Complex Scheme

[The White Tiger]

Yeah sammy - these guys come out of the wood work when the Bucs lose.

Moving the ball - but turning it over on the road = loss.

If we couldn't move the ball AND we turned it over...then I'd worry.

Jags QB is a guy named Quinn Grey (Gray?)...bet we get a healthy dose of Taylor, Jones-Drew and maybe Toelfield...

If we can move the ball and get up early this gane may be decided early.

If not - it will be yet another slugfest.

I had the Detroit game marked as a win - and the Jacksonville game marked down as a loss - to get back to even we need to take one away from the Jags...

[sammy8887]

Agreed Buckeye,

If you're going to hold Gruden responsible for the fumbled handoff at midfield and the fumbled snap at the 1, then this guy's got an even tougher job than I thought.

[UnderwearGnome]

Not sure that coming off 422 yards of offense is the week to question it...

422 total yards + loss = nothing

Why does everyone keep talking about how many total yards we had against Detroit;  evidently, it wasn't enough yards to win

[sammy8887]

TAMPA - Running back Michael Bennett was an A student in high school. He made the Dean's List twice while earning a business degree in college. But he never learned a foreign language.
Until now.

Bennett, acquired by the Bucs in a trade 10 days ago, is like a wide-eyed freshman trying to master coach Jon Gruden's voluminous and unnaturally verbose playbook. It is unlike any Bennett has witnessed with three other teams in seven NFL seasons.

Compared to this, calculus was cake.

"Every other offense was words to numbers," said Bennett, 29, a former first-round pick by the Vikings in 2001. "This one, you have to deal with numbers, colors, go back to your ABCs again. It's like going from one-plus-one-is-two to pi-equals-this. It's challenging. It makes you study. It makes you learn. You need to know the offense to be out on the field."

Bennett has been immersed in the playbook since he arrived in Tampa, calling on all of his learning skills and techniques: visual, auditory and kinetic. He has watched more film than Roger Ebert, taken pages of notes during meetings, called plays out loud to himself and stayed after practice to go through the motions.

For last week's game at Detroit, Gruden's gameplan flipcard listed roughly 200 plays - about 150 passes and 50 runs. Bennett, after four days of nonstop study, was fluent in 20 of them.

This week, he expects that number to triple.

"It's like coming in during the middle of a movie," running backs coach Art Valero said. "You've got your popcorn in your hand, but you don't know who killed who and who that guy is."

The process began with a pass-concept film compiled by Valero that serves as a playbook primer. After years of teaching the offense to new players, Valero has a system. The running plays are easy; the pass plays a little tricky.

"When I grew up, somebody wrote something on a board and that's how you learned it," said Valero, 49. "We're in such a video world now with TV, Xbox, movies and computers, they have to see somebody do it on film or they can't comprehend it."

Each week, Bennett brings a brand new notebook to the facility. Given a written list of plays for the upcoming opponent by Valero, Bennett writes down his assignment for each play. During meetings, he takes notes as if he were in a history class lecture.

Too bad notebooks aren't allowed in the huddle.

To familiarize himself with how the plays sound, Bennett recites them aloud. Each play can contain as many 12 or 15 words, and quarterbacks spit them out rapid-fire. Valero calls the relationship between the words and the actions they trigger "mnemonic features."

Think Pavlov's dogs in football pads.

"If you hear the whole thing, you're lost in space. 'What applies to me?'" Valero said. "If you're an offensive lineman, you need to hear the run scheme, snap count. You don't care what the formation is. As a running back, you need to hear the formation, the motion, the protection, the route concept, and then be prepared to read your protection keys. That's got to become second-nature."

Bennett carried the ball three times against the Lions, including an 18-yard burst to the 1 yard line. In the huddle, quarterback Jeff Garcia called a pass play - the most complicated scenario for Bennett - but advised everyone of a possible run-play audible.

At the line of scrimmage, Garcia changed the play. All Bennett had to do was take the handoff and run.

"I was like, 'Thank you, thank you so much,' " Bennett said.

On Wednesday, when steady rain turned practice into a walk-through, Bennett took all the repetitions. It was the perfect learning tool. He made mistakes. He asked questions. Valero saw the light bulb come on over Bennett's head.

Not bad for 10 days.

"This is the type of offense where you have to take the reps and have your mess ups," said fullback B.J. Askew, who signed as a free agent in the offseason. "That's why we have to be here for spring and all summer. It didn't take me that long to learn it. I pretty much had it down pat in, oh, about two months."

Two months?

"But I wasn't in the submersion tank," Askew said. "That really overloads you. When I was a rookie, I tried to learn everything in one day, which is what he's doing. It's so much stuff, it all runs together."

Just when Bennett thinks he is gaining ground, Gruden changes the plays. The 20 he knew last week are not in the game plan for Sunday against the Jaguars.

"I haven't had a day off, and during the bye week I'll probably be here the whole time, too," Bennett said. "Tuesday night I stayed up until 2 trying to study the stuff from last week. You come in and say, 'Okay, I know this and I know that.' Well, that's all gone.

"With Gruden's offense, it's 110 plays, shred them and throw them away. We'll never run them again until next year. Bring on another 2,000 plays. It's a new week, so I have to learn a foreign language all over again."


http://www.sptimes.com/2007/10/26/Bucs/Bennett_races_to_get_.shtml

[Fresh]

Clayton has the softest hands in football today

[The White Tiger]

Yes - we hold Gruden responsible for the offensive breakdowns, but we don't hold Monte responsible for the defensive breakdowns...because well

...that's obviously Gruden's fault too...

[Boid Fink]

2002 - Brad Johnson and the dozen or so newcomers that Gruden brought in that year seemed to pick it up pretty well. 2005 personell seemed to pick it up pretty well.

In 2002 the offense was ranked #24 in yardage and #18 in points. In 2005 the offense was ranked #23 in yards and #20 in points.

So you've proven your own point regarding scoring is meaningless - as we won both years. Conversely, in 2003 when we went 7-9, the Bucs were 18th in points and 11th in yards. And in 2000 under Tony Dungy we were ranked 7th in points and 21st in yards - and was the second year in a row we were bounced in the first round of the playoffs by the Eagle's.

Again your data is skewed. Schottenheimer has made a living by winning 9 or 10 games while either missing the playoffs or losing in this first round. He is fired routinely for not getting along with his GM, and for getting close but not being able to win the big one. No thanks - we had one of those guys already.

If you want a real strange data point - take a look at where Gruden's Raiders finished each year. THAT was an offense. He did not have a scoring defense - that is what this team used to do and has stopped doing. We're fixing that. Kinda speaks to my point about it being a personnell thing - but you keep making those great spurious correlations aboput how points and yards = superbowls. Let me know when those two last intersected for the Bucs....

Those spurious correlations will sink you everytime FRG.

Good post.

[The White Tiger]

2002 - Brad Johnson and the dozen or so newcomers that Gruden brought in that year seemed to pick it up pretty well. 2005 personell seemed to pick it up pretty well.

In 2002 the offense was ranked #24 in yardage and #18 in points. In 2005 the offense was ranked #23 in yards and #20 in points.

So you've proven your own point regarding scoring is meaningless - as we won both years. Conversely, in 2003 when we went 7-9, the Bucs were 18th in points and 11th in yards. And in 2000 under Tony Dungy we were ranked 7th in points and 21st in yards - and was the second year in a row we were bounced in the first round of the playoffs by the Eagle's.

Again your data is skewed. Schottenheimer has made a living by winning 9 or 10 games while either missing the playoffs or losing in this first round. He is fired routinely for not getting along with his GM, and for getting close but not being able to win the big one. No thanks - we had one of those guys already.

If you want a real strange data point - take a look at where Gruden's Raiders finished each year. THAT was an offense. He did not have a scoring defense - that is what this team used to do and has stopped doing. We're fixing that. Kinda speaks to my point about it being a personnell thing - but you keep making those great spurious correlations aboput how points and yards = superbowls. Let me know when those two last intersected for the Bucs....

Those spurious correlations will sink you everytime FRG.

[sammy8887]

Not sure that coming off 422 yards of offense is the week to question it...

422 total yards + loss = nothing

Why does everyone keep talking about how many total yards we had against Detroit; evidently, it wasn't enough yards to win

I was going to respond, but then I saw this thread was not the only one you did a "drive-by" on, so...

Have a lovely, lovely day.

[OpTiOnMaStA]

That is a good article. I still want to see more production, though.

[stereochemistry]

Here's a fun little read from the 2005 season: Jon Gruden's Passing Attack against the Green Bay Packers.

http://www.footballoutsiders.com/print/2956/

[dbucfan]

Would have thought Madden was the issue...

[Biggs3535]

It was an argument for those that say the offense sucks, sir.

[The Q]

The scheme is complex more when the bucs lose. When they win, the scheme is not much in question. Therefore the scheme is in direct correlation to wins and losses. With some good luck or good fortune, the BUCS beat the Lions - easily. Ah, but that did not happen, so now the bugs come out of the woodwork and the venom starts slowly seeps out to cut down Jon Gruden. SSDD.

[ufojoe]

Great article. Some very good points.

>watch Clayton closely and you’ll see that he’s the best blocking receiver in football.

I think we're really seeing this now.  If he can regain any of his old form (and stay healthy)
he will be here for a long time. IF...