Profile of a winning playoff team
What does it take to win the College Football Playoffs and which teams have "it" in 2022?"
I’ve been pretty good at projecting the playoff battles of college football in the last few years ever since developing a prism for viewing how these games differ from the regular season of college football.
This might all change in the coming years as we head toward super divisions and Champions League soccer dynamics alter the architecture of the sport, but for the last few years my sense has rang true.
Here’s the gist of my approach.
College football conferences are pretty regional and the winners of different conferences tend to win by marshaling resources to build teams who stand out over their regional peers with their athletes at the space force positions (left tackle, deep threat receiver, island cornerback, Edge rusher) and perhaps more consistently their superior size and cohesion in the trenches.
In the trenches in particular, the blue blood programs of college football tend to be able to stand out. It takes some serious scratch to field a team with NFL-caliber athletes across the offensive and defensive lines. Big kids who are athletic AND 250+ pounds are rare and thus a precious commodity. To assemble the numbers of them needed to truly dominate the trenches is very difficult and smaller programs rarely even try.
Blue blood strategy tends to revolve around maximizing that advantage. IE, power run game or D-line driven defensive strategy. Georgia is a great example of this, they play a style of defense designed to defer stress to their front while keeping their secondary back and their offense is built around double-tight end sets and inside zone runs. Michigan now employs a remarkably similar strategy.
So what happens when the heavyweights meet in the playoffs? After a month of preparation and scouting for each other? It’s harder to win with what brought you there.
When the run game dries up
Given the extra time to prepare and get healthy everyone enjoys before the playoffs, it’s generally hard to win playoff games with the run game. The other team is facing you because they were good enough in the trenches to control games well enough to avoid more than one (generally) loss on their schedule. So they have some big boys up front who are hard to push around and their whole defense can triangulate the angles and positions of your running back from down to down thanks to weeks of film study and practice. Or worse, they can sit back and take away big plays.
Remember the axiom,
So, a team with a highly developed spread passing game has a trump card for the playoffs, both at the collegiate and NFL levels. Look back at the recent champions and you’ll see it.
2021: Georgia had a decent dropback game, Alabama had a great one until they lost Jameson Williams and John Metchie to injury. Once those two went down, along with Bama’s top corners, they were cooked.
2020: Alabama had a solid dropback game, no one else had anything, and COVID impacted the season quite a bit.
2019: LSU fielded the most lethal dropback offense I’ve ever seen at the college level.
2018: Clemson had a strong dropback game which torched Alabama on 3rd downs and blew them out.
2017: Georgia had a decent dropback game, Alabama didn’t but took over when Tua Tagovailoa came in and blew up a gameplan designed to stuff the more passing-limited Jalen Hurts.
2016: Clemson took down Alabama with Deshaun Watson throwing endless passes from spread formations with a flexed out tight end.
2015/2014: Both won by the best designed, traditional college teams. Alabama and Ohio State both paired a vertical passing game with amazing power run games featuring Derrick Henry and Zeke Elliot respectively.
The “power run and deep passing” formula is a classic one, but it can run into diminishing returns in the playoffs. I have more examples…
2020: Ohio State had the smashmouth spread formula down pretty well (power runs, deep shots down the field) and Alabama stuffed them with two-high coverages, including blitzes.
2019: Clemson was getting popped early by Ohio State’s power run game and switched to the 3-2-6 Flyover defense and stuffed them down the stretch to pull out the win.
2018: Alabama’s RPO spread was stopped up when Clemson played two-high (with some disguise that generated a pick-6) and forced them to try and work the way down the field with runs against honest boxes. Once they reached the red zone, Bama couldn’t overwhelm the tight proximity of the Clemson defensive backs and the Tigers’ NFL-rich defensive line.
2017: Alabama stuffed everyone playing nickel and dime with Minkah Fitzpatrick at nickel or even mike (Money-backer) while Daron Payne held down the front.
In 2022 Georgia and Michigan have both designed their defenses this season to play two-high and still be able to hold up in the run game thanks to big, effective fronts. They’ll do the bend don’t break routine while mixing in some disguises to help inflict negative plays or turnovers.
If you want to move the ball efficiently against good two-high defense, you’re probably going to need to throw it, particularly with a progression passing game. The progression passing game is the hardest dimension of football to execute and thus the hardest to defend. Even in the NFL today everyone is falling in love with “shot plays” where you scheme up a particular route or receiver to some space and a matchup to work against and then throw him open. That’s great as far as it goes, until you face a team who has the knowhow to bracket your top guy and make your quarterback progress to other options (cough, Michigan vs Ohio State, cough).
How are you going to dial up shot plays when the defense is disguising their coverage and dropping into two-high shells with one or both safeties dropping 20 yards off the ball? The quarterback can’t just stare down a deep route and throw it open, deep safeties can figure it out and get to their spots and the quarterback doesn’t have good secondary options save perhaps for a late check down.
A progression passing game solves for this issue by attacking the linebackers underneath and allowing the offense to slowly (not as slowly as the run game) chew up a defense with reasonable efficiency.
You could argue an underneath option route game is comparable to the deep shot style of offense, but it requires more skill. The deep shot game you just need to be able to protect with max protection on play-action and send someone fast down the field to run to open grass. The quarterback does needs arm talent.
The option route game underneath requires a receiver with real quickness and technical skill working from spread sets that allow him to hunt matchups on weaker coverage defenders. You also need good protection with only five or six blocking for the quarterback and the quarterback needs to be able to read hot against the blitz, identify coverages and leverages, and make progressions.
It works quite well, but it’s a chain-moving tactic, not a touchdown-scoring method. In the NFL it’s a must, as we’ll discuss come NFL playoff time, but for college teams it hardly seems worth the high investment. Until you reach the playoffs…then it’s invaluable.
The Deshaun Watson Tigers and the Joe Burrow other Tigers were all quite good at it and no one had answers. The 2020 Florida Gators were great as well but they couldn’t play championship defense so they took a bunch of disqualifying losses. But no one gave Alabama more trouble that year.
A great, pro-style passing game can win the championship. Otherwise, you have to be better at a more traditional formula than everyone else, which generally means mastering the traditional triumvirate of…
Defense
Power run game
Deep threat passing
The traditional triumvirate
Georgia and Michigan have some pro-style passing dimensions, but both have tended to lean more into power runs and some deep threat shots. Both also have a firm mastery of modern defense.
All of our favorite axioms apply for playing great defense in today’s game. Namely, “the rule of three…”
…and “great defenses stop the run with two-high.”
Both tend to rely on the following formula for success:
NFL caliber athletes up front on the D-line.
At least one elite athlete at cornerback and two other defensive backs in the secondary who can play high level coverage, 1-on-1 down the field.
I’ve noticed a trend at every level of the game which is rarely appreciated properly. Linebacker and safety do not require elite athletes for success, they’re really more mental positions. Playing fast is invaluable, but you can’t play fast at those positions unless you know how to process multiple inputs quickly and react.
The guys who can do that and the guys who run a <4.6 40 with a body designed for football don’t overlap that much. Many of the best safeties and inside linebackers are not elite athletes but elite football thinkers. If you are both, even better, but the thinking part has to come first.
I routinely note, with regards to Texas’ endless struggles to find great inside linebackers at the high school level, that the dudes who have eye-catching athleticism in 6-foot-2, 200+ pound bodies don’t play inside linebacker in high school at Texas. If you have a guy like that in high school, you want him at Edge, maybe at safety, or more likely on offense at running back, receiver, or quarterback.
You see the same dynamic play out at every level. It’s hilarious to me that James Franklin used Micah Parsons at inside linebacker as much as he did at Penn State. When the Cowboys drafted him in the first round I noted, “unless they’re playing him on the Edge, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.” Well, it’s worked out for obvious reasons, dude moves all over but he’s primarily an Edge.
Anyways, well trained (upperclassmen) or otherwise preternaturally smart linebackers and safeties are the ticket, they needn’t be elite athletes and they rarely are. Cornerback and Edge, the space force positions, require elite athletes and at defensive tackle you need either well trained big dudes with grown man strength or yet even more freakish athletes.
Building a power run game with a deep threat passing dimension is less tricky than building an elite pro-style, progression passing game…but it’s not easy.
Boise State, referenced in the article above, had dynamic space force units and then a bunch of sons of potato farmers elsewhere and they had the formula down pat. Their methods are now more mainstream for coaches like Kalen DeBoer or Steve Sarkisian, using multi-tight end sets and moving into different formations to cause leverage problems for the defense paired with deep shots over the top.
As I keep mentioning, the trouble with the power run game comes when you have to execute it against a playoff opponent who’s recruited future pros across their defensive line. There are lots of clips from Georgia games over the last two years which reveal the challenge. This one is as good as any:
Michigan’s walk-on center Andrew Vastardis wasn’t a particularly limiting factor for the Wolverines in 2021 and their counter scheme pulling a center had been invaluable for creating angles and leverage…then they reached the playoffs, it was no. 1 overall pick Travon Walker waiting there, and things stopped working.
The 2021 Wolverines also lacked the deep threat passing dimension which helps create angles and leverage up front by generating hesitation from the back end, not that it mattered on this rep. The Bulldogs had it to some degree, certainly Stetson Bennett made Alabama pay for having to field back-up cornerbacks in the title game and that’s largely why they won.
Building out the schematics of a championship defense, power run game, and deep threat passing attack aren’t necessarily complicated. The main trick is having the talent. Being able to consistently plow a road for steady gains on the ground, getting open and hitting targets down the field, and fielding a defense with multiple coverage defenders and a stout defensive front all require the recruitment and development of size and athleticism.
This is why you routinely see the programs who recruit at the highest levels in the playoffs, winning the title. They can recruit enough depth to expose the potato farmers on your offensive line, or to challenge your 4.4 receiver, or to bracket him with a safety without getting mauled by your run game.
So one of our key points to study with this playoff field is whether any team has the “trump card,” a pro-style passing game which gives them a leg up in outscoring everyone else, or whether this will come down to who has the boys to assemble the traditional triumvirate.
We’ll start with the bottom seeds and work our way up. First, Ohio State.
IAN….great stuff, brutha!
A question on Space Force - do you define it as the position they play or the impact they have? In terms of pure positions, UGA lost it’s only NFL caliber Edge (Nolan Smith) for the season, and doesn’t have the WRs at the level you routinely mention (Jameson Williams, Marvin Harrison Jr.). Instead UGA’s two best players are a DT (Jalen Carter) and a TE (Brock Bowers), but they essentially have the same effect of pressuring the QB and creating headaches for DCs, respectively. Are these Space Force or tenches guys, or does their hybrid status make them even more impactful?