This is quite an in-depth look at what makes a Jim McElwain offense tick. Hope to see the offense really bloom this year with improved line and QB play.
Charlie
Best in the SEC? Florida coach Jim McElwain's offense based on impressive blend of deception and creativity
Categorizing offenses can be difficult.
In 2016, everyone incorporates a little of everything — West Coast principles with rhythm, spread elements, vertical elements, pro elements, option football, matchup football, and good, old fashioned power football.
Some offenses look different stylistically, but the concepts behind them often are the same. Take Alabama. When categorizing the Crimson Tide under offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin, do you fall into the lazy stereotypes of what we know Alabama football and a Nick Saban team to historically look like? Or do we call it what it is: A spread-to-run isolation offense?
Categorizing Florida coach Jim McElwain and his offense is even more difficult than most.
The Montana native talks about football in a different way. It's often overly simplistic but dispensed with his witty personality and trademark smile. He has a way of condensing detailed offensive concepts, plays and decisions into simple instructions or phrases, such as what he told ESPN Radio prior to last season: "Really I'm looking for a guy who knows what color jersey we're wearing and can throw it to our guys."
McElwain is among the best offensive teachers in all of football, and what's interesting is the contrast in how he discusses his offense and how it looks on the field. Off the field, he uses that simplistic language in place of more difficult concepts, yet on the field he masks simple concepts with detail and window dressing to generate mismatches and force defensive communication.
Deception may be the best way to describe McElwain's brand of football. From Alabama to Colorado State and onto Florida, he has built a blend of power football, classical passing concepts disguised with a series of new-age personnel packages and constant moving parts to form a beautifully deceptive unit.
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The art of deception
Florida runs few new-age concepts within its base offense. In fact, almost everything the Gators run from a conceptual standpoint could be found in a playbook from any age.
Their run game features a hybrid zone/man blocking scheme, with seven primary concepts — inside zone, outside zone, power, strongside/weakside counter, draw and zone toss. The passing game is much the same with a number of concepts run at all levels — curl-flat, levels, deep over, and so on. Nothing revolutionary, but dressed up to create confusion.
While McElwain runs a limited number of concepts, he runs them from every imaginable personnel grouping and formation. Everything is designed to disguise what easy-to-execute concept is coming. This is done in a number of different ways: Basic window dressing, simple alignments, formations and pre-snap motion/shifts.
Few teams in the country do more pre-snap movement to disguise calls. It starts with basic formations — moving tight ends or running backs all across the field. As for alignments, the Gators execute run plays out of a pistol formation to conceal the running back for longer than if he were lined up next to the quarterback.
The greatest form of deception comes from pre-snap movements. Watching a McElwain-coached game can sometimes be a dizzying experience, with all kinds of players moving on almost every snap.
Even on the most basic plays like an inside-zone run, Florida will motion its tight end/H-back to try and disguise the call, overload one side of the defensive front, and force communication.
Motioning pre-snap forces the defense to communicate or switch its play call, which can lead to miscues. It also can lead to mismatches if the defense chooses not to alter its call. Perhaps most significantly, it can reveal the defense's coverage. If the motion man moves and a defensive back follows him, the defense is revealing man coverage. If the DB doesn't follow, the opposition is playing a form of zone or pattern match defense, eliminating the need (unless it's a disguised coverage) for the quarterback to diagnose the coverage post-snap.
The benefits are tremendous, and outside of it slowing the snap of the ball, there is little to no downside.
Moving groups of offensive personnel before the snap can lead to mismatches, particularly in the running game, where the offense can gain a numerical advantage against certain fronts. As always, the defense has the right to reply and audible pre-snap, but it's a big win for an offense to see the defense's hand before the ball is even snapped.
One thing that separates McElwain from others is that he builds offensive shifts into play designs, rather than those shifts coming as an audible from the quarterback or coaching staff.
Few quarterbacks at the college level are given free rein to shift and then re-shift based on the defensive front. Some special talents, like Andrew Luck and Carson Wentz, have been afforded the opportunity to command the entire offense from the line of scrimmage. But for the most part, coaches are controlling everything in the modern era.
You see it every Saturday — the offense gets into position ready for the play, then they all stand up, turn to the sideline, read of one of the large cards, and the play is changed.
But McElwain and his offenses shift by design, rather than the quarterback or coaching staff evaluating on the fly.
A lot of this is only as effective as the personnel running it. Forcing defensive communication is one thing, but generating mismatches is the biggest net win for McElwain's offense. To accomplish that, one needs athletic personnel.
McElwain always has placed a huge emphasis on the use of tight ends. He employs a number of two- and three-tight end sets as well as a hybrid tight end/H-back who can line up in the backfield or all across the offensive formation. In DeAndre Goolsby and C'yontai Lewis, Florida has a pair of weapons at the tight end spots who can play as in-line blockers, in the slot or flexed out as wide receivers.
Florida also has Brandon Powell who can take handoffs as a running back, run routes out of the backfield, or line up anywhere as a receiver. Window dressing the offense is great in theory, but without versatile weapons that force the defense to consider altering its calls, it's a limited approach.
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Creativity in the red zone
McElwain gets more creative than deceptive in the red zone.
Part of this, like all innovations, comes from necessity: Last year's offensive line wasn't good enough to line up and punch in the ball against some the SEC's best defenses. Similarly, the scattershot accuracy from Will Grier and Treon Harris made it difficult to trust them to thread the needle against tight red zone defenses.
To combat this, McElwain got creative, introducing Wildcat formations, unbalanced lines, jet sweeps, additional lineman, increased tempo and defensive linemen as fullbacks.
It's another example of matchup football and creating confusion:
- The Wildcat creates a numerical running advantage inside the box.
- An ubalanced line gives a talent/size advantage to one side of a rushing play.
- A jet sweep gets the ball into the hands of the offense's best playmakers while eliminating reliance on the quarterback's decision-making and accuracy.
- Increasing the tempo gives the offense a chance to snap the ball before the defense is set or before it has identified the offensive personnel.
- Using additional linemen or bringing in a defensive lineman gives the offense a size advantage and can cause confusion.
While some of the creativity may fall away as the Gators improve at quarterback, expect most of it to remain into the 2016 season. The Gators offensive line has improved, but with potentially limited play at the quarterback position, they'll have to get creative inside the scoring zone once again.
"You want to be mechanically sound in everything you do, but there comes a time when you just need to — I don't care how it looks — get it to the right guy, complete the pass, move the team," McElwain told ESPN.com prior to the 2015 season.
Although that mindset works when marching down the field and spreading the ball to playmakers, it's more difficult to just complete ugly balls when you are in the red zone.
Florida's mix of an unbalanced line, with Bryan Cox Jr. — a defensive lineman by trade — in as a fullback, was one of the biggest components of its red-zone offense last season and should remain the same this year. Cox is an elite athlete for his position and has the power to light up linemen and linebackers at the point of attack. With an unbalanced line on one side, and Cox as a blocker able to hunt behind that line or to the opposite side, the Gators have two built-in mismatches for a play designed to simply run over the opposition at the goal line.
In many ways, this formation is a microcosm of McElwain's offense — old-school football mixed with a dash of deception and creativity. Although it doesn't score the same style points as the offenses run by Gus Malzahn or Kevin Sumlin, it is every bit as impressive.
Indeed, if you asked me to name the best offensive coach in the SEC today, it would be hard to look past McElwain and his deception-based unit.
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