Why Am I Standing Here? Malzahn's Most Used Formations

What's in a formation?

Football is a game with many arbitrary rules. Why four downs to get 10 yards? Why not five to get 15? Each team can field 11 players. Why not 12 or 13, Tennessee?

Arbitrary rules also dictate the basic structure of offensive formations. Of the 11 on offense, four must be in the backfield, or behind the line of scrimmage. That leaves seven that must be on the line. Obviously, one of the players in the backfield is the passer (who may or may not actually be the quarterback), but the other 3 are eligible to receive a pass. Of the players on the line, each one on each end is also an eligible receiver.

Seven are on the line, and the X and Y are on the ends, so they are eligible receivers.
Everyone is the backfield is an eligible receiver.

Easy as 1,2,3... & 4,5,9

In both of his interviews this fall camp, [Corey] Grant has said he's still getting some time at the "4," the tailback position in Auburn's hurry-up, no-huddle offense.

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.

Pace and Injuries: How Dangerous is the HUNH?

Looks like random blue dots in a white square to me.

How long has this been going on?

Hurry Up, No Huddle Offenses did not just appear last year.  In 1997, Gus Malzahn was the head coach at Shiloh Christian in Arkansas when he decided to run his offense at a 2-minute drill pace for the entire game.

"We started running two- and three-play drives at the first of games the year before," Malzahn said. "We'd get great momentum, and then we have to go back to huddling and we'd lose it. So we decided in 1997 that summer to revamp everything and see what happens."

Malzahn was hired as the offensive coordinator at Arkansas for the 2006 season after running his offense at the high school level for nearly a decade.  He then held the same position at Tulsa and Auburn, where he continued to use pace as a weapon against defenses.

Chip Kelly became the offensive coordinator at Oregon in 2007, bringing his fast paced offense from the University of New Hampshire.  Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, Baylor, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, and Clemson (not to mention several non-BCS schools like Houston and Marshall) are examples of teams that have run their offenses at a hurried pace within the past few years.

So *now* we're worried about the HUNH?

Yes, the HUNH is being used at more and more schools, but it is not new to football.  What's new is that a few coaches are becoming increasingly frustrated by it.

SEC Football Scheduling: An Exercise in Futility

Why are we talking about this?

The football scheduling uproar has come and gone this offseason, but it's not going away altogether. Some coach is going to complain that their cross-divisional games were tougher.  It happened at SEC Media Days and it will probably happen some time during the season.  Lots of talk has been dedicated to "solving" this problem.  There have been three basic options thrown out there.

1. Keep the scheduling as it is.  You play six divisional games, one permanent cross-divisional game, and one rotating cross-divisional game for a total of eight games. (6-1-1)
2. Eliminate permanent cross-divisional rivals.  You play six divisional games, and two rotating cross-divisional games for a total of eight games. (6-2)
3. Add a ninth game.  You play six divisional games, one permanent cross-divisional game, and two rotating cross-divisional games for a total of nine games. (6-1-2)

Each school has a preference and there is very little agreement.  Auburn, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee want to keep playing permanent cross-divisional rivals.  LSU wants to eliminate said rivals so that they don't have to play Florida every year.  Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida don't want nine SEC games because they also play Georgia Tech, Clemson, and Florida State every year, respectively.  Despite all the disagreement, there may be another option, no matter how unlikely.

The 3-5 plan

Andy Bitter laid out a plan for ACC scheduling that I think can be directly applied to SEC.  I'll let him explain it.

Here it is: Eliminate the divisions. Have every team play three fixed rivals per year. Play five more games against non-fixed opponents in a given year, then the other five the next, allowing for each team to play everybody in the league at least once on the road and at home in a four-year cycle. Then have the teams with the best two records play in the [SEC] championship game.

He goes on to explain that there are some problems.  For example, the NCAA only allows conference championship games if there are round robin divisions.  Also, some great annual division games wouldn't be played every year.  Good thing we can all agree on which teams will be fixed rivals, right?