With us in the market for a new OC and with Applewhite stating the importance of being able to run the ball (Him and Herman have both stated that you can’t win a championship without having a strong running game), I’ve been noticing all the different offenses and their ability to run the ball. There are some offenses like ours that seem to exclusively use a power running attack (Stanford, Wisconsin) along with all of the Urban Meyer offshoots (Dan Mullen, Herman, Adazio, etc.). However, a lot of offenses run the ball close to 50% of the time but do it in a more finesse way (more perimeter runs, more motion, more speed instead of power, etc.) and UCF is a prime example of this. It’s halftime during the peach bowl and UCF has 17 passing plays and 15 running plays against a SEC heavyweight. The announcers said they only have 5 plays total between the tackles and every thing else is either down field or on the perimeter. They have the #1 ranked offense in the nation and are balanced but don’t do it with a bunch of power runs. To me, this is the type of offense I would hope we would try to run based in part on our inability to recruit dominant run blocking offensive linemen and in part on our proclivity to recruit smaller, faster players. I think we can accomplish all our goals by having an up tempo, speed based exciting offense while also running the ball effectively. Oh well, we’ll see.
We don’t have anywhere near UCF’s speed at our offensive skill positions currently. We got away from recruiting smaller, faster guys during Levine’s years and Herman was more interested in stars than speed.
Hopefully, that will change under the current coaches.
We had some speed but dang those concussions…
We shifted from speed as far back as Sumlin. I miss that speed too.
Need to go back to the speed again
Applewhite is bringing in some speed guys but we will see how long it takes for them to hit the field. We have had some speedy receivers the past couple of years who never got to play due to concussions and other injuries…
I think speed on defense is just as important and I think we were missing that element on defense this past year, especially with the linebackers. I know we have some good young defensive players coming up, so we shall see…
Auburn looked just like UH, only much more committed to the dive.