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.