A few years ago during the off season I had a regular series of posts title "Football University". As the title implies the posts were about football related topics, mostly X's and O's. I thought that I'd resurrect that series for this off season, and since rookies are starting to sign their contracts I figured that there might be more than a few questions about rookie contracts and wage scales and such.

As a side note, if you have twitter you'll want to follow Andrew Brandt of the National Football Post. He's a former scout, who then went to work for the Packers in their front office and has some great stories and insights about the business side of football.

One of the priorities of both the NFLPA and the NFL during the recent labor negotiations was to fix the rookie pay for top picks. To give an idea of the absurdity of the old way of doing business, Matt Stafford's rookie contract was six years, $72 million with $41.75 million guaranteed. $26 million of that was due to signing bonuses, so he was going to get paid that much even if he didn't throw a single pass in the NFL.

By comparison, when Tom Brady signed a new contract a year later it was for 5 years, $78 million, with $48.5 million guaranteed. In other words, a multiple SB winning QB, one of the best in the game, and he's only getting $7 million more guaranteed than an untried rookie did.

Clearly something had to change and it did.

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Over the past year or so smileyman has provided some solid information on basics related to the NFL and just learning basic things about offense and defense. Our Football University section has a good rundown of previous posts. He's not going anywhere but I came across a resource over at National Football Post that I wanted to share.

Retired NFL defensive back Matt Bowen has been writing a series called "Inside the Playbook" in which he covers a variety of basic and advanced football concepts. A week ago he wrote about specific routes within Andy Reid's playbook. Today he went a lot more basic and wrote about the basic NFL route tree. He goes into concepts outside of running and defending pass routes, but that has been the focus lately. What's also very useful about Bowen's posts is that if you post a question in the comments, he seems to do a fairly solid job responding.

Looking through some of these routes, it will be interesting to see how the 49ers coaching staff utilizes Michael Crabtree specifically. One of his best routes in college was the bubble screen. The 49ers struggled to implement screen's with Crabtree, which could be due to a whole host of reasons. He can be fantastic in running after the catch, so maybe we see some more slants and other quick routes? It seems like the idea is to get him the ball as quickly as possible and let him go from there.

How would you utilize Michael Crabtree in the 49ers offensive game plan to optimize both his performance and the 49ers overall offensive performance? And no, trading him is not an applicable answer to that question.

Ever since the drafting of the versatile Aldon Smith, I've been racking my brain thinking of how the 49ers would get the most out of him on all three downs.  It might seem simple to some: just use him as a DE in Nickel (pass-rusher) and let him slowly learn the other nuances of a complete 3-4 OLB in the meantime.

Let me give you a quick take on Smith and why it isn't to simple to me:

Smith predominantly played DE in Missouri's 4-3 defense, but he also lined up at DT quite frequently as well.  He's a pass rusher first and foremost, a skill I don't want to waste on ANY down.  He's shown the ability to beat guards AND tackles 1-on-1 as well as contain the run to his side AND pursue on runs to the backside.

Simply put: he's a great DE prospect.

But the 49ers selected him 7th overall and we don't run a 4-3 defense (where a DE would line up in the same spot each down and primarily just play the run or rush the passer).  True 3-4 OLB's must cover TE's/RB's on first and second down, at times.  They stand up on two legs most of the time and have to play in space a lot.  These are things Smith would need to work on and probably wouldn't be effective at immediately.

So what's another way to make the most out of a player like Aldon Smith?

Oh yeah, and what abou the nose tackle (NT) position?  Franklin could be gone and Ricky Jean-Francois was underwhelming as a traditional 2-gapping 3-4 NT last year.  Why didn't we draft a NT prospect, a space-eater to play the middle of our defense?

I can give you a proposal that would take care of all of these questions, and I will...after the jump.

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Last year during the off-season I wrote a series of posts titled "Football University", where I talked about various aspects of football X's and O's and explained them in as much detail as I could. Here are some of the topics I covered last year, with some excerpts from those articles:

Special Teams

Other than the kicker the most important players on the field might be the "gunners". These are the two players who are lined up on each side of the field closest to the edge. Their job is to run down the field as fast as they can and force the returner to move to the inside of the field where the most traffic is. They are also the ones responsible for downing the ball before it goes into the endzone. Gunners are generally your 2nd and 3rd string DBs or WRs because these players have the best hands and are the fastest on the team.     

The Cover 4

The cover 4 defense is basically the same thing as a prevent defense and is hardly ever used. It's gotten such a bad name that coaches don't want to admit that they've used it ("We weren't in a prevent" ranks right up there with "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" in the book of lies.)

Join me after the jump for some more examples.

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Special teams units are perhaps the most under-appreciated units to the casual fans. It's easy to see when the offense screws up or does a great job. Same thing with defense. With special teams the only time you see much attention to it is when it goes bad--blocked punt, missed field goal, long return on a kick off or punt. 

Even when the average fan pays attention to special teams it's generally to the skill positions--kicker, punter, holder, returner, and maybe the long snapper. Most fans don't pay much attention to the rest of the unit on the field. My goal is to correct that with this post on the special teams. 

There are certain kinds of people that you look for on your special teams:

• Good athletes. They have to be fast and strong
• They have to be fearless. Special teams contact is more dangerous than on most plays
• Smart. Players have to be able to recognize trick plays
• Disciplined. Your players have to be disciplined. If they don't follow their assignments on special teams it can be disastrous.  
• As odd as it sounds you actually want backups on your special teams. Special teams units are generally made up of 2nd and 3rd string players. This gives them a chance to get some gametime in and get experience and it lets coaches evaluate their athleticism and fearlessness. It also prevents your starters from getting injured un-necessarily (see Clements, Nate for an example of that). 

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The cover 4 defense is basically the same thing as a prevent defense and is hardly ever used. It's gotten such a bad name that coaches don't want to admit that they've used it ("We weren't in a prevent" ranks right up there with "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" in the book of lies.)

If you've followed along with the other cover defenses you should be able to recognize that a cover 4 means 4 defensive backs. This is sometimes called quarters, though not often (nickel, dime, quarter). 

At it's most basic the cover 4 is a 3-1-7. That's three down linemen, one linebacker, and 7 DBs (almost always three safeties). It can take other forms too. Bill Belichick has used a 0-4-7 (no down linemen, four linebackers, seven defensive backs). 

Contrary to popular opinion the object isn't to prevent the gaining of yards, or even a score (depending on the situation). Rather the object is to use up valuable time. Thus the prevent should only be used in situations when there's very little time left at the end of a half or the end of a game, and should only be used when the offense has to score a TD. There's one other time when a cover 4 can be useful but it's not common in the NFL. 

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Last week we talked about the Tampa 2, which is essentially a cover 2 that turns into a cover 3 with the middle linebacker dropping into coverage. This week we're going to talk about a true cover 3, but before I get into that I want to talk a bit about how to exploit the weaknesses of a Tampa 2. 

There are two different routes that can beat a Tampa 2 pretty easily. The first is what's called a "flag" route or a "7" route, and the second is a "999". Both of these are assuming a 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 RB personnel group, though they could work with a 2 WR, 2 TE grouping as well, depending on whom you designate as your W, X, Y and Z receivers. 

Here's a diagram of a basic route tree (an important note--even numbers mean the receiver is breaking in towards the middle of the field, odd numbers mean the player is breaking to the outside). 

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Now we get to dive into the nitty gritty of the the West Coast Offense. We're going to be using Bill Walsh's playbook from 1985, which I've uploaded if you want to take a look at it yourself. It's 356 pages long and packed full of information. It's also hard to read at points because it's been copied so much that some of the letters are faded and there are some weird page angles that cut off some of the details. It's still a fascinating document. I also have Holmgren's 49er offense from 1991, Cowboys' 1992 offense (which is rather amusing since it appears to be written in a loose leaf notebook) and the Rams' 2000 offense, all of which use variations of the West Coast Offense. 

I won't be going over each of those simply because that's far too much information to try to absorb (there's a reason that college players sometimes have a tough time making the switch to the pros). We'll mainly focus in the 1985 playbook and i may take a look later through the 1991 playbook.

1985 49ers (Bill Walsh)

1991 49ers (Mike Holmgren)

1992 Cowboys (Norv Turner)

2000 Rams (Mike Martz)

Join me after the jump as we look at the 1985 offense. 

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