Texas Coast, 70% the same, and the 2023 Offense

Was going to put this in another thread but that had devolved into a typical morass. I figured I would break this out so we could talk about the offense as a whole as opposed to whether or not a particular player is going to fail in it.

Changes on offense we know they are making:

Pass protection. MM early on after the season and canning Moore said pass protection was changing without going into specifics. MM recently said the RB are going to be used more here when our base 6 and 7 man protections have always used the RB already. This has me confused.

Verbiage: Apparently, Moore used the verbose old school Coryell call language. They are describing all of the options for all the routes and such in those calls. That is being reduced. Presumably, they are going to use the system where you give route combinations and similar concepts one word names. That way by calling combinations on both sides of the field plus the protection you can take Moore’s 60 word barrage and reduce it to 3 words. Think they are doing it this way because of the next thing we know which is:

Option routes are out, route combinations are in: that was the narrative early but having heard a lot from the receivers this offseason, it is clear that they still have options on their routes but they are treated more as add ons as opposed to core features like they were previously. Instead the focus is on how the offense is designed to play off the defense to get each other open.

Simplify: This is a common term tossed out by all of the coaches and players. It speaks to the above point but it also speaks to how incredibly complex and diverse Moore was on run offense. Looking back, it certainly seems that Moore was willing to do anything to try to run the ball. We had the middle and outside ZBS stuff but we played a lot of the doubles/gap/combo/man looks, we played a lot of trap and pulling power stuff, and we even used the old school draw. At one point he had installed the counter tre with some play action off of it. Sturm has an excellent piece behind a paywall at the Athletic that details a lot of this. I appears that he is going in the direction of what plays they do best and what plays they are likely to emphasize. During the year he similarly breaks down formation use and you can see where Moore similarly used all kinds of formations.

I look at it from a broader sense and from the vantage point of what Schottenheimer did in Seattle. Seattle ran only a few formations and 95% of their runs were inside/outside zone and counters. All runs and passes came out of all formations and all had a bevy of playaction looks to take advantage of how the defense is playing them. Throw in the new verbiage and this is how you simplify. I’m not saying they are going to pick those runs, I am just saying they are going to pick a few runs and focus.

Detail: Various players have described a situation where there are fewer plays but they are "detailing" the heck out of them. I can think of plenty of categories to detail but the specifics will change how the offense functions.

There is a common refrain that they are keeping 70% of the offense but I think that belies what they are doing to change the offense.

Discuss this on CowboysZone (45 comments)

Site Footer