[BostonCard]

Here's an excerpt from Sundays with Soltau.

Early deficits are nothing new for Stanford, which has struck first in just two games this season.

But the team has been resilient. After falling behind 24-7 at Oregon, the Cardinal rallied for a stunning 38-31 overtime win.
 
Last week against Washington State, Stanford fought back to take a late fourth-quarter lead but couldn't hold it.
 
"When things are tough and when things are dark, we are at our absolute best," said David Shaw, the Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football. "I love that about our guys. The problem is, we create the situation that puts us there."
 
The Cardinal (5-4, 3-3 Pac-12) has been outscored 69-28 in the first quarter, a trend Shaw would like to see change in the remaining three regular season games.
 
"We have to find a way to play great football from start to finish," Shaw said. "It's on me, it's on the coaches, it's on the leaders on this football team. We're allowing ourselves to start slowly before we kick it in. When we play our best, we're as good as anybody, injuries or not."
 
Shaw said there were no major halftime adjustments.
 
"We didn't call anything differently," he said. "We didn't change who we play – we played the same guys. They played harder, they played smarter, they played better."

What struck me were the last two lines. I don't know if I should be happy that there were no halftime adjustments and we came back because we had the right plan all along, or I should be appalled that we didn't make any adjustments when we weren't getting it done. I do recall comments for the Oregon game where they became more aggressive on defense after halftime.

https://gostanford.com/news/2018/11/4/fo...oltau.aspx

ASide from CTCard's response, it depends on the diagnosis.  If the problem was that the play calls were not being executed properly, and it was a fixable problem, like reminding the offensive linemen to worry about their own assignments and not try to block someone else's man, then it is reasonable to keep trying.  If the problem is that the personnel we have is incapable of executing the playcall, say because it relies on a guy who maybe is a bit beat up whose lateral mobility is limited to quickly move down the line, then it's time to try a different play that the offense you have can execute.

I take it the coaches diagnosed the first problem, found some adjustments that could be made, and got better results after those adjustments.

BC

---

In the aftermath of the election (I swear this won't be meaningfully political) I've seen a lot of people lamenting that Oakland's mayor, Libby Schaff, was reelected. After all, they say, Oakland has a lot of problems and in her four years they haven't all been fixed. When asked why they wanted someone new, how that would actually help, I never see a response.

I tend to think that playcalling criticisms are largely meaningless, for reasons the author indicates, but it's sort of frustrating to tell people that you have to be an expert in something to actually meaningfully criticize it (even if that's something we all very eagerly understand in our areas of expertise, don't even get me started on the people talking about quantum mechanics who couldn't tell a Hamiltonian from a ham sandwich). Those frustrations, though, aren't necessarily meaningful. As WiM points out ad nauseam, how many playcallers have gone from obvious idiots to hot new things? Kyle Shannahan was widely derided in his first year with the Falcons, now he's one of the toasts of the NFL. His replacement, our good old friend Steve Sarkesian, was, again, widely derided early on, but has turned it around and I've been seeing plenty of talk about how he's calling great games now. Has anything actually changed in their approaches? Or is it players executing better? Or any of the myriad things that can cause an offense to appear to underperform.

The one exception in my mind is run/pass ratio. Now obviously you can still say the things about failures to check into the right play, but runs and passes are fundamentally different, and it's easier to examine them from a macro perspective. It's not easy, but easier.

No, you don't have to be an expert to criticize plays, but usually the criticisms are so completely lacking of analysis as to be unhelpful.  As CT mentions, usually the criticisms fall into two camps, and I don't think either of them advance the conversation much.  The first is "we should have zigged when instead we zagged".  In other words, we should have run, instead of passed, or tried a play action pass instead of a shotgun pass.  The basis of the criticism is typically that whatever we did, didn't work and doing something else would have worked better.  There is nothing per se wrong with the criticism; but it is just not all that helpful with the benefit of hindsight.  That passing instead of running might have worked because it is an unfalsifiable alternative doesn't tell you much.  The alternative call might have failed just as much, but we'll never know because we didn't get to see it.  (As a corollary, I notice people rarely criticize the plays when the work, even when it is a broken play that was saved by a great individual effort).  But there are good criticisms of such plays.  I found, for example, Addicted to Quack's preview of our offense helpful, see for example this breakdown of why calling between the tackle runs from the heavy formation was bad play calling:

On the first play, SDSU has all 11 men in the box, and all it takes to blow this play up is #63 RG Herbig being a little slow to get off his double-team to block the shooting linebacker; even if he hadn’t three more Aztecs had gotten past their blockers in time to cut off the playside and the backside, and of course the middle was totally clogged. On the second play (at :15), this zone block is requiring too much of the o-line given the number of defenders coming down (and SDSU wasn’t even really ready for the snap) - the RG panics at the WILL coming into the B-gap, even though that’s #6 FB Williams’ assignment, which forces #51 C Dalman to block the DT and leaves the A-gap open for the MIKE to shoot … the boundary CB is also free to contain the edge since the lone split-out receiver heads inside to block the safety. On the last play (at :37), we see the Cardinal still having trouble against the Trojans’ eight-man box - the DT shades over to #74 LG Hamilton’s inside shoulder, forcing him step inside and allowing USC to pin him and the blitzing safety to crash hard into the backfield (the only guy left to stop him is Costello, who at least taps him on the shoulder in lieu of blocking).

A few observations about this: first, all of these plays feature Stanford in very heavy sets -- three tight ends and sometimes a fullback, with one or even zero receivers split out -- so of course the defense loaded the box … where else would they put their guys? Second, maybe in previous years Stanford’s jumbo sets with eight or nine blockers could defeat the defense’s comparably stacked box, but this year they just don’t have that ability. Third, this configuration -- inside run out of a jumbo set against a stacked box -- failed constantly against FBS competition (I had thirteen more such failed plays to choose from when making this video, from just two games), and yet Pritchard called them time and again.

Fourth, while the narrative is therefore not wrong that they couldn’t run against a heavy box, it’s still misleading because Stanford can’t run against a light box either. Let me prove it:

[embedded video I can't insert]

I’ve got a lot more of these if anyone doubts it, including against UC Davis. I think my favorite is the last one (at :47) where Herbig gets flagged for holding the 3-tech but still can’t stop him from tackling Love.

(emphasis mine)

The criticism is not the play call per se, but the play call in the context of the offense's ability to execute it, which I think is right on the money.  In years past we could have run effectively from these sets, so they are not intrinsically flawed, but it is wrong to call them this year because our offensive line has struggled.



BC

[BostonCard]

Here's an excerpt from Sundays with Soltau.

Early deficits are nothing new for Stanford, which has struck first in just two games this season.

But the team has been resilient. After falling behind 24-7 at Oregon, the Cardinal rallied for a stunning 38-31 overtime win.
 
Last week against Washington State, Stanford fought back to take a late fourth-quarter lead but couldn't hold it.
 
"When things are tough and when things are dark, we are at our absolute best," said David Shaw, the Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football. "I love that about our guys. The problem is, we create the situation that puts us there."
 
The Cardinal (5-4, 3-3 Pac-12) has been outscored 69-28 in the first quarter, a trend Shaw would like to see change in the remaining three regular season games.
 
"We have to find a way to play great football from start to finish," Shaw said. "It's on me, it's on the coaches, it's on the leaders on this football team. We're allowing ourselves to start slowly before we kick it in. When we play our best, we're as good as anybody, injuries or not."
 
Shaw said there were no major halftime adjustments.
 
"We didn't call anything differently," he said. "We didn't change who we play – we played the same guys. They played harder, they played smarter, they played better."

What struck me were the last two lines. I don't know if I should be happy that there were no halftime adjustments and we came back because we had the right plan all along, or I should be appalled that we didn't make any adjustments when we weren't getting it done. I do recall comments for the Oregon game where they became more aggressive on defense after halftime.

https://gostanford.com/news/2018/11/4/fo...oltau.aspx

ASide from CTCard's response, it depends on the diagnosis.  If the problem was that the play calls were not being executed properly, and it was a fixable problem, like reminding the offensive linemen to worry about their own assignments and not try to block someone else's man, then it is reasonable to keep trying.  If the problem is that the personnel we have is incapable of executing the playcall, say because it relies on a guy who maybe is a bit beat up whose lateral mobility is limited to quickly move down the line, then it's time to try a different play that the offense you have can execute.

I take it the coaches diagnosed the first problem, found some adjustments that could be made, and got better results after those adjustments.

BC

---

In the aftermath of the election (I swear this won't be meaningfully political) I've seen a lot of people lamenting that Oakland's mayor, Libby Schaff, was reelected. After all, they say, Oakland has a lot of problems and in her four years they haven't all been fixed. When asked why they wanted someone new, how that would actually help, I never see a response.

I tend to think that playcalling criticisms are largely meaningless, for reasons the author indicates, but it's sort of frustrating to tell people that you have to be an expert in something to actually meaningfully criticize it (even if that's something we all very eagerly understand in our areas of expertise, don't even get me started on the people talking about quantum mechanics who couldn't tell a Hamiltonian from a ham sandwich). Those frustrations, though, aren't necessarily meaningful. As WiM points out ad nauseam, how many playcallers have gone from obvious idiots to hot new things? Kyle Shannahan was widely derided in his first year with the Falcons, now he's one of the toasts of the NFL. His replacement, our good old friend Steve Sarkesian, was, again, widely derided early on, but has turned it around and I've been seeing plenty of talk about how he's calling great games now. Has anything actually changed in their approaches? Or is it players executing better? Or any of the myriad things that can cause an offense to appear to underperform.

The one exception in my mind is run/pass ratio. Now obviously you can still say the things about failures to check into the right play, but runs and passes are fundamentally different, and it's easier to examine them from a macro perspective. It's not easy, but easier.

No, you don't have to be an expert to criticize plays, but usually the criticisms are so completely lacking of analysis as to be unhelpful.  As CT mentions, usually the criticisms fall into two camps, and I don't think either of them advance the conversation much.  The first is "we should have zigged when instead we zagged".  In other words, we should have run, instead of passed, or tried a play action pass instead of a shotgun pass.  The basis of the criticism is typically that whatever we did, didn't work and doing something else would have worked better.  There is nothing per se wrong with the criticism; but it is just not all that helpful with the benefit of hindsight.  That passing instead of running might have worked because it is an unfalsifiable alternative doesn't tell you much.  The alternative call might have failed just as much, but we'll never know because we didn't get to see it.  (As a corollary, I notice people rarely criticize the plays when the work, even when it is a broken play that was saved by a great individual effort).  But there are good criticisms of such plays.  I found, for example, Addicted to Quack's preview of our offense helpful, see for example this breakdown of why calling between the tackle runs from the heavy formation was bad play calling:

On the first play, SDSU has all 11 men in the box, and all it takes to blow this play up is #63 RG Herbig being a little slow to get off his double-team to block the shooting linebacker; even if he hadn’t three more Aztecs had gotten past their blockers in time to cut off the playside and the backside, and of course the middle was totally clogged. On the second play (at :15), this zone block is requiring too much of the o-line given the number of defenders coming down (and SDSU wasn’t even really ready for the snap) - the RG panics at the WILL coming into the B-gap, even though that’s #6 FB Williams’ assignment, which forces #51 C Dalman to block the DT and leaves the A-gap open for the MIKE to shoot … the boundary CB is also free to contain the edge since the lone split-out receiver heads inside to block the safety. On the last play (at :37), we see the Cardinal still having trouble against the Trojans’ eight-man box - the DT shades over to #74 LG Hamilton’s inside shoulder, forcing him step inside and allowing USC to pin him and the blitzing safety to crash hard into the backfield (the only guy left to stop him is Costello, who at least taps him on the shoulder in lieu of blocking).

A few observations about this: first, all of these plays feature Stanford in very heavy sets -- three tight ends and sometimes a fullback, with one or even zero receivers split out -- so of course the defense loaded the box … where else would they put their guys? Second, maybe in previous years Stanford’s jumbo sets with eight or nine blockers could defeat the defense’s comparably stacked box, but this year they just don’t have that ability. Third, this configuration -- inside run out of a jumbo set against a stacked box -- failed constantly against FBS competition (I had thirteen more such failed plays to choose from when making this video, from just two games), and yet Pritchard called them time and again.

Fourth, while the narrative is therefore not wrong that they couldn’t run against a heavy box, it’s still misleading because Stanford can’t run against a light box either. Let me prove it:

[embedded video I can't insert]

I’ve got a lot more of these if anyone doubts it, including against UC Davis. I think my favorite is the last one (at :47) where Herbig gets flagged for holding the 3-tech but still can’t stop him from tackling Love.

(emphasis mine)

The criticism is not the play call per se, but the play call in the context of the offense's ability to execute it, which I think is right on the money.  In years past we could have run effectively from these sets, so they are not intrinsically flawed, but it is wrong to call them this year because our offensive line has struggled.



BC