A-11 Offense

September 26, 2008 9:10 PM

The A-11 Offense (All Eleven Players Potentially Eligible) is a new, scrimmage-kick formation based, offensive system in football... The Football Math.
posted by bigmusic (33 comments total)

I can't wait until we have majority popular intelligence games.
posted by Mr_Zero at 9:12 PM on September 26, 2008

I can't wait until we have majority popular intelligence games.

Your braining embaffles me. Must be all the football I watch.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 9:20 PM on September 26, 2008 [2 favorites]

Which wobegon NFL team will be the first to try this and how soon? Assuming the NFL doesn't ban it first. I predict Zorn will do it in Washington. He loves trick plays and he's facing the cowboys this weekend.
posted by humanfont at 9:31 PM on September 26, 2008

Why doesn't blitz after blitz work? Those QBs look pretty naked.
posted by popechunk at 9:39 PM on September 26, 2008

Which wobegon NFL team will be the first to try this and how soon?

First link: "NFL: Cannot be used"
posted by Chuckles at 9:43 PM on September 26, 2008

It's already not possible under NFL rules, I believe.
posted by aaronetc at 9:43 PM on September 26, 2008

"It's already not possible under NFL rules, I believe."

That's what bugs me about football, arbitrary rules like that involving jersey numbers. It would be like a defenseman in hockey not being allowed to shoot on goal, or a pitcher not being allowed to tag a runner out.
posted by Space Coyote at 9:58 PM on September 26, 2008

There is already a wikipedia entry on this. It's illegal in the NCAA and NFL, and according to the NPR story, it's already illegal in high school in some states, with a possible nationwide ban upcoming.
posted by Stylus Happenstance at 10:42 PM on September 26, 2008

If (big if) it wasn't already illegal in the NFL, it would never work. It's a gimmick that allows teams lacking certain skill sets to be that scrappy, plays-its-heart-out team that all the disney folks love. I would imagine, to field a decent A-11 offense, you'd essentially need one or two actual offensive linemen (check), a mobile quarterback who can pass accurately (in the NFL, how many are there that you would say are really good), a running back who can work with little to no blocking (open field runner), who can also pass well, and then, what, 7 tight ends? I mean, they need to be able to block, every play, and also need to be able to catch. Are there 7 quality tight ends in football? I don't think so.

The opposing defense would have faster corners, linebackers that are likely stronger, and, in the NFL, freakishly fast defensive ends that would be on top of the QB before the spread wide TE had a chance to come back to block. I'd pay good money to see the NFL allow the Redskins to use this offense. Good, good money. Against my Bears. Lance Briggs would have a field day, as would any one of the Bears linemen.

Shame its illegal.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:45 PM on September 26, 2008 [2 favorites]

(I once was a lead designer of a licensed NFL game. Sure the game never shipped, but I learned a ton about the mechanics of football.)

A-11 as such wouldn't work in NFL even if it was legal. Players are smarter, especially the defensive backs that would need to do the extra work to defend against this. But there is something happening right now that approximates A-11. The Miami Dolphins unleashed the "Wildcat" formation last week to beat the New England Patriots, in Foxboro. This formation puts the quarterback out as a receiver and directly snaps the ball to a running back who might be in motion or who might throw the ball himself.

The Patriots didn't just lose, they got crushed at home 38-13. Something that basically doesn't ever happen. The Pats had won 21 straight regular season games, stretching back to 2006, before this loss. Miami employed the Wildcat because they had lost 20 out of the last 21 games, coming off a 1-15 season last year, and they had nothing to lose.

Did Brady's injury help the Dolphins? Sure. But that doesn't explain the defense giving up five touchdowns.
posted by andreaazure at 12:13 AM on September 27, 2008 [2 favorites]

The thing about that wildcat offense is that it worked last week for the Dolphins, I'd be pretty surprised to see them either try it again, or if they do, have any kind of success with it. Fluke and gimmick offenses don't work in the NFL, or they'd be used much more often. The NFL adopts what works, and it spurns what doesn't. The Dolphins were desperate, and evidently they have more faith in the gimmick than in their qb. Doesn't bode well for either, I imagine.

Oh, and from time to time (Fred Miller, anyone?) NFL players just hit that moment where the just suck. They hit that point, and overnight, they're never as good as they were. The Pats have been stockpiling old guys for years. I imagine part of it is that one, or more, of their key defensive players just got old in the offseason. Brady or no, the Pats were likely to suck this year.
posted by Ghidorah at 12:34 AM on September 27, 2008

being more of a 'worldgame' football player (soccer) than a US 'football' player, I had no idea just how rigid and structured the game was!!

you mean ordinarily there are only 5 players on the field who are allowed to catch a pass? !

jesus... no-wonder its always seemed so boring to watch. half the game is predetermined before anyone even gets pon the field.
posted by mary8nne at 5:49 AM on September 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

The forward pass was added to football (in part, backed by Teddy Roosevelt) in order to reduce the injuries that the players were suffering- it used to be a plodding, running and shoving game. I thought it was particularly interesting that none of their offensive players had suffered a significant injury since switching to the A-11.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:09 AM on September 27, 2008

being more of a 'worldgame' football player (soccer) than a US 'football' player, I had no idea just how rigid and structured the game was!!

you mean ordinarily there are only 5 players on the field who are allowed to catch a pass? !

Well, six. One of them is typically the passer, but he is allowed to catch a pass (and occasionally does).

jesus... no-wonder its always seemed so boring to watch. half the game is predetermined before anyone even gets pon the field.

Yeah, um, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Yes, about half the players aren't usually allowed to catch a pass. Yes, plays are often highly scripted. But one of the most important factors for success in football is making the defense not know what you're going to do.

The idea that professional defenses and defensive coordinators are constantly struggling to predict what the offense will do on any given play, while you, a person who basically has no idea how the game is played, is bored by it because it's so obvious what's going to happen is flatly ludicrous.
posted by Flunkie at 6:14 AM on September 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

OK EVERYBODY GO OUT FOR A PASS has been the standard pass play in sandlot football since forever, especially when all the players are age 8-10. That's the main reason I prefer it to the kind where you actually have to dress up in some weird 'Murican-football costume to play.


> The idea that professional defenses and defensive coordinators are constantly struggling
> to predict what the offense will do on any given play, while you, a person who basically
> has no idea how the game is played, is bored by it because it's so obvious what's going
> to happen is flatly ludicrous.

Super-specialists see tiny differences as important. "Wow, I thought that WR would make his cut eighteen inches before he did. That was totally unexpected! Their O Coordinator is a genius!" The principle is familiar from the Kama Sutra, where #473 is exactly like #472 only with your fingers crossed, and to the author/compiler this is stop-the-presses enough to make #473 a totally different act--while nonspecialists (me, e.g.) may expect more radical differences before we get all "Holy spaghetti, are you kidding me? That's dangerous!" There was a young lady from Norway, who hung by her heels in a doorway.
posted by jfuller at 6:40 AM on September 27, 2008 [3 favorites]

You clearly aren't doing #473 right.
posted by Flunkie at 6:42 AM on September 27, 2008 [6 favorites]

I am a football coach; we studied this last season in Texas. The coach who invented this is 0-3 this season with it.
posted by Senator at 7:28 AM on September 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

Senator makes my point exactly. Football is a game of study. When nobody had ever seen it before, there were no plays for the defense to react to it. I imagine there was some confused highschool d on the field, clinging to its 4-3 formation, wondering what the hell happened. This year, they come back, their coaches have properly prepared them, and they think "Oh, these jokers again. We're going to crush them." And then they do just that.

In that car-crash-don't-want-to-but-i-gotta way, I might try to catch the Dolphins' game this weekend. It's going to be ugly.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:55 AM on September 27, 2008

What makes me think Ghidorah and Flunkie are football junkies?
posted by notreally at 9:28 AM on September 27, 2008

American football. It ain't hockey.
posted by Hoopo at 9:58 AM on September 27, 2008

Not really, notreally. I mean, I like football just fine, but I'm more a baseball kind of guy, myself. But the idea that football is boring due to being easily predictable is ridiculous. Outright ridiculous.

I submit that the reason that mary8nne finds football boring is almost certainly something else, something entirely different. And, whatever that reason is, it's likely not due to some inherent superiority of her personal favorite sport.
posted by Flunkie at 10:24 AM on September 27, 2008

The problem with the "Wild cat" play that Miami used is that its novelty can wear off relatively quickly. I know this because I'm at Arkansas, where David Lee picked it up and took it to the Dolphins. Arkansas got it when it hired Gus Malzahn, who had tweaked the single wing formation.

More specifically, you have to depend on your running back (or whomever gets the ball other than the quarterback) having the ability and accuracy not to throw the ball away. Darren McFadden was our main go to guy on this play last year, and while he managed some touch down passes, he also had a lot worse accuracy than your standard quarterback. More so, after a defense see's it or prepares for it, it's not that hard to stop.
posted by Atreides at 10:34 AM on September 27, 2008

I think the A-11 looks awesome. Have any college teams run it this season? it's legal on 4th down.
posted by empath at 11:08 AM on September 27, 2008

One problem with the A-11 offense is that, especially in HS football, you aren't likely to have ten guys on the field that can really catch the ball. Plus the obvious gimmicky nature of it doesn't lend to continuing success.

I would like to see someone try to pull off a rugby-style offense, with a bunch of bruisers carrying and handing off or lateraling the ball. It seems that it should be possible, but it's very personnel-dependent. If you had, say, 10 of Brandon Jacobs, you could do this. Seriously though, you could do this with a regular-looking offensive alignment, but the WRs and TE would be RBs. It would be really cool to see a guy take a handoff, pitch the ball, throw a block, get the ball back, etc. Has anyone tried this anywhere besides the sandlot?
posted by Mister_A at 12:09 PM on September 27, 2008

Which wobegon NFL team will be the first to try this and how soon?

The NFL lets sharks play football?
posted by onya at 2:28 PM on September 27, 2008

In that car-crash-don't-want-to-but-i-gotta way, I might try to catch the Dolphins' game this weekend. It's going to be ugly.

There isn't one. You'll have to settle for camping out near a risky curve along the Interstate and hoping it gets interesting.
posted by Bokononist at 2:51 PM on September 27, 2008

After watching the video, it seems to help that Piedmont's players are fast.
posted by Pollomacho at 5:21 PM on September 27, 2008

Bokonist points out for me that I'm not really that much of a football junkie. Living overseas, it's next to impossible to watch games without resorting to bittorrent. Only one or two games are played on tv here live, then recordings are staggered throughout the week, up to five or six days after the actual game. To me, if you know the score of the game, football is totally unwatchable. All of those pauses that ratchet up the tension in the game become a death march to an inevitability.

On the other hand, my decision to wait until the Bears' game is posted each week improves my productivity in nearly all facets of my life, as I have to avoid nearly every one of my bookmarks (sports, newspapers, etc) until I've got the game. That pretty much leaves this place as one of the only sites I can safely check from Monday-Wednesday each week.

Looking back over this, I guess this counts as denial, doesn't it?
posted by Ghidorah at 5:55 PM on September 27, 2008

half the game is predetermined before anyone even gets pon the field.

Which half?
posted by dirigibleman at 6:20 PM on September 27, 2008

Most sports offer very little chance for innovation that could redefine the game (say, like the Fosbury Flop redefined high-jumping). It's a pity, because other types of activity from science to music to business to war have always become more interesting when new models, new techniques, and new ideas were allowed to play out.
posted by twoleftfeet at 9:04 PM on September 27, 2008

The Patriots didn't just lose, they got crushed at home 38-13. Something that basically doesn't ever happen.

Right, which will happen exactly once to an opponent of the Miami Dolphins. I spent half of last week arguing about this over on the ESPN boards, so if the level of discourse is lower than you'd expect, bear with me.

The Single Wing attack that Miami loosed on New England was essentially a series of trick plays, which were all predicated on the fact that they were facing eleven guys who had had 'the basics' ground into their heads by an angry Bill Belichick, to the point where novelty in defense most likely didn't occur naturally to any of them. When Chad Pennington lined up as the slot receiver, they had no earthly clue how to react, because seriously, WTF? This was hilarious to watch in a sports bar in Boston (I was in a Giants jersey, so it was already kind of a rough scene), but I'm frankly surprised that it even continued to work into the second half, because the counter to it is pretty obvious: when the quarterback lines up as a receiver or a back, he's not subject to the NFL's mollycoddling QB protection rules, so you take one of your slower, bruising, pass-rushing OLBs and tell him he's going to run a lap for every down where he doesn't drive a shoulder into the chest of Chad Pennington. As long as the defense is keyed to the fact that they need to maintain their assignments, and that the QB is an eligible receiver who needs to be covered, the whole formation falls apart, because you know before the snap which way the play is going to go. (Hint: not to the side without an offensive tackle lined up)

Miami will never again get the formation to work against an NFL team, because now opposing defensive coordinators, the week they play Miami, will spend an hour in Thursday practice going over the defensive scheme needed to stop it, and if the Dolphins try it more than a couple of times, Pennington's going to have his arm ripped bodily out of his surgically-repaired shoulder.

The situation with the A-11 is similar. I'd love to see it legalized, because it would make for precisely one game that NFL Films can replay for the next decade with Yakity Sax playing over it, and maybe it'll be Jim Zorn embarrassing the Eagles or something. But the counter to it is also pretty clear: there's only one guy on the field who's a serious threat to pass the ball (yes, I know there are a handful of WRs and HBs who played quarterback in high school, but you'll notice that most of them don't have stellar passer ratings against defensive backs who play in the pros), and he's an 8-figure investment for his team, and he's only defended by 2 bona fide offensive linemen. Even if the defense has to spread their formation into an 8-DB scheme to make up for the pass-wacky playcalling, that's still three down linemen rushing the QB, and if two of them are athletic defensive ends, they're going to get to the QB before any of the weird screen-reverse-bootleg stuff has time to develop. Even if they don't, you can be sure that the rest of the defense on the field knows roughly what to expect and how to defend it (yes, all 11 players are potentially eligible, but something tells me the team's 6th-string tight end might warrant less attention than the running back), and any defensive coordinator worth his salt will have a few tricks of his own if the offense keeps calling gadget offensive plays.

There's a chance--just the slightest of chances, mind you--that this would work if a team were to spend three years retooling for it, and drafting personnel who fit into the A-11 scheme. I think Ghidorah had it right--your offensive roster would have 7 tight ends on it, and you would draft for flexibility rather than single-dimensional players. But that's where it also falls apart: there are maybe 3 guys in the NFL right now who can do it all, and they all have 50 million dollar contracts and were drafted in the top 10 of their respective draft classes. Yes, this would be a badass formation with 3 Vince Youngs lined up across the backfield, but there is a surprising lack of Vince Youngs in the league, and most coaches with a Vince Young on their roster would be understandably hesitant to use him as a runner, because opposing linebackers are paid to take him out at the knees. Nor are there enough wide receivers with an arm to make it worth looking for them. (you're going to build your offense around Randel-El or Matt Jones? Really?) Point of fact is, the NFL is all about specialization, and having your 7 tight ends on the field to run the 5th screen of the drive is going to start to seem like a bad idea when a pure pass-rusher is able to fight off three of them to plant your star quarterback face-up on the Texas turf.
posted by Mayor West at 6:02 AM on September 29, 2008

As an ex high-school tight end, I wholeheartedly support the widespread adoption of this formation.
posted by rokusan at 7:23 AM on September 29, 2008

jesus... no-wonder its always seemed so boring to watch. half the game is predetermined before anyone even gets pon the field.

Much the same way that sonnets are boring since they all have to have fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with one of only a few permissible rhyme schemes.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:09 AM on September 29, 2008