Saban and Alabama?😂😂😂😂😂😂
He is and was transforming from a position of strength. Fickell same boat.
You think if they dropped into a rebuild of awful the first thought would be Air Raid O? With the roster they inherit?😂😂😂
I'm thinking many here never played or coached well. All the hair brained schemes and plans can make you look even worse than methodical progress."Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face" , so brilliantly pointed out by Mike Tyson . The head coach is facing the real world, not playing a video game.
It's always some excuse, position of strength lol. Change is change. You think it's a position of strength to go from a pro style offense for 30+ years at Wisconsin to a more tempo open offense. It's the same thing regardless.
Wisconsin had no real productive qbs and suddenly they get inundated with potentially productive ones when Longo comes on board. Whatever your roster is currently doesn't matter because solid talent will come if they think they have a chance to shine and are attracted to coaches with a track record of it. That's especially true in this age of the portal.
Nothing is a guarantee, it's about identifying the path with the most potential to succeed and provide fruitful results. I don't talk about this like it's magic wand to instantly work, I talk about it as which path has a better chance to succeed. Productive offense is extremely important to outperform your status on the CFB landscape.
Forget about position of strength, it's more imperative for teams that aren't in position of strength to find ways to close that gap. I posted excerpts from an article in the Wisconsin Air Raid, the whole point of it is to narrow the gap with teams that have more talent.
Were Washington State and Miss State in positions of strength too before Leach got there? Baylor before Briles got there?
From the article in that thread, does any of this sound like operating from a position of strength.
Key to Air Rad: Keep it simple
That trait followed the Air Raid to the top. Speeding up tempo meant more snaps per game, which meant more stats to go around. And forcing defenses to cover the entire field opened holes talent alone couldn’t close.
“It doesn’t really matter what coverages they run. You feel like you’ve got answers,” Anderson, now head coach at Utah State, said. “You don’t always have to have better athletes than the team covering you. Numbers and leverage and execution can help you be effective.”
Even coaches like Anderson, who didn’t necessarily have a dedicated Air Raid background, were beginning to embrace it.
They found the mesh points between Mumme’s offense and the burgeoning spread-tempo, option-heavy attacks run by coaches like Rich Rodriguez. Anderson and Darin Hinshaw, his co-offensive coordinator at MTSU, spent a week observing Sonny Dykes while Dykes was on Leach’s staff, as they adapted the offense to their own thinking.
Coaches found it easier to recruit athletes to an offense that promised touches and space. Programs found fans enjoyed the basketball-on-grass spectacle Air Raid games became.
“It took us probably from ‘86 until about ‘91, and then we took it to Valdosta (State) and repeated it,” Mumme said. “In that five-year span, we had to learn to make it simple, and keep our menu of plays to a bare minimum. Particularly when we started playing fast, you couldn’t overcomplicate things.
“I think that’s one of the worst things coaches do, to this day.”
They built the Air Raid on a handful of basic route combinations — calls you’d recognize today like four verticals, Y cross and mesh — and then a few key principles.
What the option once was to high school football — a talent leveler that’s easy to teach and drill — the Air Raid has become.
If a wide receiver was single-covered, that was an opportunity. If a linebacker rolled the wrong way, that was an opportunity. Defenses were forced to spread themselves thin, to cover the entire field. Tempo made communication more difficult, and the way the offense isolated defenders made them reveal their intentions more often.
So long as the quarterback was conditioned to recognize and check to the right play pre-snap, the Air Raid could operate on those base plays and concepts indefinitely.
Just as numerous are coaches like Anderson and Longo, now with Luke Fickell at Wisconsin, who fell in love with the Air Raid enough to make it their own. Wisconsin, an old-school offensive program in an old-school offensive conference, will run the Air Raid this fall. Bell even saw Air Raid concepts in the offenses that drove Kansas City and Philadelphia to their meeting in last season’s Super Bowl.
“You can see it,” he said, “at the highest levels of football.”
That’s what evolution looks like: A whole generation of coaches grew up on the offense once viewed as too niche, spreading it from conference to conference, from one level of football to the next, eventually usurping and replacing the old order.
