learning to teach attitude
How do you "see" the game?
*Disclaimer*: If you don’t like thinking about why we do football, then you probably won’t like this article. If you like thinking about why we do football (and explosive offenses), read on.
Spread. Wing-T. Triple-Option. Double Wing. Single Wing. Air Raid. Pro-Style. Slot-T.
These are offensive systems that work. Coaches believe in them, advocate for them, and teach them.
Each one brings a philosophical approach to the game.
There are pros and cons to each. Most often, a preference towards one over the other is due to what you were first taught, what you’re most comfortable with.
And these philosophical approaches to the game shape how you see the game.
What are you trying to do?
When you think of the schemes mentioned above, you might’ve thought of a formation or a set of plays.
And that’s pretty much the only difference, right?
Every system has its specific set of formations, plays, and way of doing things — those specific parts are what make each one a defined system and distinguishable from other systems.
And because those parts limit what you can do within a system, your possibilities within any given system aren’t endless.
For example, if you run the Wing-T, you aren’t going to attack 2 High coverages like this:
Does that look like an easy install for a team that usually lines up with only one receiver on the field?
Of course not.
But that’s not a bad thing because that play doesn’t accomplish what Wing-T teams want to accomplish.
In other words, they don’t need that play because defenses aren’t going to be defending you that way — you don’t have to solve that problem the defense is giving you.
But let’s move away from talking only about mere plays. Let’s talk about the “philosophy” behind these plays.
The plays are just plays.
Reading The Perfect Pass (the book about the origins of the Air Raid offense) convinced me that plays don’t matter as much as your players’ attitudes while executing the plays.
I was particularly struck when the author argued that the offense “was less about Xs and Os and more about attitude, optimism, and a way of thinking.”
He then quickly drives the point farther and says this:
To make this offense work, you had to believe you were going to score from any part of the field anytime. You had to be fearless. You had to stop worrying about what the defense was going to do to you.
My question to that statement is could that be true for any offensive scheme?
Because playing with an attitude like that sounds fun — no matter what plays or scheme you are running. If your players believe that they can score at any given moment, you’ve done your job as a football coach.
Because what’s the point of coaching football anyway?
Is scoring points the point? Is having fun the point?
Now we don’t have the time to dive into that question any further (at the moment — we will return to that question at a later date).
For now, let’s focus on one offense in particular, and let’s think about what their “point” to playing might’ve been.
How the (old) Baylor Bears played football
Art Briles’s Baylor Bears of old were explosive and fun to watch. Briles came from the Air Raid family (RB coach for Mike Leach’s Texas Tech Raiders from 2000-2002), and his teams certainly adopted that Air Raid attitude we talked about above.
Currently, Tennessee, Ole Miss, and now Oklahoma are three prominent teams that are running a variation of Briles’ chuck it deep and go fast “scheme” that first took the field in his early 2010s Baylor Bears.
This style of play is incredible to watch, and while watching, you might’ve asked yourself “how are they getting away with this?”
What they’re getting away with
They are trying to get away with getting the ball to their best players in as much space as possible.
They get away with this because they are the aggressors. They ask demanding questions of the defense. They ask the questions that defenses don’t want to answer. They make sure the defense is embodying their name and truly playing defense.
Just look at how their tight end is aligned in the backfield:
Pretty much every other offense you will ever see has that player in an even, two-point stance. Baylor cares not for such a formality and has him lined up ready to attack, head-on in a wide receiver stance.
This offense wants to attack, plain and simple. They play to score.
And this offense doesn’t wait for opportunities to attack the defense. Instead, their offense is the attack by its very nature. They aren’t setting things up in the usual sense that a “normal” scheme might.
For example, the Wing-T team will run Buck Sweep and their other complementary runs in the series to set up their waggle pass. They want to lure you to sleep with the run and get all your players locked in on what’s happening in the box.
They are setting up for the optimal situation (that optimal situation being once the defense starts aggressively playing the run) and then will strike with a pass play that looked just like the runs for the first few seconds.
But that isn’t what Baylor is doing at all.
Baylor is not waiting for you to give them anything — remember, they are the aggressors. They are making the defense decide how they want to be attacked — they are like pursuit predators.
How the animal kingdom can help explain the point
(please enjoy this brief escapade in exploring the hunting behaviors of carnivores)
There are two primary types of predators: ambush predators and pursuit predators.
Ambush predators “[stay] in concealment, waiting patiently for the prey to get near, before launching a sudden overwhelming attack that quickly incapacitates and captures the prey.”
Just like the Wing-T, these predators wait for you to be wrong, and then and only then will they attack.
Baylor does the exact opposite. They are not waiting for you to make a mistake. By their tempo, alignment, and deep routes, they force the defense to choose their own demise.
Baylor’s style is more similar to how pursuit predators operate.
These types of predators “rely on superior speed, endurance and/or teamwork to seize [their] prey.” And they do all of this because it is efficient.
We saw Baylor’s aggression last time. Now let’s look at Baylor’s backside wide receivers jogging off the line.
If you don’t believe it, take a look at the two receivers at the bottom of the screen on this touchdown:
Now if you’re thinking that “lazy” play from the receivers is an abomination to the game of football, don’t worry — you’re not alone.
Here’s the reaction of Chris Brown (editor of SmartFootball.com):
But the most remarkable thing to me is how lazy Baylor’s offense is. What do I mean? I mean that if you watch Baylor closely, you will frequently see something you almost never see: receivers jogging or even just standing around while their teammates run their routes full speed.
But this style of play is simply how they did things.
In fact, their entire attitude toward playing offense seemed to be “put effort into the things that help us score points, and don’t put effort into the things that don’t help us score points.”
Your attitude shapes what you believe is possible
Those Baylor Bears weren’t going to wait for you to “allow” them the opportunity to attack you. They were going to attack you in your weakest spot no matter how you chose to defend them.
That’s the premise of their infamous “Choice” concept.
The Baylor Bears believed that they didn’t need to run in many formations, carry a bunch of plays, or even ask their players to give effort when they weren’t getting the ball.
And yet they won a lot of games and scored a lot of points.
How did they get away with those abominable crimes?
How they got away with it
Baylor quite simply asked three questions of the defense. And they did it over and over again. The questions were as follows:
1. Can you play as fast as us?
2. Can you defend the whole field?
3. Can your cover the deep ball?
Exploring how Baylor asked those questions of the defense is the key to understanding how they played the game — with what attitude they played the game.
Because as I will argue, their entire offense was just that — an attitude more than any Xs and Os.
But this article has become too long to give those three questions the time they warrant, so we will have to dive into those questions another time.
Final thoughts
Now if you made it to this point in the article, thank you.
This offense is exciting to watch and study, and I hope you think so too. This offense does not play the game like other people — and that seems to be the point.
A great piece of advice I have recently heard is “to imitate, then innovate.”
Baylor’s ideas are very much innovative. They’re contrarian and somewhat reckless. The people who know the keys to the offense are even quite secretive about sharing any details.
But I am not studying this offense to imitate them. I want to explore them because they so clearly look at football, offense, and space so differently that I cannot help but be intrigued. Diving deep into ideas that are foreign and challenge your way of doing things is a good thing because it makes you seek the truth.
Let’s end there today.
Until next time—