Spread 301: The supremacy of the outside receiver
Great slot receivers are a dime a dozen in the college game. The real stars stand out for what they can do outside the hash marks.
Early on in the history of this blog, I wrote the following piece detailing a dynamic of the college game I feel is routinely overlooked.
Spread 201: Your quarterback chooses the tight end
Tight end is one of most important positions for an offense, tell me the skill set of a team’s tight end and I can probably define the identity of the offense. In a spread offense in particular, the tight end is basically the table-setter for the quarterback. Whatever your signal-caller does best should inform the skill set of your tight end and whether or not those skills match will set the ceiling for the offense.
It actually irks me that this isn’t better understood. My late friend Jonathan Tjarks excelled at explaining concepts like this in basketball. He often described “the patterns of basketball” as how the skill set of one player dictated the skill sets of another in building a winning team. That’s a simpler proposition in basketball because everyone plays offense AND defense so the overlapping skill sets are more obvious.
It’s true in football as well. In spread 201 I explained how if the tight end isn’t a great run blocker, then the quarterback needs to be able to run some option to help him out. If the quarterback isn’t a good runner, then it’s not a flex tight end he needs but a blocking one who will allow the offense to block a nickel front.
A dual-threat at either position opens up a world of possibilities at the other.
Today we’re going to talk about something similar. The supremacy of the outside receiver and who lines up where in the receiving corps.