#10 is a Running Back - Marcus Allen

[stinger78]

If the DT is head up or outside the guard, the OT will combo block the DT, meaning he will "rub" the OT to help out the OG and then go to the 2nd level to the MLB. If the DT is inside the guard, the guard should be able to handle him by himself and the C will go to the 2nd level, but may help the OG if needed. Either way, on the triple, the DE has to take the dive, not the DT, so the BB is not smashing his head into a DT every time we run our bread and butter. And, like you said, most of the time we're running something different anyway. The only time the BB will be taken by the DT is on the midline when his track would be the A-gap rather than the B-gap.

And, for any RB, he's always going to be hit by somebody whether a DL or a LB, so a RB has to always have an affinity for contact or at least not an aversion to it. And, he's often a decoy or having to block on play action or straight drop back passes, so I would never see the BBack's role as a drawback at all in our offense as far as the attractiveness of the position. Like I said, there is the negative perception with regard to the NFL that would be the only negative I can think of and the negative recruiting.

Contact on an occasional play-action pass is far different than what our Bbacks experience running full speed into a pre-determined hole (that's often not there in our case) from 3 yards back. Contact on picking up LB/DL on pass protect is different than what our Bbacks experience in these cases, too. And, yes, football is a violent contact sport, and anyone who plays better be ready for it.

This may be in the case of the 3-tech, but I don't see many 3-tech DT's against us as it presents an unbalanced DL, and that is death against CPJ. I see a lot of 2-tech a 2-gap alignments against us.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter, though, to the point I'm making, which is that the Bback runs at full speed into the arms of a DT (or pinching DE) on almost every play. This is not typically what a TB experiences in a zone block system, where he delays and waits for the hole to open.