Goals of the No-Huddle Spread Offense By Rich Rodriguez – University of Arizona Originally Published - Nike 2014 Coach of the Year Clinics Clinic Football Manual
I have been at Arizona for two years and we have put together a great staff. We have won two bowl games and we have a new facility. We have things going in the right directions. When you talk about offense, the things we did at Glenville State in 1991, we are still doing today. That was 20 years ago, but we are still doing the same basic things. The game has changed and we tweaked what we did then, but it is the same offense. We ran the fast tempo, spread, no-huddle offense. It was fun back then and still is fun. We were experimenting and having fun with it. Now you cannot turn on the TV or go to a high school game where you do not see the shotgun spread no-huddle offense. It is not as if we invented the offense, but we first started running the offense because there were not many teams defending it very well. If you have heard this lecture before. I want to tell you I am doing some things different. Today I am going to use an overhead projector. I could talk on the philosophy we believe in, but I think that is boring. I am going to use this overhead and talk some football. This is my 29th year of coaching college football and my 22nd year as a head coach. This is my favorite thing to do. We are going to talk football. You run the offense you run because that is what you know. We do the same thing. We do what we do because we know it and have answers for it. If I found a system tomorrow that was better and would help us win games, I would change my offensive system. However, I am not going to change to the next popular fad because others are running it. First, I have to give you my typical head coach material. I do not think it is a big deal if you huddle. I like the no-huddle because it gives you more options. There are two distinct advantages the offense has over the defense. One is they know when (snap count) they are going. The second one is they know where (play call) they are going. The one advantage the defense has over the offense is they can move around before we snap the football. Not only can they move, they can move all eleven defenders before the snap of the ball. If the offense or defense does not use the advantages they have over the other side. they are missing the boat. I want to do the simple things. I am not the type of coach that wants to do many complicated things and try to outsmart everyone in the room. GOALS OF THE NO-HUDDLE I can take a fourth grader and teach him a three-step drop in 15-minutes and a five-step drop in 10-minutes. However, to teach a quarterback to catch the ball in the shotgun and throw it without griping the laces is a learned skill. Eighty-percent of the snaps in the NFL today are in the shotgun set. In the Super Bowl, Peyton Manning was in the shotgun 80-percent of the time. The shotgun is for the new pro-style quarterback. The shotgun allows the quarterback to have better vision. He can read better in the shotgun and he has more time to do it. Other than his physical skill, the biggest attribute for the quarterback to have is decision-making. That means making the right choices about where to throw the ball. If the quarterback aligns under the center, his peripheral vision to the flanks is okay but not good. If he backs up five yards in the shotgun set, he has great peripheral vision to both side lines and all the way down the field. If you have a quarterback throw an interception, his excuse is, he did not see the defender. That is a no-brainer because if he did he would not have thrown the ball. If that is the reason he threw the interception, you need to get him into a position to improve his vision. If the quarterback gets under the center and makes a five-step drop, it takes longer than the shotgun snap. In the shotgun he has longer to read and can get rid of the ball quicker. It used to be when you aligned in the shotgun the only play you could run was the draw. Now, you can run every play in your offense. You can run the inside and outside zone, power, counter, or anything in your offense. In addition, the quarterback can become a runner in the shotgun set and the defense must account for him. The reason I like the shotgun is the pressure it puts on the defense. The quarterback in the shotgun is a threat to run the ball. They must scheme for that possibility. The reason Seattle was able to play the type of press man-coverage on Denver's receivers was that Peyton was never a threat to run the football. He was in the shotgun and never moved the pocket. That made it easier for Seattle's defense to find him. With the running quarterback, teams do not make a habit of playing man-to-man coverage with the threat of the quarterback running the ball. That allows the offense to play 11-on-11 instead of playing 10-on-11 when the quarterback cannot run the ball. Ron White, the comedian, told a joke about being thrown out of a bar in New York. He said, "I did not know how many of them it would take to throw me out of that bar, but I could see how many they were going to use." REASONS TO RUN THE SPREAD: We want to force the defense to play the entire field. If we put receivers extremely wide to both sides and run patterns with them, our quarterback probably cannot reach those patterns. It does not matter how wide you split your receivers, the defense will send someone to cover them. The first thing the defensive coordinator does on Monday is to go over his adjustments to the opponent's offensive sets. I tell my quarterback if he cannot throw the ball to the wide receiver because he splits too far. he should run the ball to a position or spot on the field where he can throw it to him. You want to play the game with multiple tempos. I would like to play the entire game going as fast as we can possibly go. However, that lets the defense adjust to the tempo you are playing and it ceases to be an advantage for you. When you change the tempo by going fast, faster, then slow and slower, it screws up the defense. You must make the quarterback a dual threat to run and pass. If you do not run the quarterback, you are playing 10-on-11. You do not need to make it a steady diet of quarterback runs, but you must run enough to have the threat of the run. We want to make the offense simple but at the same time unpredictable. Coaches at the college and pro level have a tendency to outsmart themselves and over think everything. It happens at our level because of the time the coaches have to prepare a game plan. They watch all the films and sometimes they forget whom they are coaching. They have to transfer their knowledge to the players so they can execute the game plan. They are transferring their knowledge to eighteen-year-old kids that still watch cartoons on Saturday morning. People want to know if I let the quarterback call the plays. I answer them with "hell no!" I have too big of a mortgage payment to let that kid call the plays. If he is smart and thinks like me, I let him make the checks or "check with me" calls. I do not want the pressure of calling the plays on the quarterback. The worst view in a game is the coach on the sidelines. The best view is the coach in the box. They send down to me what the defense is doing, but I call the plays. I have two coaches in the box I trust. One of them reads the secondary and the other reads the front. They tell me what they see and I call the plays. I like calling the plays because it keeps me involved and I am coaching. The quarterback never has to worry about calling the plays. All he has to do is execute them. You have to execute your base plays. It does not matter what level you coach, you have limited time with your team. You must find out what you are good at doing and spend your time working on that. If we cannot complete a bubble screen, we are dead in the water. If your quarterback cannot complete the bubble screen, do not spend your time working on it. Spend the time doing the reps on what you are good at doing. At the end of the day, you must be good at something. The difference in running the spread offense today and twenty years ago is what the defense does. Twenty years ago. not many teams ran the spread and the defenses did not see it that often. Today, everyone runs the spread and the defensive adjustments are better at defending the spread offense. In the past, the defense ran their fits to one side and the backside played the cutback and pursued the ball. Defenses today, play the ball side with one scheme, and the weakside with another scheme. They do not play the cutback as much as they defend the quarterback run. They fit the front side run one way, and the backside run another way. We have to take advantage of what they do. We have to figure out how to do that. We have to find out how the defense is playing the quarterback run, and read the defender responsible for the quarterback. It could be a linebacker, defensive end, or a secondary player. The next part of this lecture is the most asked questions I have to answer. What are the two most difficult things to do on a football play? The first thing is to tackle in the open field. You cannot practice tackling as much as you need to practice it. The second thing is blocking in the open field. It is not two fat-asses locked up as if they were sumo wrestlers, it is open field blocking. Those are the two most difficult things to do on a football play. As a coach, I need to work on doing those two things. I think the key to both techniques go back to footwork drills. When you teach a wide receiver the fundamentals of stalk blocking, the most important thing is moving the feet. I know all the drills, but that defender is going to be moving. He is not standing still. If you do not move your feet, there is no chance to block him. Tackling in the open field is the same exact skill. You must move the feet to have a chance to make that tackle. In the off-season, that is the fundamental you should spend your time working to improve. The next question people ask me is "what play do you call at crunch time?" When it is a critical play of the game or a "must succeed" time in the game, you must think players and not plays. You must think what play my best player does well. When we played in the Gildan - New Mexico Bowl against Nevada in 2012, we were down 13 points with a minute and half left in the game. We had no time outs, but scored, recovered the onside kick, and scored again to win the game. The offensive plays we ran on those two drives were with our best players executing what they did best. When it comes to crunch time, think players not plays. If you have a big list of plays for that situation, you have too much. Your list should be small with plays that the quarterback is comfortable executing. What kind of communication do you get on the headset? We use the headset communication every day in practice. I used to script plays for the offensive drills. I do not do that anymore. I thought, we do not script plays for a game, so why do it for practice. We use the headset during a game and that is what we do now in practice. Our tempo is different from most people's practices. We must have extreme organization with our managerial staff. it is not like coaching in the old days where you had no managers and the coaches did it all. We have many people involved with the organization of a drill. In a five minute drill, when we scripted plays we got 8-9 plays. Without the script and using the headsets, we do it like a game. In that five-minute period, we get 13-14 plays. All the coaches wear headsets even the scout team coach. I was curious about what the conversations that occurred on the headsets sounded like during the game. I had a radio station tape the conversations that went on during the game over the headsets. I listened to it a couple of days later and you would be amazed at what went on with the coaches. What we try to do is make sure the conversation is direct, precise, and to the point. I told the coaches. I do not want to hear their opinions or commentary of what went on with the play. I want to know whether we should audible or flip the play. Taping that conversation was educational for us. It taught us we needed to be more precise and direct. You do that by practicing with the headsets in practice. The coaches are practicing how to communicate. How do you communicate with the quarterback during the game? I have had some intelligent quarterbacks during my tenure in coaching. I can tell the level at which our quarterback understands the offense by the amount of time he looks at the sideline for the signal. The first year he stares at me. The second year, he nods. The third year he waves and the fourth year, he gives me the finger. That means, "I got this Coach." The fourth year we trained him so he thinks the way I think. What are the important things to consider in building a program? Many people think it is players, money, facilities, and many other things. How many head coaches or those that aspire to be head coaches, are in here today? If you did not hold up your hand, I know you are lying. I have coached at six different schools. The most important thing in building a program is to make everyone connected with that program feel important. That includes the secretary, trainer. custodian. and anyone that has anything to do with the operation of your program. You have to make the coaches, the third team kicker, and the third team long snapper, who may never play, feel important within the program. Sometimes it is hard to do it. There is too much focus on the star player or the player that is scoring all the touchdowns. Many times all it takes is to recognize the manager in front of the team or give him a tee shirt. I have been a head coach for 22 years. I will not hire a coach that has not coached at the high school level or small college level. If you hire coaches that have never been anywhere but the top-level programs, they are spoiled. They are used to having things done for them. Unless you have been at Glenville State or a high school coach, you do not appreciate all the help you get. Most of the coaches in here cannot recruit. The only thing you can do is provide opportunity for players. High school coaches have the players that come to them, and that is it. You must make do with the athletes in your program. Make everyone feel important including the parents of your players. I tell the parents of the players we recruit I will talk to them about anything that concerns your son except playing time. I will talk to them about attitude, academic work, and things of that nature. However, I tell them never to call me about playing time. Let the parents know you encourage them to call. If the topic is about his progress in school or his well being, I am glad to talk to them about those things. How important is the intelligence of your players? Too many times people want to equate academic intelligences with football intelligences. That is a completely different thing. I have had players that were strong academic players but did not know much about football knowledge. The other side of the coin is the player that has weak academics but has great football intelligence. If something is important to the player, they will be good at it. If a player plays Division-I football and stays eligible, he has intelligence. However, there is a wide gambit of intelligences on our team. Intelligence is not as important as the one who wants to learn. At Arizona, we call it OKG. (Our Kind of Guy) When we recruit, we want to recruit players that are talented, but we also look for OKG. I want the player that loves football. I do not want the player who likes football. It is too hard of a sport for a player that just likes playing. He will not help you win. If you love football, you will do the things it takes to win. They will watch film, go to the weight room, and do all the things needed to win games. On the West Coast, many things can distract a player. I want the player that will do what is best for the program. If you punish a player for missing class or some other discipline problem and it does not bother him, you recruited the wrong athlete. Some players are out for the team because it is a "cool." There are ways to find out who loves football and who likes it. You cannot run off the player that loves football, but you can run off the pretenders and those that just like to play. What is the first thing you look at in a defensive alignment? In the spread offense, the first defensive player we identify is the free safety. The second player is the strong safety. They will tell the offense, what the coverage alignment of the defense is. If the free safety is in the middle of the field, they are playing cover-1 or cover-3 and there are six defenders in the box. If there are two safeties on the hash marks, they are playing cover-2 or cover-4 and there are five defenders in the box. They may cheat with their apex players being in or out of the box or playing half-in or half-out. If you cannot tell whether the safety is in the middle of the field or on the hash mark, you have not taken advantage of playing with tempo. If you play with tempo, they will align in their coverage early. Even if you are using the huddle, you need to operate with tempo. Sprint to the line and align quickly so the defense must set and not be moving around. If the free safety is on the hash mark, I look to see how deep he is. If he is 10-11 yards, the coverage is probably cover-4. They play quarters of the field. If he is 13-14 yards deep, it is cover-2. He plays one-half the field and must align deeper. I want to tell you a short story. I played at West Virginia University. I walked on and received a scholarship my second year. During my sophomore season, we played at Pittsburgh on national TV. Dan Marino was the quarterback at Pittsburgh. The starting safety got hurt and they put me into the game. I did not want Marino to throw a touchdown pass over my head for a touchdown on national TV. Before I went into the game, the secondary coach told me to set my depth using an ability alignment. That meant get as much depth as your ability allowed you to play. I lined up 22-yards off the line of scrimmage. They ran a post route and I retreated so far back, my ass bounced off the goal post. They completed the pass and I came up and made the tackle. Does the quarterback ever call the play? I have had quarterbacks smarter than I am. However, they need to execute the play and I call it. If you have a quarterback that watches more game film than you watch and understands the game better than you understand the game, he can call the plays. Until that time happens, I will call the plays. What is your key when a team plays zone coverage? There is not a single key in a zone coverage scheme. I tell my wide receivers to make the defender defend what he is playing. If the defender is playing cover-3, it is the receiver's job to make him drop deep into his third. He cannot let the corner sit on the hitch or quick out. If he has the deep third, the receiver has to threaten that third to get him out of the short zones. If the strong safety is defending the flat, make him break into the flat. Do not allow him to sit in the curl and play the flat also. In a cover-4, the corner has the deep quarter of the field to his side. The receiver has to push him and make him turn his hips before he comes out of his pattern and runs a hitch route back to the ball. If he cannot do that, he is not running the route the right way. If you have a curl/flat defender, you want to high/low your receivers. If he has a hook zone defender you want to right/ left him. Are players different than they were 20 years ago? They are because they are smarter. Twenty years ago I could tell a player to run through a brick wall and he would try it. Today, if you tell a player to run through a brick wall, he wants to know why. They are still kids but you must be smarter now to get them to perform. As a coach, you have to explain more things than you used to explain. The players are walking around with a computer in their pockets. They still want the same things they did 20 years ago, but you need to adapt your coaching to get it out of them. The society we live in has become a soft society. Sometimes you must go with the way we did things years ago. That builds the toughness into them. Sometimes you have to get their attention. What is the number one thing you must do when you take over a program? Before you decide on the offense or defense, get in the weight room, or have a parents meeting to discuss their role, you must establish an attitude for your team. The first thing you must do is to establish the attitude you want in your program. When I got to Michigan in the first meeting, I asked the team to write down the three best football programs in America. I did not want it based on national championships or any other criteria, but their perception of the three best programs in America. Out of 95 players in the room, I only had six that listed Michigan in their list. Five of the six listed Ohio State as number one. I told the assistant coaches that until we get every one of our players believing we had the best program in America, we are going to struggle. We have to make them believe what we are doing is the best program in America. Before you do anything else, you must shape the attitude of your players. I see things going on with the recruitment of players that are not good. I am beginning to see players that have a sense of entitlement. Years ago, we did not make the announcement of where we were going to school with three different hats on the table. I do not know if it is television or the hype of signing that is causing these things. Those things tell you a lot about a player's attitude. We have a play-calling sheet, which I use to hide behind when there is a referee's review during the game. It takes forever for them to come to a decision. I ask the television producer to let me know when I am on camera so I can look halfway intelligent. I put it up over my face and make it look as if I am reviewing our plays. I could be telling a joke. If you need one of these sheets to call a play, you probably do not know your offense. I keep my call sheet between my ears. On the call sheet, it is just the same as everyone else's. It has down and distance situations, two point plays, trick plays, red zone plays, and every kind of special situation imaginable. My offensive assistants have many things listed and written on their sheets. I do not look at them. The back of the sheet is the important thing for me. That gives the defensive tendencies and defenses played against certain sets. It tells me when they play Tampa-2, blitz, or play cover-2. It has answers for stunts. What do you do if the end crashes and one of the linebackers runs a scrape over the top? There are suggestion plays listed to counter those stunts. It is on the answer sheet and it gives you solutions for everything you might see from the defense. That is useful for me because I can see it. This helps you when you game plan for one defense and they play something entirely different. You can get some answers from the back of the call sheet. If the coach in the box tells me it is "Bear, Cover-1", I can look at the answer sheet and have a call ready. You can only call what you rep in practice. That is why you do not need too many plays. Today, the technology is way ahead of what we used to do. In the old days if you wanted a cut-up of all third down plays, it took you two hours of splicing to get that done. Today, they do it in two minutes. You have the advantage of seeing all situational plays within minutes. You can put it on a CD and give it to your players. They can download it onto their iPods or whatever you want to share with them. Football is like checkers and not chess. In football, you do not need to think five plays in advance. It is like checkers. He moves and you move. If the defense plays a Bear front and you do not have five offensive coaches thinking the same play you are going to call, you have too much offense. If the offense is killing us with the power play and your defensive staff is not thinking of no less than three ways to stop them, you have too much defense. The other possibility is the defense does not understand what you want them to do. When we first started signaling the plays to the quarterback, it was almost like a third base coach in baseball. The even numbers were up the right arm and the odd numbers up the left arm. If we had a double digit call, we touched the right or left arm for the first number, and the right or left arm for the second number. If we called 52, we touched the left elbow and right wrist. It became excessively complicated. Today, the simpler the signal the faster we can run the play. We do not add anything that slows down the signal or the play calling. If it speeds it up, we add it. We have three different signals for the zone play. We can call it with a simple wave of the hand, an L-shape of the arm, or a fist shake down at the waist. We have three different people signaling. They all wear hats. One is red, one is white, and one is blue. One color is live and the other two are dead. The signal callers signal at the same time and clap when they are finished. They all clap at the same time. We have done this for a long time. The secret to this signal system is we do it every day in practice as well with headsets. It is simple communication but it is a fast way to do it. We try to limit what we do to five words. If you can get one word to be the formations and play, that is what we do. We have a signal to repeat the previous formation. When we use that, we get ridiculously fast. The first package we put in is the "Go" package. (Diagram #1) When we run this package we like to run it from a four-wide receiver set. With the ball on the left hash mark, the X-receiver splits five yards from the sidelines. The Z-receiver is five yards outside the field hash marks. The slot receivers split the difference between the outside receivers and the offensive tackles. The receivers run four vertical patterns. However, it is a read package.  If the coverage is cover-3, the outside receivers read the drop of the corners. If the corner bails out or plays deep, the receiver pulls up at 12 yards. If the corner is shallow, squats, or is in man coverage, the receiver runs by him and calls for the ball. If the corner is deep, we pull up. If he is shallow, we go deep. The slot receivers key the safeties. If there is a single high safety, the slots run one yard outside the hash marks and goes deep. If it is cover-3, the quarterback looks the safety off on one slot and throws to the other slot. If the strong safety and Will linebacker wall off and contact the slot receivers and keep them from getting down the hash marks, the quarterback throws outside to the 12-14 yard comeback routes. The strong safety and Will linebacker are flat players. They cannot bang the slots and cover the flats. Whatever they do, it is wrong. If it is cover-2 or cover-4 and there is a safety on the hash over him, the call side slot runs to 12 yards, wraps himself around the linebacker, and finds a hole in the zone. (Diagram #2) The backside slot runs a "tube" route. It is a bend pattern going into the middle of the field. He bends away from the hash mark safety into the middle.  If the coverage is man-coverage, we look for someone beating his man deep. If we cannot beat him deep, we have the pattern coming across the middle running away from man-coverage. It is more of a choice route for the receiver. We coach him to run down the field and get open. We do not want them to look mechanical by trying to do what you tell him to do. Let him free lance and get open as he would in a sandlot game. I was speaking at a clinic somewhere, which had about 1000 coaches in attendance. When I finished speaking, a coach came up to the stage. He told me he was just a Pop Warner coach but he wanted to ask a question. I told him he was not JUST a Pop Warner coach. He probably has more influence over a group of players than I ever will have. Most of the coaches sitting in this room may be the only true male role model that some of your players will ever have. The high school or junior high football coaches, have a great chance of influencing that player more than anyone in his life. There is no better game in the world that challenges the players. Football is a tough sport for tough people. Not everyone can play this game. Not everyone can coach this game. When I started, I did not get into it because of the money and I know you did not either. You got into it because you love the game and for what it means to you, and to your staff, and your players. We need to keep telling people about that. Football saves a hell of a lot more players than it hurts. We all have a chance to make an impact on these players. Do not sell yourself short by thinking you are just a Pop Warner coach or a junior high coach. You are a coach and you influence those young people. If I polled each one of you about who influenced your life other than your mother and father, it would be your football coach. I appreciate what you do. If they paid you by the hour, you would have a fortune. The influence you have is second to none. Who determines what success is? Is it when you are rich and famous? Seeing the players you coached grow up and be successful is all the success I need. As a society, we have gotten soft. When someone has an issue, we give it a letter. They say he has ADH or ADD. They are diagnosing him with a reason why he cannot succeed. If you give him to a football coach and give him a little discipline, pride, and self-worth, he can accomplish anything. We have to trumpet our own game. I love nothing better than coaching football. When I was out of coaching for a year, I missed the locker rooms. I missed being with the other coaches. What I am trying to say is I appreciate what you do and do not thing it is unimportant. I promise you we are going to get there at Arizona. I have a great staff and we have good players. My big thing when we have success is to watch the reaction of the players, coaches, and fans. When we played Oregon in our last home game, it was senior day. I am big into seniors. I was so happy for them on that day. We beat Oregon and to watch the scene in our locker room, there was nothing like it. I hope you can reach that level with your players. If you are ever out west, come to Vegas, hang a left, and drive on into Tucson. We would love to see you. |
Goals of the No-Huddle Spread Offense