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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Running the Ball: The Weis Philosophy

It has been brought to my attention that it is concerning that we "can't" run the ball on offense or stop the run on defense. While I agree there are valid concerns in both areas I would like to point out a part of our coaching staff's (really Weis') philosophy that may ease some of your concerns.

Weis seems to have a unique philosophy on offense in the sense that if something isn't working, he doesn't keep trying to do it. He isn't particularly inclined to force things and he won't ask our players to do things they aren't a) good at and b) comfortable with. It just isn't a part of his philosophy. That doesn't mean he doesn't try and develop the shortcomings of our athletes so that they can do more things well, he just doesn't believe in trying to win by overcoming our weaknesses at the current time. Weis isn't short-sided enough to not work on our running game. But if the other team is trying to take that away from us, he isn't going to do it. He will look at how that opens up other aspects of their defense and try and exploit those. Weis' offense is diverse enough to do nearly everything. But for a given personnel package, i.e. a given set of players, he will adjust his playbook to do what they can. Currently, we are capable of running and passing pretty well.

On defense it seems our staff game plans to take away the best aspect(s) of their offense. However, they realize it isn't necessarily possible to always shut down every aspect of the opponent's game. In some cases they have to live with giving up, for example, some fairly significant rushing yards in order to slow down the passing game. This doesn't mean we can't stop the run, it just means our coaching staff has identified the aspect of the opposition's offense that most allows them to win and has attempted to stop it.

Many times Weis' offensive and defensive plans are aligned, i.e. he will use certain aspects of his offense to help the defense. This is most commonly evident in our staggeringly favorable time of possession statistics which simply keeps the opposing offense off the field.

Therefore, it seems that in most cases we won't be great in all areas of our game. However, we will be good enough at enough things that the game becomes a chess match. And guess what? We nearly always win those.

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