2021 Must Squatch Bundle

       The Tennessee Volunteers had a rebirth in the 2021 college football season.  This rebirth led to a 7-6 overall record and a trip to the Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tennessee.  The rebirth of this program is centered around Head Coach Josh Heupel and his dynamic offense that he brought to Knoxville, Tennessee.  The offense that Tennessee has built under first year offensive coordinator Alex Golesh ranked number nine in the nation this year.  Over a 13 game span Tennessee ran 952 offensive plays that gained 6,174 yards.  They averaged 6.49 yards per play for the entire season.  The offense also accounted for 63 total touchdowns and averaged 474.9 yards per game.

       This offensive success is what led to our study of the Volunteer offense.  We wanted to know what makes them tick.  What we uncovered from our study was actually pretty surprising to us.  Tennessee strives to play with a break-neck pace when they are on offense.  Because of their up tempo offense they are able to average 73 plays a game.  This speed clearly causes problems for many opposing defenses because it will quickly wear you down as a defender.  

The second aspect of the Tennessee offense that we quickly noticed, and loved, is how they use horizontal space on the field.  The splits that they incorporate for their wide receivers force a defense to spread out much wider than they are accustomed to.  Tennessee does not just widen out their wide receivers as a window dressing, they have certain plays that are called to take advantage of how a defense reacts to this creation of extra space.  

The third thing we found is that Tennessee is very simple in what they do.  The Volunteers do not carry a lot of different schemes into a game.  Rather than schemes they rely on the tempo that they play with along with their unique horizontally stretched formations to keep a defense off balance.  This is not to say that they are a very generic, cookie cutter offense; they are far from it.  Tennessee likes to fully develop their schemes and find multiple ways to run the same play that shows their creativity as a coaching staff.  For example, their favorite run play from the season was counter.  They presented this scheme to defenses in nine different ways.  The offensive line was still blocking the same base scheme but they found as many ways as possible to dress the play up.  This creativity is one thing we believe sets Tennessee apart and why we chose to study them.
 

      When reading through this PDF we hope you are able to appreciate the Tennessee offense like we have grown to.  The goal of this PDF is to help coaches and fans better understand what one of the top ten offenses in the country is doing that leads to their success.  We hope that you are able to either incorporate some of the things that makes the Volunteer offense so successful into your team's offense or that you at least leave with a better understanding of the offense that Josh Huepel and Alex Golesh have built.

This PDF contains 62 plays from the 2021 Oregon Ducks Offense. Each play is diagrammed, explained, and there is a QR code to scan for immediate access to film of that play. (Wide and End Zone Angles)

For our second deep dive into a particular team we at Must Squatch decided to choose the Oregon Ducks.  Oregon was #42 in scoring offense in 2021 and was ranked #50 in total offense for the year.  While Oregon may not be at the top of the ladder statistically they were able to do some creative things on offense that quickly drew our interest.

Joe Moorhead (now the head coach at Akron) was the offensive coordinator for the 2021 Oregon Duck.  Moorhead has had many stops along the way in his coaching career, most notable are as the Head Coach at Fordham from 2012-2015.  After Fordham he went to Penn. State as the offensive coordinator from 2016-2017.  After Penn.State he became the Head Coach at Mississippi State from 2018-2019.  From there Moorhead went to Oregon from 2020 to 2021 as the offensive coordinator.  As previously mentioned he is now the Head Coach at Akron and will be bringing his dynamic offense to MACtion.

As a play caller Moorhead likes to utilize unbalanced formations, varying tempo, and simple RPO’s that his offense can execute with ease.  At the FBS level you do not see a lot of teams that will get into quads and trips closed to the extent that Moorheaad does, this is what drew us to study his offense.

For this book we chose to break down eight total games of the 2021 Ducks Offense.  These eight games include Fresno State, Arizona, Utah for the PAC 12 championship, UCLA, Stanford, Ohio State, Washington, Washington State.  We feel that these eight games provide a perfect snapshot of Joe Moorhead and his offense.  The Ohio State game is probably when Oregon looked its best during the year.  This game by itself could be a book on its own.

We hope you enjoy this second installment from Must Squatch Football.  We have enjoyed studying the Oregon offense and we believe that there are many concepts from this offense that you can easily incorporate into your own team’s offense.