Film Study: Potential Playbook Additions for 2023 - 16 Days Until Kansas Football
We're so close to the start of the Kansas Jayhawks season, which means we're inching nearer and nearer to seeing one of the country's most exciting and most explosive offenses take the field.
KU busted out plenty of "wow" plays a year ago, both in terms of results and in terms of designs. In the never-ending quest to stay ahead of the curve, Kansas did an impressive job of finding new ways to involve its deep arsenal of talented offensive weapons throughout the 2022 campaign.
That's in the past, however, and finding the competitive edge in football really is a never-ending process. If the Jayhawks want to maximize their offensive potential in 2023, they'll need their offensive playbook to keep evolving in tandem with roster steadily improving.
Let's take a look at three plays from around the football world, both collegiate and professional, that would be both fun and practical places from which Lance Leipold and Andy Kotelnicki can glean some new ideas.
PLAY 1
Our first play comes from the USC Trojans, coach Lincoln Riley and Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams, and it harkens back to some concepts we discussed in our first film review of the offseason.
A phrase that’s been used a lot in NFL circles recently, specifically by descendants of the Shanahan coaching tree, is “the illusion of complexity,” and one way those coaches have brought that motto to life is by packing multiple plays or concepts into one personnel grouping or alignment. As it pertains to the Jayhawks, this particular play is one of several options you could run out of this concept.
You have a ton of moving pieces here, but nothing that's especially unique. Shotgun RPO, giving you an option to hand off to a tailback based on either a pre-snap or post-snap read. The eventual intended target is just the inline tight end running an out-breaking route following a delayed release. But the part of the play that would draw the most gravity for KU is the (fake) end-around, which is where you'd expect Jason Bean to get involved.
In the aforementioned film room, we covered how much defenses have to respect Bean's presence due to his running and throwing abilities. By putting him in the end-around position here, you're baking three options into the play: Either he gets the ball and takes off running, he can throw the ball to an open receiver on the near side of the play or you fake the pitch to him like we see in the clip. Essentially, you have five different plays you can run out of this one concept.
When you have a chance to take advantage of this many of your offensive strengths (a dynamic starting quarterback in Jalon Daniels, an athletic backup quarterback, stellar tight ends, etc.), there’s no good reason not to.
PLAY 2
Is this just an opportunity to force something from my favorite NFL team into this piece? No, I promise, there’s something KU can use here.
This isn’t a flashy seven-yard gain for the 2022 Green Bay Packers, but it's a great example of using your strengths to your advantage.
Anyone who follows the NFL closely could tell you that the most dangerous playmakers for the 2022 Packers (at least as of Week 9) were their running backs, Aaron Jones and A.J. Dillon. Green Bay’s “pony package” features those two backs on the field together. This made me think of KU’s roster and the fact that there aren’t many teams across college football with a running back tandem as dangerous as Devin Neal and the now-healthy Daniel Hishaw. If those two are on the field together, that means the opposing defense is always accounting for two of the Jayhawks’ best playmakers at any given time.
The field side of the play here opens up with the boundary receiver (a tight end in this case) motioning into the slot, pulling the defensive back toward the middle of the field and leaving the sideline open. From there, it's simply a numbers game.
That tight end takes out the defensive end while the center and left guard pull, which in turn eliminates two linebackers. The original slot receiver blocks his assigned defensive back and the running back who didn't take the handoff gets in front of the play to try to throw a downfield block. This becomes a seven-yard gain and it could have been more with perfect execution downfield.
For this play to work, Kansas may need to get a little more creative with personnel. For example, maybe Leipold, Kotelnicki and company would use multiple tight ends instead of wide receivers in order to get their best blockers out there. Whatever the specific personnel grouping is, this is an example of how to play to your strengths. More playmakers on the field simultaneously means more conflicts for the defense, and KU has more than enough running back talent to put defenses in a bind.
For more on the "pony package," check out the work of film breakdown extraordinaire Dusty Evely.
PLAY 3
You may have noticed by now that your fair blogger is a fan of option plays, not to mention the obvious love of sets with multiple running backs. So, we may as well stay on brand for our final play, which comes to us from an old Kansas nemesis.
We get two views of this Coastal Carolina Chanticleers split-zone run here, one from the broadcast angle and one from behind the play. That split-zone concept is already creating the outside running lane, but it becomes an even more favorable opportunity to the offense thanks to the ball fake.
Almost the entire defense here is flowing to the right side of the play, with the offensive line blocking and the ball fake going in that direction. Watch how much that influences the linebackers in particular, who are now playing catch-up as soon as the running back catches the pitch. The near-side wide receiver seals the edge (reminiscent of Play 2 above), the tight end gets out in front of the play as a lead blocker and this run goes for a first down.
Again, the beauty of this concept is the ability to run multiple plays out of it. Most of the time it will turn out like this one from the 2021 Cure Bowl, but handing the ball to the first running back in the right situation could be a dangerous tendency breaker. Even mixing up which running back is in which role can open up new opportunities for the Jayhawks offensively. That's why it's so valuable to have two standout ball carriers in Neal and Hishaw who aren't just clones of one another, they each offer varied skill sets that make the offense more malleable.
On paper, Kansas should have one the most explosive offenses in the Big 12, if not the entire country. And given this staff's penchant for offensive creativity, you can assume there will be plenty of new looks, wrinkles and concepts on the field for the Jayhawks this year.
If they're looking for inspiration, though, it can't hurt to look for ideas from one of college football's greatest offensive minds, one of the NFL's best play designers and a team that's run the spread option as well as anyone in recent memory.
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