Ok this post is about ways to improve the Yellow Jackets offensive schemes.

In addition to all of Paul Johnson's current formations and plays, I think Georgia Tech needs to add a few more formations. With how the offense is run, it's difficult to get the ball to the speedy A-backs. The only way to get the ball in their hands is by pitching it to them. Pitching the ball has proved very dangerous and risky and has cause a ton of fumbles this year, especially in the red zone. Also, our current pass protection is not very good in the base fllexbone formation. That could be because the only pass plays that Paul Johnson calls are 50 yard Hail Mary bombs. Most of the time these passes are not even completed and half the time our quarterback gets sacked or scrambles because he is getting pressured. I think calling more short passes, slant routes, screen passes to wide receivers and running backs, and many other versions of quick throws will dramatically improve our passing game and also our offense as a hole. Pass protection won't be much of an issue and our offense would be so much more diverse. Instead of just contantly running the ball, even when the opposing defense is stopping us, we could have far more options when it comes to moving the ball down the field.

A couple new formations would help with the A-back problems. I think that adding the shotgun formation to Georgia Tech's arsenal would help out a lot. We could steal some plays from Florida's playbook like handing the ball off through the dive play and also the sweep. Different versions of the triple option and option plays can be utilized throught the shotgun formation. It would also help in passing situations with improved pass protection and more playcalling abilities. This would involve the A-backs more in the offense without the constant risk of fumbling the ball on a pitch.

Besides those 2 changes, it wouldn't be difficult for Tech to use the I-formation and the Ace-formation. The flexbone is similar to both of these except the Ace formation doesn't have a fullback. We also recruited a pretty talented blocking fullback in Daniel Drummond last year, so we don't have to just depend on the Flexbone B-back to just run the ball. Naturally fullbacks are blockers, but Paul Johnson uses the B-back in the Flexbone to run the ball a lot.

I think all of these changes and additions will dramatically improve our offense. With added formations, running plays, and passing plays, our offense will become much more versatile.

I also think that these additions will also help in recruiting. Georgia Tech would be much more than just a "Triple Option run oriened" team. Recruits would see it as a diverse offense with many options and positions to play.

Feel free to comment on these ideas and what you think about them.

 

This was a question a few of my friends and I recently discussed and I wanted to know what others thought. After the jump I'll talk about my answer.

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Subject:Georgia Tech Song wrote 1984 for the game in Athens

Sent:1/21/2011 12:55 AM EST Delete Reply I am 71 now but have alwayse been a Jacket fan,I was a Scout that seated fans from 1952 til 1960,
during the Bobby Dodd years troop 172 Mtta American Legion,while running a printing press I wrote the song,My Daughter revived it this year and put it on www.utube type in the title it will come up.
          [ were gonna take your silver britches to the ground ] by Larry V.Davis

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     As this season meanders along I keep saying to myself things like, "I actually like basketball."  So in that spirit lets reflect on some positive images from the past.

   If I had a time machine that would allow me to pluck any Tech basketball player during their prime and put them on a team together I would come up with the following roster:

Center        Rich Yunkus  (all time Tech leading scorer)

Forward     Sammy Drummer  (on teams where he rarely had any talent around him he still is one of Tech's leaders in average points per game)

Forward   Matt Harpring   (made his teammates  better and also is a leader in average points per game)

Guard   Mark Price  (what more can you say about the player who brought Tech back to prominence?)

Guard Kenny Anderson  (he can stack up with any of Tech's best guards)

        I thought of lots of other players and thought about doing a depth chart at each position but I got too lazy.  Since this is subjective I was really trying to get at which players all time gave me a sense of confidence whenever they had the ball.  The aforementioned list is it.  Rarely did these guys make mistakes and they could be counted on in the clutch.  All of them were flat out dangerous scorers.  I also think you see in them another quality.  Each one made the chemistry of their team better.

     A second list of Tech players would be those who went on to be good NBA players.  The best of that lot seems to be Mark Price, Dennis Scott, Stephon Marbury, Kenny Anderson and Chis Bosh.

    O.K., I want to hear your thoughts on any or all of the following questions.

1.  Do you think any of Tech's current players will end up among Tech's all time elite players?

2.  Do you think any of Tech's current players will end up being NBA stars of the caliber I've mentioned?

3.  Who are your favorite Tech stars of the past and what did you like about them?

 

Well, the SB Nation College Bowl Pick Em' game ended as of January 11th, about 12:30 A.M. EST. That last win by Auburn was enough to push hothot Louisville Cardinals to win the game. Congratulations. I for one know that it will look like I picked pretty badly, but in reality I picked pretty well, picking 23 of 35 games correctly. Unfortunately, Almost all of those were under 25 confidence points and 75% or more of my losses had a confidence of 25 or higher...

Anyway, here is the final Top 10:

1. hothot Louisville Cardinals
2. Reba's Son
3. Miller
4. mizzou123
5. jerjharris
6. St. Pete Jacket
7. Easy 1
8. Gamehenge Multibeasts
9. BroncoBuffaloBill
10. B5Q Adam T

The game that killed everyone:

Nebraska vs. Washington

Full Final Standings

    I hope I am wrong about this.  On the morning of the big game I am seeing all of the earmarks of a blow out.  The first clue I get is when certain people in the media are straining real hard to sell us this game.  In spite of all the ballyhoo, tonight's game may not even be between the two best teams.  I know, I know, it is heresy to say so.  Auburn has at times perhaps been the best team in the land.  At other times it was Oregon.  Right now for all we know it may be TCU.  But timing is everything and without a playoff system tonight's game is all we've got.

    Here is the problem.  With a 36 day layoff, or whatever monstrous amount of time it has been, either one or both of these teams is a mere shell of its former self.  When Ohio State beat Arkansas they were not playing the same Arkansas that was matching Auburn play for play up until a key injury put the game away.  The dropped passes and stupid penalties of a rusty Arkansas team doomed them from the start.   Sitting around waiting for a bowl game can hurt the timing of some teams more than others.  Oregon's offense is especially susceptible to this.  Auburn is more like Ohio State, having a gifted quarterback who can make things happen even on a busted play.

    Let me offer this disclaimer one more time.  Tonight's game may be like the classic Southern Cal vs. Texas national championship game of a few years ago.  If so, I will happily eat my words.  Nothing would thrill me more.

    But here is what I fear.  I fear yet one more year in which we end up not quite sure that the right teams played each other, or at the very least, that they did not play each other at the right time.  Answer this question honestly to yourself.  How many bowl games this year did you actually consider good games?  Most were the kind of games that had they occurred during the regular season you would have turned them off and gone out and walked the dog.  Only because someone tells us these are bowl games and therefore they are important do we bother to watch at all.

    So when the carnival barker starts hawking a game like it is the super tonic for hair loss I instinctively put my hand in my back pocket  to see if my wallet is still there.  Somebody is selling us something and, this morning at least, I am not buying.

  Few college football fans would disagree with the premise that the best way to judge the strength of a football conference is the won / loss record.  Unfortunately, without a college playoff system this will only take us so far.

   No less a luminary than John Heisman was skeptical of things like margin of victory and out of conference records.  His scheduling of Cumberland and the ensuing 222-0 score was his effort to illustrate a point he had been making about that for several years.  

   So what would an objective system be for evaluating the relative strength of a conference in lieu of a playoff system?  I propose that we get some good Tech student who has the time (and we all know how much time they have) to run the numbers.  The numbers would be collected by using something akin to the grading system that coaches use to grade each player after watching game films.  Team grades could be determined from compiling the position grades.  Obviously teams with high composite grades would also have good win / loss ratios.  What would be eliminated would be the hype and bluster that comes out of conferences when a good team is upset by an average team or when a strong team mercilessly pounds a weaker sister by four touchdowns. 

   Once individual team strength is determined within a conference each team could be given a numerical rating.  The following is a description of the rating system along with a brief interpretation.

     POOR TEAMS - 0.0-1.9     Poor teams are those hapless creatures which have  breakdowns in multiple phases of the game, scoring so low on so many positions that there is no possibility of the team winning consistently.  

     GOOD TEAMS - 2.0-2.9     Good teams generally have winning records because they have high scores in several key positions.  They may have an athletic quarterback, a pro-caliber running back or a monster defensive line.  However they may also have some glaring weaknesses such as a sub-par secondary that frequently gives up big plays or a special teams unit or place kicker who perform below average.  

     COMPLETE TEAMS - 3.0-3.9    Complete teams have the attributes of good teams but without any glaring weaknesses.    In other words they may have one or two positions or areas with the highest grades a coach could give while the other areas of the team all score above average.  

      GREAT TEAMS - 4.00    Great teams border on the mythical but theoretically could be determined by identifying that 60% or more of the positions on the team receive grades as high as any other team in the nation.  From defensive end to running back to safety to wide receiver to kicker these teams not only do not have any weaknesses they are in most areas as strong as any team in the nation.  Great teams always have a chance to go undefeated. 

      Now if I were to offer my subjective opinion about say the relative strengths of say a conference like the ACC versus a conference like the SEC it would go like this.  The SEC had perhaps two great teams this year -Auburn and Alabama.  In my opinion it had one complete team -Arkansas.  It had several good teams such as South Carolina, Mississippi State, LSU and Florida.  The ACC had no great teams and no complete teams.  Two teams, FSU and VA Tech, would in my opinion be on the upper scale of good teams, say in the 2.9 range.  Unfortunately for both teams there were glaring weaknesses that showed up several times throughout  the course of the season.  Just off the top of my head it might be that the ACC had more teams in the Good range than did the SEC.  However if one were to average the scores of the respective teams of the two conferences the SEC comes out ahead both because of the presence of complete teams and great teams, and because the poor teams probably score slightly higher overall than the poor teams of the ACC.  For the record I would rate Georgia Tech a poor team this year, albeit at the upper end of the poor scale.   Fix a few key areas of this team and Tech easily jumps into the Good range.  Likewise if Florida State and Virginia Tech were to take care of a few of their weak areas they might jump into the Complete team category.

     O.K., now all that is necessary for you to determine in an objective way the relative strength of different conferences is to punch in the numbers.  Of course for all of us blow-hards that really would take the fun out of it.

  First I just have to get this off of my chest.  During the first few bowl games I kept hearing the announcers say things like this:   "As everyone knows the SEC is a tough conference; those guys will really hit you."  Problem was the SEC was losing the bowl games in which these comments were being made.  Then I watched Tennessee and North Carolina and it looked like Tennessee might finally pull out the first SEC win.  A North Carolina player was taken off the field badly hurt.  The announcer said, "That's the kind of thing that happens when you play an SEC team."

  Later I watched UConn play Oklahoma.  An Oklahoma player was carried off the field on a stretcher.  I listened for the announcer to say something about how hard UConn players hit but only heard the sound of chirping crickets. UConn is not in the SEC so clearly their hits don't hurt as much.

   Finally an SEC team began to win a bowl.  As Alabama started running up the score the announcer made the very predictable comment, "As everyone knows, the SEC is the strongest conference in the nation."  This was said even though up to that point the SEC had lost all of its previous bowl games and was winless against the ACC. Regardless of that fact "everyone knows" which conference is really strongest.   

     By the day of the Arkansas vs. Ohio State game all TV announcers were in agreement that the SEC is the strongest conference in the land.  Sadly these conclusions are always drawn before the evidence is all in but that doesn't matter.  Even if Arkansas and Auburn both lose, the myth has once again been established.  Announcers, having pronounced the SEC the strongest conference, can not take back what has already been said.  It is established fact.

   Now for the BCS matchups.  Does anyone else think the matchups this year were poor?  TCU and Wisconsin both seemed to be strong teams and TCU could be the best team in the nation but we will never know without a playoff.  I wonder how the bowls would have looked if Michigan State had played Virginia Tech?  What would a Stanford versus Alabama game have looked like?  What if Wisconsin had played Mississippi State?  What if TCU had played Arkansas or Ohio State had played Florida State?  Almost every year I feel dissatisfied with the bowl match ups. 

      The only one that it is hard to argue with is Oregon versus Auburn.  Of course if that ends up being a blow out by either team we still will wonder if either of them could have handled TCU.  The best we can hope for is close hard fought game like the classic championship game a few years ago between Texas and Southern Cal.

    Only a playoff would prove once and for all in a given year which is the best team and whose conference is the strongest.

Was taking a look at Ken Pomeroy's terrific basketball rating page (www.kenpom.com) to see where the Yellow Jackets stand (currently 83rd) and noted that Tech ranks 298/345 in the "Luck" category. This rang a bell for me, as I recalled seeing the Jackets' Luck rating also near the bottom in previous years. So I went back and checked where Tech ended up in the Luck factor since 2002-3 season. Here's the data, with overall rating in parentheses.

2002-3: 314/324 (46th overall)

2003-4: 146/326 (7)

2004-5: 256/330 (19)

2005-6: 320/334 (96)

2006-7: 306/336 (17)

2007-8: 327/341 (49)

2008-9: 340/344 (93)

2009-10: 264/347 (27)

2010-11: 298/345 (83)

The Luck factor is described in more detail in Ken's Help section, but essentially attempts to quantify whether a team is winning games it should win based on its typical offense/defense points distribution. More math behind the factor can be found here: http://www.rawbw.com/~deano/articles/BellCurve.html.

The Luck factor ranges from negative to positive so if, on average, you are winning the number of games expected your Luck factor would be zero and you would place in the middle of the number of teams in Div 1A. In the Final Four year Tech's Luck factor was +0.001 and it ranked 146th. Duke's Luck factor last year was +0.003 and it ranked 124th, so you don't have to be overachieving to go deep in the tourney, just taking care of business.

It's striking that other than the 2003-4 season Tech is consistently in the bottom echelon by this measure. As the Bell Curve site explains, a negative Luck rating can come from losing close games - not being able to finish, missing a last second shot or having an opponent hit a game-winner.

Hewitt apologists may say, "Paul's right. We are snakebit. We just can't catch a break and get those shots to fall when we need them." Hewitt detractors may say, "See, Hewitt can't coach a team to finish off games. Poor inbounding, lack of timeouts, etc. at the end of games keep us from winning games we should be expected to win."

So what say you - Is Tech under CPH unlucky or underachieving?

  Prior to the start of the current Bowl Season I would have said the SEC was the strongest conference in the nation. Even if they do not eventually end up with the number one team in the nation I reasoned at the time that they were still "top to bottom" the best conference in the nation.

      But things change.  The SEC has yet to win a bowl game and after their number two team South Carolina got shellacked by FSU I am now having to reassess my opinion.  Even if the SEC wins all of its remaining games (starting with today's games)  I would have to rate this season's conference below the ACC. 

    Since I work for ESPN and recently wrote that the Mountain West Conference was superior to the ACC based on Air Force's win over Tech  I am now compelled to go one step further and state that the MWC is also better than the SEC given the logic of my position.  If anyone cares to dispute the facts please go to the ESPN blog site and address your concerns to my pseudonym Heather Dinich.  Thank you.