Silverfield’s offense

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offense installation time is not an acceptable excuse

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What’s Muschamp doing these days

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Ryan Silverfield’s first big assistant hire is in: unsurprisingly, he’s bringing his Memphis offensive coordinator Tim Cramsey with him to Fayetteville.

Offense has been the strength of Memphis, particularly over Cramsey’s four seasons. The Tigers have averaged at least 34 points per game each season, and the last three years have seen them rank 10th, 12th, and 17th in Offense SP+.

Here at Fayette Villains, we love looking at X’s and O’s and how football strategy has developed over time. We’ve written extensively about the Veer-and-Shoot (I had an article ready to go in case Alex Golesh was hired), the Air Raid, the Petrino offense, the Odom defense, and many more. Now we get to meet a new one.

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In a single sentence, Cramsey’s offense is a West Coast passing attack paired with a zone read run game. It favors speed and athleticism at every position. It loves varied formations, all kinds of motion, play action, and lots of horizontal movement featuring all sorts of eye candy for the defense and options for the quarterback.

Changes to substitution rules and defensive adjustments took the “tempo every play” strategy that Oregon was so good at out of favor, so Cramsey’s offense isn’t usually in a hurry. Because of the wide variety of the schemes it draws from, it is very flexible and can adjust to the style of the quarterback: dual-threat quarterbacks (like Oregon’s Dennis Dixon in 2010 or Memphis’s Brendon Lewis this year) will cause the playcaller to lean into the zone read run game and move the quarterback all over the place, while pocket passers (like Ohio State’s Will Howard or Memphis’s Seth Henigan last year) will lean more into the pro-style pass game.

Is it different from what Bobby Petrino has been running? Yes, it’s completely different. If you’ve read our past work on Petrino’s offense, you’ll note that it developed entirely independently, but it also looks completely different to a casual viewer.

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Petrino’s run game was about 60% gap-scheme runs and 40% zone-scheme runs. The difference is in the technique of the offensive linemen. Gap-schemed run games, which include the Power and Counter series, tend to prefer bigger, stronger offensive linemen who are asked to block straight downhill. Zone-schemed run games tend to prefer smaller, quicker linemen who can move laterally.

Cramsey’s offense is going to be about 80% zone. The main gap concepts I saw on film are Duo Dive (a common short-yardage run) and Counter Trey, which is a nice change-of-pace run for a zone team. This is consistent with Silverfield’s own background as a former NFL offensive line coach. Zone blocking is associated with former Broncos head coach Mike Shanahan and his longtime offensive line coach, Alex Gibbs. It remains dominant in the NFL, with many of the top pro offenses running it, typically (like Shanahan) pairing it with a West Coast passing attack, much like what Cramsey does. Arkansas was also about 80% zone with Kendal Briles calling plays, as many of Briles’ tendencies were borrowed from Lane Kiffin, who himself comes from a pro-style West Coast tradition.

You can recognize zone runs when you see the offensive line “slide” on a run play, like they do to the right on this split zone:

As the name implies, the linemen have a “zone”, or area, they are blocking into. They’ll hit the first defender they see in their zone. It’s easy to install because you don’t have to adjust assignment based on the defensive front, and linemen can execute it with confidence.

The bread-and-butter play of this offense is outside zone, which was also the base play under Briles. In an outside zone, the back angles off the tackle and can cut inside wherever he sees the hole form. If the defense fails to set the edge (as Arkansas, unsurprisingly, does here), the back can continue off-tackle for a bigger gain:

If a defense demonstrates an inability to stop outside zone, Cramsey is happy to just keep calling them. Outside zone teams tend to do that: the most notorious outside zone spammer in the SEC is Eli Drinkwitz, who just kept calling them in Arkansas’ 2025 finale.

Another big difference from Petrino is motion. Petrino uses very little motion (least among SEC playcallers, per data from SEC Stat Cat), but Cramsey, in line with modern analytics trends, uses a ton of it. The reason is obvious: just like tempo was a way to get the defense out of position in the spread-to-run era of the late 2000s and 2010s, now motion is way to force the defense to show its hand and get defenders out of position.

Here’s a fun exit-and-return motion that dressed up an outside zone read:

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One of the big stories from Silverfield’s opening press conference was KJ Jackson’s announcement that he’s back. From what we’ve seen of Jackson, he seems like a good fit for this offense. Dual-threat quarterbacks make it better because of all the quarterback movement and run reads, but Jackson seems to have the skills to be a good passer as well.

That’s where Memphis lagged a bit in 2025. Jackson needs to present a serious downfield threat and read defenses well to be an upgrade over Lewis last year. A less explosive run scheme could be a really bad thing if Jackson isn’t a good passer, because SEC defenses aren’t going to let you quick-hitch them to death.

Along the offensive line, expect the Hogs to move away from an emphasis on size and into an emphasis on lateral quickness and technique. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Hogs will run off their bigger linemen: 330-pound Kobe Branham is probably fine, for example, since he’s already blocked for plenty of zone runs. But linemen who struggle with lateral mobility may not be a good fit. I know that’s something keeping Shaq McRoy from playing more, but I’m not sure who else could be in trouble.

One way to distinguish between gap and zone run schemes is with this oversimplification: gap schemes are hard for the linemen but easy for the backs, while zone schemes are easy for the linemen but hard for the backs. In a zone, the line has an easier time because they are simply blocking into a zone. Their responsibilities don’t change depending on the defensive front.

For running backs, vision is prioritized in a zone scheme. Gap-schemed runs tell you which hole to run through, but zone backs have to see how the hole in the defense forms. The best zone backs understand that the defense often loses contain on the backside of outside zones, opening up a cutback that can create a big explosive:

Getting another Rocket Sanders would be a big deal for this scheme. Sanders was a monster on outside zone.

At tight end, meanwhile, there won’t be a whole lot of difference from the Petrino offense, so I think the Hogs should prioritize retaining Jaden Platt, who could be really good in this scheme. Memphis seemed to use the tight end in a wing position more often (not on the line of scrimmage), but the tight end is very important in blocking the playside edge defender on outside zones. Platt could do well with something like this, a Leak play (very common West Coast concept):

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