[Langdude]

First of all, my apologies. It seems my use of "amused" came across as pejorative. It wasn't meant as an insult, but I am … interested(?) in the evolving views of our various extra-OL formations. 

In my post, "play-maker" was used to indicate people who would handle the ball in moving it down the field, not in the sense of a player who is particularly good - a difference maker. So, RBs, WRs, and TEs. Perhaps I should have used "ball-handlers". No matter how good a player Walker Little is or becomes, he isn't going to be running downfield with the ball outside of a trick play. 

More ball-handlers means that a particular formation has more options for plays. That's one way to attack a defense. Another way is to bring superior numbers or superior ability to the point of attack. That has often been Stanford's approach under both Harbaugh and Shaw - which is the point of having so many formations and personnel packages. If you can run five-wide empty backfield sets, traditional I-formation, 7/8-heavy run formations, etc.; almost every defense will have trouble matching up with at least one of those options. The heavy sets are particularly useful when you have a back like Love; bringing everyone up to the line of scrimmage means that a single decisive blocking win could mean breaking for a TD. 

Like Goose, I suspect we will have times during the season that we'll read complaints about using too many heavy set formations, and these will morph to comments about Shaw's stubbornness. However, at the moment it looks to me as if these heavy formations play to a lot of Stanford's current personnel strengths and should be generally effective (though they do have to worry about cutting off the crashing rusher from off the edge which occasionally caused trouble last year).

Oh, no worries. I was just participating in the joshing.

Yeah, we can't run that package every time; we need versatility. But, actually, I think that this formation could provide different options, it's just that most of the options would be different sorts of runs (with possible passes to the TE, Ogre, or RB). There are ways to be creative out of this front; I remember throwing a TD to Dalton out of it, for instance. My point is just that I hope we leverage the fact that we have 8 OL of very high quality, and it'd be good to use them. (And then, of course, use other formations that use our other weapons, including all our WRs and TEs. Lots of weapons.)

-m.

[Langdude]

First of all, my apologies. It seems my use of "amused" came across as pejorative. It wasn't meant as an insult, but I am … interested(?) in the evolving views of our various extra-OL formations. 

In my post, "play-maker" was used to indicate people who would handle the ball in moving it down the field, not in the sense of a player who is particularly good - a difference maker. So, RBs, WRs, and TEs. Perhaps I should have used "ball-handlers". No matter how good a player Walker Little is or becomes, he isn't going to be running downfield with the ball outside of a trick play. 

More ball-handlers means that a particular formation has more options for plays. That's one way to attack a defense. Another way is to bring superior numbers or superior ability to the point of attack. That has often been Stanford's approach under both Harbaugh and Shaw - which is the point of having so many formations and personnel packages. If you can run five-wide empty backfield sets, traditional I-formation, 7/8-heavy run formations, etc.; almost every defense will have trouble matching up with at least one of those options. The heavy sets are particularly useful when you have a back like Love; bringing everyone up to the line of scrimmage means that a single decisive blocking win could mean breaking for a TD. 

Like Goose, I suspect we will have times during the season that we'll read complaints about using too many heavy set formations, and these will morph to comments about Shaw's stubbornness. However, at the moment it looks to me as if these heavy formations play to a lot of Stanford's current personnel strengths and should be generally effective (though they do have to worry about cutting off the crashing rusher from off the edge which occasionally caused trouble last year).

Oh, no worries. I was just participating in the joshing.

Yeah, we can't run that package every time; we need versatility. But, actually, I think that this formation could provide different options, it's just that most of the options would be different sorts of runs (with possible passes to the TE, Ogre, or RB). There are ways to be creative out of this front; I remember throwing a TD to Dalton out of it, for instance. My point is just that I hope we leverage the fact that we have 8 OL of very high quality, and it'd be good to use them. (And then, of course, use other formations that use our other weapons, including all our WRs and TEs. Lots of weapons.)

-m.