The Space Invaders defeated the fittingly titled Giants 13-6 on Sunday, in commemoration of Mother’s Day. An assistant coach for the Giants complimented our team during the game to me on the sideline for their speed and how well coached they were.

It was nearly a close thing though down the stretch and next week will likely be close as well. Unfortunately, I will not be there to help the Space Invaders overcome the final boss save for in what I imparted to them and through my son who will make the game.

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Or maybe it’s just returning the quarterback, nearly the entire secondary, and Marcus Freeman having won at least 10 games for three years in a row. Notre Dame is certainly humming on a different level now than they used to and are one of the primary benefactors of above board player payments…although they certainly were completely unable in the previous era.

The best argument for why Notre Dame is a playoff contender in 2026 is the schedule and the new proviso that makes them a lock for inclusion if they finish in the top 12. But I also took in their spring game to get a look at how things are progressing with the team, I don’t like to take things for granted.

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When I coached the Dino Nuggets this fall, I was going to miss the title week (why does this keep happening??) and so we practiced defense without my son at our Robber position since he was joining me out of town and my co-coach called plays so he could get used to calling offense. We were facing one of the weakest teams so it seemed like a safe risk, but we didn’t have enough talent and we threw back-to-back pick-6s late to lose. It still haunts me.

Same story here. We wanted to try a new defense (at least my son won’t miss the title game, I’m leaving him in Texas) and get co-coach (different guy) comfortable with calling offense from my playbook. So I formally wrote the playbook out (previously it was stored in my brain and communicated in the moment via a whiteboard) and we designed wristbands with the play-calls for the kids to wear and reference.

That way co-coach could call the game from the sideline and avoid breaking any league rules about non-official coaches being on the field. While he did that, I took the opportunity to finally coach defense for the first time in nearly a year, which I loved. I hope in Pop Warner next fall I can help on defense as a volunteer coach.

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Like many other sports, it is leveraged to maximize the playoffs, which are a big money draw and frankly a pretty great product. I know lots of people hate the NBA, but I always deeply enjoy the playoff format. The nature of the 7-game series leads to each team making tactical adjustments from game to game until someone runs out of answers, which can lead to big “momentum” swings in the games. Plus the last five minutes of any good game is usually really entertaining.

The problem is that the NBA has expanded the playoffs to include as many teams as possible, including with the play-in tournament, which has made the regular season pretty irrelevant. The top 10 teams in each 15 team conference get in. You only have to be average to participate.

That’s not a great thing to do when the season is 82 games over six months. It has all kinds of deleterious consequences on the produce. Teams don’t treat the regular season very seriously because it’s easy to pass GO and collect your $200 playoff admission and the challenge of finishing in the bottom to have a chance at a “Get out of jail free” card in the form of a top lottery pick is worth more than making the playoffs in any given year.

The longer regular season dilutes the product, delays the exciting playoffs, and also puts considerable wear and tear on the bodies of the players. The much more intense nature of the playoffs always leads to injury to star players which then dilutes the playoffs. But the NBA is as held hostage to debt-fueled spending as any other enterprise and is terrified to cut inventory and lose money and value for franchises and player salaries. Even if they had a way to cut regular season games and make up for it somewhere else, they’d probably do the “somewhere else” thing and keep the extended regular season for its financial value.

Let’s hope college football doesn’t make the same mistake one day, although it is nowhere near as maxed out for playoff emphasis as the pro sports leagues. Not yet at least.

All that to say, I pay some attention to the NBA in the regular season but a lot more in the playoffs where I have a theory and system on picking winners and losers. Now the first round has passed, I actually have enough of a feel for the field to apply my NBA “space force” criterion to the remaining teams and try to guess who will win this thing.

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I wasn’t quite inking them into the playoffs and through the league title game like others have done. The Big 12 has always been tricky and things were a little dicey at times even last year. I was close though.

This was a team that was clearly built to continue playing great defense and to run the dang ball with Cincinnati transfer Brendan Sorsby handling the rock as a dual-threat quarterback.

But if you didn’t hear, he’s been caught gambling on college football games and a near lock to lose at least this coming season of college football. I had studied his film in anticipation of breaking it down for y’all. He’s pretty good and his command of RPOs and run-options would have made their run game formidable enough to roll over most of the league when combined with this defense.

Now the Raiders are left with a JAG G5 transfer and my co-coach’s former lawnmower, Will Hammond, coming off an ACL injury last October. I really like Hammond and was initially confused about why they were so keen on spending big on a transfer until I heard the extent of his injury. It’s possible he could be back to lead them to a Big 12 title, but this certainly opens things up a bit.

Can anyone else in that league take advantage?

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The recent NFL Draft put a bow on Curt Cignetti’s roster-building achievement by selecting eight players from the title team.

Nary a blue chip in the group, save for Omar Cooper whose 89.53 rating would qualify him as a low 4-star. Also interesting, Cooper was inherited by Cignetti from the previous staff.

Within this group are three space force players and some really good veterans at positions in the middle of the field like center, fullback, quarterback, and running back. Indiana didn’t win the title because of elite play in the trenches featuring dominant athletes.

The departing linemen include Edge Mikail Kamara, who was a UDFA to the 49ers, and D-linemen (end or tackle) Stephen Daley who has yet to find a new home, likely because of his injury. Indiana’s offensive line is returning three starters, including left tackle Carter Smith. We’ll see if he is drafted next year, I doubt the others are coveted.

The right question to ask about next year’s Indiana team is whether the inauspicious origins of so many key players is an indicator that the Hoosiers could absolutely replace what they lost to the draft? Or a “lightning in the bottle” trick they can’t reduplicate?

Since their spring game was televised, I decided to have a look to see if I could discern the answer.

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It’s been one practice game and three real ones into the season, and we’re now positioned second in the league with a win over the previously 2-0 Giants, making us both 2-1 and just behind a team calling itself “the Cowgirls” that narrowly defeated us last week.

Our scores in those respective games:

• 21-6

• 20-6

• 13-20

• 7-6

That’s right. We won this week because we converted our extra point and the other team did not. That was the whole difference in the score.

I’d like to think we more or less controlled the game after taking the lead, which occurred on our second drive, and we were knocking on the door pretty often for the rest of the game on our offensive possessions. We could never quite punch it in though and had to rely on defensive dominance.

Thus far our most successful space invasion has been of the spaces opposing teams are trying to attack. It’s possible I’m just a better defensive coach than offensive, or maybe it’s just easier to unlock speed on defense than on offense. Here’s my story this week.

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Play Dime personnel and drop into zone coverages.

Some teams played more man coverage from sub-packages, but in two decades of watching Leach call offense I believe it was the zone teams that flummoxed him most. You had to be good at pattern-matching, but getting vision on the quarterback was better than trying to chase the Wes Welkers around through rubs and whip routes.

In the face of the Dime defenses they were getting, Leach, or maybe more likely his quarterbacks, were checking to inside zone a lot. Not a lot, a lot, but often enough. Jo’Quavious Marks and Dillon Johnson combined for a modest but solid total of 202 carries in 2022 which produced 1,070 yards at 5.3 ypc with nine rushing touchdowns. I noted at the time that his new access to athletic linemen in the Deep South was suddenly making basic runs a much more formidable constraint for his passing game.

But then he passed away.

Now they have Jeff Lebby calling the offense and have evolved from the Air Raid into the Veer and Shoot. For whatever reason, perhaps his closer connection to the originator Art Briles, Lebby really leans into the Veer. This coming season, Mississippi State is really going to bring it on the ground.

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Some of the takeaways you’ll read on this humble blog will probably also miss some key context. Some potential examples:

• “That play came against a walk-on.”

• “The defense sat their best pass-rushers.”

• “They didn’t call the schemes they’ve really been focusing on in a public scrimmage.”

The only way to effectively valuate spring games is just in terms of pure execution of fundamentals by guys expected to contribute in the coming season. Today we’re going to try and glean what we can from spring games by big time programs Georgia, Ohio State, and Michigan.

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We also had to take the field against the other top team in the league, at least as demonstrated by the early scores.

Finally, we had to do it while incorporating a late addition to the team and without the aid of our best player who couldn’t make it.

The plan going in was to pivot our offense to a fully unbalanced look, move under center, and take a ton of deep shots. By halftime we’d entirely scrapped the plan.

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Thus far in our flag season, I’ve been guilty of the second style. “Let’s run some plays we think could be good and hopefully we’ll score a bunch of points and win the game.”

Our flag season has been grievously abridged of late though. We had Easter off, then some thunderstorms cancelled our second game, delaying a series of both tactical and strategic adjustments I had been considering. This Sunday will be our first game in three weeks. Madness.

Naturally, I’ve used the time to develop a vision for how to control games and win the title this season that I hope will approach the level of strategy rather than just tactics. It came to me after studying the Alex Golesh Veer and Shoot vs Eric Morris Air Raid.

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As it happens, I’d recently taken in some of Miami’s defense against USF looking for examples of how Alex Golesh would try to formation teams into problems against the Bulls spread run game. I noticed early on that Miami’s answer to the RPO spread challenges of Golesh’s Veer and Shoot involved challenging the USF receivers outside and conceding 1-on-1s outside while positioning the safeties in the middle of the field.

When they took on the RPO-heavy Indiana Hoosiers, they had the same approach and in the second half when the cornerback position was bolstered by Xavier Lucas’ return (suspended for targeting from semifinal) they generated some real results.

Beyond the “are we playing one-high or two high?” disguises common to all modern defenses now that Vic Fangio’s defense has been in vogue for multiple years in the NFL, Miami also made great use of flat-footed safety techniques. Meaning, the safety would line up at depth and read the play for run or pass without dropping further back, allowing him to quickly trigger downhill as needed on runs or short passes.

Most everyone is incorporating that style more across different coverages and getting a defense in depth effect that is very difficult for spread offenses to counter. Keeping flatfoots on patrol duty in the middle of the field is a big part of this.

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I like to observe the process for teams and how well they execute the fundamentals of base-level schemes. If you see a defense effortlessly trading off receivers in their coverage schemes and maintaining good leverage on the ball, that’s a good sign. Similarly, if you see a quarterback moving around easily and finding open receivers with actual head movement, that’s a very good sign as well. Or if you see an O-line pick up a pressure or nail the concert of blocks on a counter play, that’s better than seeing the opposite.

Sometimes just seeing a new team coming together with different transfers and known commodities in key spots is really telling.

I’ve seen a few clips now from the Florida and Alabama spring games and have what may be unfair but at least somewhat qualified takeaways on how each team might perform this season.

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It was posed to me and Justin as a question and Justin guessed first, taking North Texas. I couldn’t think of a better answer.

But in fact, it was Alex Golesh’s Veer and Shoot down in South Florida that paced the nation. They also finished 30th in offensive FEI at .22 and scored 40.5 points per game. My impressions of that offense from watching them against Florida were that it was a bit more limited and dependent on quarterback Byrum Brown running the ball.

I decided to give Golesh, whom I had regarded previously as unlikely to make good at Auburn, another look. I also figured I might as well do so by watching the game where his offense proved their supremacy over North Texas in a 63-36 shootout victory.

That game was a terrific peek at two schools following two systems of spread offense and taking them in different directions. Eric Morris ran the Air Raid at North Texas and they finished 10th in offensive FEI while scoring 45.1 ppg, then he left to become the new head coach at Oklahoma State and took his quarterback Drew Mestemaker with him. Alex Golesh ran the Veer and Shoot of course and also took his quarterback, Byrum Brown, with him to Auburn.

Golesh certainly leveled up higher in pay and status, I suspect Morris is more likely to get a favorable second contract. Here’s how each rising coach is branching away from the other.

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The SEC made OU and Ole Miss annual rivals in the new schedule format and Kiffin was doing absolutely everything he could to make it personal, talking trash to the overall program and to individual players on the field after games. It was very entertaining, especially if you like watching Oklahoma lose.

It was also a fun matchup to study, because Brent Venables can produce some outstanding defensive gameplans which I generally find extremely insightful while Kiffin’s spread offense will regularly do the same. This last matchup was no exception. OU struggled to hang in there but did manage to take a lead in the third quarter before Ole Miss took back over in the fourth.

Here were a few notes I had in observing this contest.

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One of the more interesting notes from Connelly is that Ohio State is a pretty solid favorite for the 2026 season. Bill has been tweaking his formula in recent years in order to make it more robust in the era of the transfer portal with one of the biggest changes being to heavily de-emphasize talent inputs in the recruiting weight and instead put that weight on returning production.

Well, Ohio State is returning a lot of production and snaps across the offense and importing production from other schools on defense, which boosts the SP+ score on that side of the ball.

One of the biggest factors for this coming season is the addition of former NFL offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, coming to Ohio State from the wreckage of the Mike Tomlin era of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I have it on good authority that Smith is bringing a truly pro-style overhaul of the offense to Columbus. The success of that transition will obviously tell the story of the 2026 Buckeyes and have significant downstream effects on the rest of college football.

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Interpreting this intel is always very difficult, but I do happen to have a lot of experience in parsing the spring reports put together at various publications and have seen how the sausage is made.

This year I have specific questions to ask for different programs which can help reveal the truth of how things are coming along at various contenders. It is hard to overstate how helpful it is that everyone’s roster is basically set. There’s no spring portal nonsense to transform rosters going into the summer and everyone now has a chance to coach their team without fear of losing much of what they spent spring working on.

You figure that will help some programs more than others…

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That combined with my understanding of American settlement and migrations from Britain had me reasonably sure of what I’d find, but I didn’t get it quite right. Turns out the family history on my mom’s side of English ancestry and a lineage going back to William the Conqueror was a more telling factor than her more “borderer” (England-Scotland) maiden name.

But, I was right to suspect my ancestry was almost entirely British. My test is almost a perfect encapsulation of British history and its subsequent stream into America.

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All of the defensive coaches from the Nick Saban school tend to lean at least partially into man-match. Nick Saban himself famously called Cover 1 “the best coverage in ball” and his own compatriot Bill Belichick was always a big fan of man coverage as well.

When I first got started in flag football I initially reasoned that man coverage was the obvious right answer because otherwise I figured it’d be impossible to keep track of “who’s got who.” I was quickly disabused of that notion.

The Indiana Hoosiers just won the National Championship playing zone and now the pendulum seems to be swinging back somewhat after years of Saban influence on the college game.

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There’s always adjustments to be made as you get to know your own personnel and opponent, but this is far and away the most confident I’ve ever felt about what we’re doing and how it will work against what we end up facing.

It helps that this is year two of doing this and that I know the roster and quarterback in particular.

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