Foster’s Notre Dame Adjustments, UVA’s QB Strategy, and Arkansas Preview

Woody Baron, Bud Foster, Ken Ekanem
Woody Baron and Ken Ekanem played very well against Notre Dame, and Bud Foster made key defensive adjustments at halftime. (Ivan Morozov)

I was on the road for a family holiday week in the Buckeye state when the game was going, so I only had tracker updates and TSL forum posts to keep my updated. So like other fans, I was in a state of dejection, but a step removed from in the game compared to most. I knew the Domers were picking up chunks of yardage in the passing game, but I didn’t know how, though I figured it was a bit of the usual: guys in man coverage biting on fakes or getting flat burned on deep routes.

So I was pretty surprised when I settled down into a cozy McDonald’s in the fringe town of Loudonville and watched the game. Tech was getting gashed while in read coverages, and the routes burning them at first weren’t spaced out catches on the fly, but mostly snapped routes clustered together into “triangle” concepts.

What might’ve been the last big innovation to come out of the professional passing game was what Bill Walsh did with route concepts*.  Walsh figured out that if he had three receivers attacking the same side of the field, he could put the defense in a bind by stretching the defense in two dimensions by sending one receiver left, one right, and one deep. Often the routes overlapped to confuse defenders.

If you connected the end points of all these routes, the result would be a long triangle with its top point deep on the side of the field being attacked, and its two bottom points spaced out across the left and right lower portions of the side of the field being attacked.  In general any type of three-man route grouping like this just became generally acknowledged as a triangle concept because it helped QBs visualize their reads. The individual concepts have names like “stick” and “scat” to name a few; I won’t lean too hard on the concepts just because the names aren’t uniform, nor very informative.

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