Power-O. Regardless, for opponents of both, a pulling guard meant trouble for Stanford’s and Baylor’s opponents run defenses, which, through the use of play-action, in turn meant trouble for their pass defense. That Bill Walsh guy just might have been onto something.

Yet it’s not as simple as telling your players to run a pass play and to have the guard pull around. Pass protection is the most important aspect of the modern passing game, and play-action passes are no exception. What I advocate below, which is what it seems to me all of the really successful teams use with pulling linemen in their play-action passing game, is to use a type of “slide” or “gap” protection. In brief, slide or gap protection requires the offensive linemen to protect their gap to one side or the other; by working in tandem, they should be able to zone block all games or stunts from the defense, protect the quarterback from the inside to out, and force any unblocked rushers to come from the edges.

The downside of gap protection is that all the gaps need protecting and the gaps are predetermined; the result of those two factors is that the offense typically loses an eligible receiver or two to the pass protection scheme (because he must stay blocking his gap) and gap protection can result in mismatches. But given the complexities of modern defenses, I think full slide and various half-man-to-man/half-slide protection schemes are the way to go, and they certainly make pulling a lineman in pass protection much simpler. So given that focus on slide protection, how have Luck, Griffin, and others put this into practice?

Let’s go pro. We’ll begin with the pro-style approach favored by Stanford and Luck. The concept is very simple: The quarterback and runningback will fake a run play, while the linemen take initial steps — keeping their helmet levels down — to simulate a run play. The linemen to the side the run fake is going to will step to the opposite direction, just as they would on the Power-O play, while the backside tackle steps to the playside to seal the gap. The backside guard pulls around just as he would on a run play, except instead of looking to lead up onto a linebacker he looks to block the “C” gap from the inside to out. (The gaps between offensive players are lettered, beginning with A out to D, beginning with the gap between the center and guard, then guard and tackle, and so on.)

The important point is that this leaves the offense one short away from the side of the run-fake, so the offense will have to account for that with either a fullback or tight-end/H-back type, as shown in the diagram below. With the H-back plus the five offensive linemen (the four who are simply stepping and sealing off their gaps plus the pulling guard who is sealing the C gap to the opposite side), the offense should have a sound six-man “surface” covering the backside C gap through the frontside C gap. This isn’t to say there cannot be any penetration by the defense, but if there is it is because of technique and skill, not scheme.

The runningback who is faking the run play can be given a few different assignments. One, he can be given no blocking assignment and be told to simply run a route. This can work fine but unless it is some kind of specific play — like that you want him to run a wheel route up the sideline — I wouldn’t recommend this. Another tactic is to let him check-release the “D” gap to his side and, if no defender shows up, he would then run a route. This is a solid strategy, as although it is a gap or zone protection scheme he should still be able to check-release because all he is doing is seeing if there is an outside rusher. Moreover, he can help the pulling guard as that player might need some help sealing his gap. Finally, my preferred method is to have the runningback check both the frontside and backside D gaps, as shown in the diagram. To do this effectively he should get a good pre-snap read of potential threats. The reason I like this is because unless you have a specific play for him in mind the point of this kind of play-action is not to dump it off to the runningback and the thing I am most concerned with is some kind of overload blitz from one side or the other resulting in a hit on my quarterback. Indeed, if the blitz is clear enough — and the quarterback doesn’t check out of the play — the runningback is instructed to ignore his run-fake responsibilities and simply protect the quarterback. Lastly, you can also keep the other tight-end in to block and either release the runningback or not to get a seven- or eight-man protection concept.

But regardless of which preferred method you choose, the fundamentals stay the same: It’s a very straightforward gap protection scheme, and the only thing that changes is that some of the responsibilities for gaps has been altered. Further, what I frequently find is that the blocks with this sort of concept are easy to execute because the defense is reading run and is more worried about filling gaps than it is getting to the quarterback. Below is another diagram showing the full play, this time with a fullback blocking the backside C-gap instead of an H-back.

In terms of route combinations, any basic two-man or three-man pass combination will work, with the best and most obvious combinations involving deep post routes and deep crossing routes. Andrew Luck’s favorite combination the past few seasons is the same one Greg Roman drew up for Brian Billick in the video below, involving a simple deep post with a deep cross from the opposite side.

And as the first clip in the video cut-ups below show, this remained very effective for Luck. It was also effective for another pretty good quarterback, Tom Brady, as the Patriots — despite being only a so-so rushing team — have been excellent over the years at using just this very play-action concept. See the video clips below for several examples of pulling a guard on play-action from relatively traditional pro-style looks.

The new new thing. The spread offense, as it has matured, seems like it continues to absorb and assimilate every offensive football concept ever run — quick passing game, option, single-wing, wing-T, etc — and the play-action passing game is no different. The rise of pistol and even three-back “Diamond” formations have been big factors in spread offenses incorporating using more and more play-action over the past few seasons. And with the rise of the “inverted veer,” which involves a pulling guard and has the quarterback read a play-side defender (as opposed to a backside defender as with the zone read), it was only inevitable that offenses would use that play as the foundation for play-action.

And no one did it better this past season than Art Briles and Robert Griffin III at Baylor. Griffin, of course, throws a beautiful deep ball — probably the best I’ve seen from a collegiate player in at least a decade. But he also benefited from a lot of wide open deep tosses, often off this very run action. The typical inverted veer play is as drawn up below:

So how do you adapt this to play-action using the same principles as above? You guessed it: The line to the play-side blocks down while the pulling linemen is responsible for the defensive end to his side, i.e. the “C” gap.

One important note is that as I have drawn this up — which is how Baylor typically ran it — there are only five offensive players pass blocking. Unlike above where the backside tackle steps down and an H-back or fullback has the C gap, here the backside tackle just locks on to the defensive end. Note that one can easily put another blocker there backside to get a sound six-man surface.

In any event, as shown here as well as the video clips below, Baylor decimated people with this concept. They loved to fake the inverted veer one way and to have the backside slot get deep, often off of a fake-slant-and-go concept. But any passing concept should work, especially considering that the runningback becomes a swing or flare-control checkdown receiver.

So that’s how to use the pulling lineman with the inverted veer. The other method to pull a linemen in pass protection from a spread set — one used by many college and pro teams — is not quite as good in terms of the run fake but still does the trick and it provides a full six-man pass protection surface. In this method, shown below, the pulling linemen and the runningback go in opposite directions. I have shown this with a pulling tackle to mimic the common “Dart” run play, where the playside tackle pass sets and the backside tackle, not the backside guard, is the one pulling. For the play-action concept, essentially the interior line squeezes down while the runningback and pulling tackle are responsible for the C gaps — and outside rushers — to either side. And, as mentioned above, this has traditionally not been a difficult block because those defensive ends tend to read run and step down, waiting for a ballcarrier.

This concept works best for quick “pop” type passes over the middle, as the point is simply to freeze the defense for a bit so a pass can be squeezed behind them. Finally, see the video below for examples of Griffin and Baylor shredding teams with play-action from the inverted veer, along with some of the above six-man pass protection schemes sprinkled in.

For teams that pull linemen in their run game — and that use some slide or gap principles in pass protection — this pass protection concept is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. I highly recommend that every team begin using it. You might not have Andrew Luck or Robert Griffin III but that’s really the point: They had those guys and both Baylor and Stanford still got receivers completely wide open. And the guy to thank for it is that big pulling guard.