re: Comparing Alabama offensive coordinators, Sark, Locks, Dabol, Kiffin

We use our quick game (bubble screen, tunnel screen, etc) basically as an extension of the wide run game. So if you took those numbers and basically called them runs, here is what our breakout vs SC looks like. We ran 9 screen plays for 63 yards (7 YPA).

Passing - 22/30, 432 yards, 14.4 YPA
Rushing - 34 attempts, 139 yards, 4.1 YPA

47% Passing
53% Rushing

I mean, on paper it is more balanced. But I am at the point now where if the passing attack is consistently this good and can flat out win us games, I don’t really care.

George I shared your post with a sauce of mine and his reply and mind you he works on the offense

“There is wisdom in that analysis. A quick uninterrupted throw is no different than a quick uninterrupted handoff.”

100% agree. Short routes that turn can turn explosive just means less turnover and sack potential. You just don't always get lucky enough to have an elite group of receivers like this.

Kiffin's vision of an offensive attack was hard for me to watch at times. His insistence about stringing everything wide was overkill. Kiffin never saw a bubble screen and jet sweep he wasn't in love with. I recall many times hearing the silly argument we had to keep going sideways so we could go forward.

I would have loved to see what Tua would have done in year 2 under Brian Daboll. I think about that OC a lot and I still wonder what really happened with his interest. Brian had Tua clicking every time he went into a game as a freshman and we could run the ball. I recall Vandy got 500 yards of rushing put on their head for unnecessary wolfing. And his gameplan with Tua in the second half vs Georgia was a thing of beauty.

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It's better quite honestly, because often it's putting a skill player in a 1 on 1 matchup with momentum and far more space than a rb typically receives to work in.

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but 2 things

A good running game keeps the defense from keying on the pass

A good running game will help recruit the good running backs to keep it going. Too little opportunity to show off and the key recruits would eventually probably look elsewhere.

Speaking of which, I wonder how we stand with the kid from Texas. Last I read was that he may be leaning to UGA.

Kiffin had,imho,a better OL and better RB's.

He had Amari Cooper.

Bama has the best corp of WRs ever assembled in 2019.

Sark and Tua can put up a lot of passing yards,but this young Defense that Bama has this Season needs the Offense to get an effective running game going,so as to run the clock and rest the Defense.

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A good running game keeps the defense from keying on the pass

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This quite simply is not true. As has been posted many times here, run success has no correlation with success of play action. If you are saying that you need to be able to run to keep them from dropping 7-8 in coverage, sure, but that is also when running finally becomes efficient as a playcall, when you run against favorable numbers in the box.

The truth is your run game is made better by the pass, your passing game is not made better by the run.

FO article about PA and Rush Success
So what I am referring to started with this article and has been subsequently studied and backed up in various other articles you can google. I am going to quote the important pieces below.

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Why do teams run the ball so often? The average pass play gained 6.2 yards in 2017, compared to 4.1 yards for the average rush play. And yet, on first-and-10, teams ran the ball 53 percent of the time. On these first-and-10 runs, 44 percent of rushes and 52 percent of passes were successful. A common response to the question of why teams run so frequently is that teams need to run the ball in order to maintain the effectiveness of play-action passing. When play-action is based on a committed rushing attack, the argument goes, the pass rush has to slow down and the linebackers have to respect the threat of the run, pulling them towards the line of scrimmage and away from their coverage responsibilities.

Examples of this argument abound: The Ringer's Robert Mays recently wrote that "as much as our understanding of the sport has shifted in recent years, the belief that a play-action game's effectiveness is linked to a strong, high-usage running offense has remained steadfast." Former NFL lineman Geoff Schwartz stated that "teams have to commit to running the ball first to open up [play-action]."

Despite the pervasiveness of this argument, I have not seen much evidence about the extent to which the effectiveness of play-action passing is dependent on a team's rushing attack. With thanks to play-by-play charting from ESPN Stats & Info (from 2011 to 2013) and Sports Info Solutions (from 2014 to 2017), this piece takes a deep dive into measuring the empirical relationship between rushing and play-action passing.

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Between 2011 and 2017, 93 percent of play-action passes occurred when the offense had between one and four rushes in the previous five plays. In this range, yards per play and its standard deviation are remarkably similar for all values of previous rush attempts. Looking at the graph of rushes in the previous 10 plays, teams are at least as successful at play-action when they have rushed one time in the previous 10 plays as when they have run seven or eight times in the previous 10 plays.

Putting this all together, I cannot find any support for the success of play-action passing being related in any way to a team's rushing statistics, whether measured by frequency or effectiveness.

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You can read the whole article for more in depth explanation, but the gist here is that PA is effective no matter how good your run game is and no matter what formation you are in.

I am using NFL articles because the college version of much of this work has been done via twitter and one off posts and I'm trying to give you the best statistical work available.

To then follow to my pass game makes the run better statement, you simply need to look at the yards per play average for a pass vs a traditional run into a 7 man box vs a run into a 5 or 6 man box.
The average pass play in 2017 was 6.2 yards.

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Running backs with at least 20 carries averaged 4.75 yards per carry against six men in the box from 2016 to 2018.2 That’s well over half a yard higher than the average of 4.09 yards per carry when that same group of runners faced seven defenders near the line of scrimmage. Against eight-man fronts, the average gain falls to 3.59. Facing a loaded box makes running much more difficult.

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McVay is no rube. He likely realizes that if you are going to run in the NFL, you should do so against a light box. Even better, this is something he can control. An offense exerts quite a bit of influence over how many box defenders it faces by how many wide receivers it chooses to deploy. When offenses play three wideouts, NFL defensive coordinators will typically match body type with body type and send a nickel defensive back in to cover the third receiver, leaving six defenders in the box.

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These quotes came from this article 538 Runningback and System.

So based upon this, when you go out, spread the field with 3 wr's or 2 wr's and a pass catching TE who needs a corner to cover them, you are creating a half a yard more a play. Add onto this RPO and heavy use of PA to force the defense to slow down their reactions to the ball carrier and you actually make the run game much more efficient.

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Why, then, does a quarterback even fake the handoff in a play action pass?

It's ridiculous to think that a good or at least decent threat to run doesn't impact the passing game.

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Thank you for not reading the article. I appreciate your old-school feelings based input.