What did Grant mean by "time at the 4"?
Gus Malzahn wants to run his offense at as fast a pace as possible. But faster communication is needed to achieve faster pace. Since his time as a high school football coach, Malzahn has developed a system that allows the play calls to be communicated from the sideline that is easy to understand for the offense and hard to decipher for the defense.
One aspect of this communication system is the skill position numbers. Traditional skill position designations are letters. The quarterback is QB (duh), the split end is X, the tight end is Y, the flanker is Z, the fullback could be F, and the tailback could be T. A typical formation would look like this.
Malzahn uses the following numbers for the skill positions. The quarterback is the 1, the split end is the 9, the tight end is the 5, the flanker is the 2, the H-back is the 3, and the running back is the 4. Now the typical formation looks like this.
