What About A Fridgen Style Off? It Incorporated...

If we could recapture that style (and the players to run it), I'd love it. It was a joy to watch when it was working, like the second half of that '98 UVA game.

But it was also cursed with no defense, and susceptible to inexplicable losses to Wake Forest, too.

JRjr
 
GoldenIsle said:
some option.
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It was certainly innovative. A great fit for Tech. But who runs something like that? I was always amazed in those days that we could do so many things so well - did we have more practice time back then?
 
You can’t have a great defense while running a multiple offense. They have to practice for too many different schemes. Everyone knows this.
 
The closest thing I have seen to it is Troy Calhoun’s offense at Air Force. He mainly uses the flexbone but they’ll run out of any formation on any given play. You’ll see flexbone and then single back, then Maryland I, then regular I. He mixes it up.
 
txsting said:
It was certainly innovative. A great fit for Tech. But who runs something like that? I was always amazed in those days that we could do so many things so well - did we have more practice time back then?
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The beauty was that there weren’t really that many plays. It was a few plays out of a lot of formations. The OL could get reps. Lining up in one formation and then switching showed a lot about the defensive scheme.

It did require a qb with a lot of football knowledge. A big arm or great speed wasn’t necessary for the qb to be successful. They just had to know who was covered by who.

That was Fridge’s downfall at Md. He hit a string of qbs that processed to slowly. Talented guys, just didn’t have that football instinct to pull the trigger at the right time. Much like the option, that can be hard to gage from HS film where every D1 level player can out athlete most the guys on the field.
 
johncu said:
Having Joe Hamilton really helps.
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Godsey did fine. Even knocked in a 30+ yd QB keeper on the triple option vs UGA.

The late 1990s Freidgen offense is sort of the holy grail of offenses, in my opinion. But I don't know anyone who could develop it outside of him, and he's very old.
 
WracerX said:
The beauty was that there weren’t really that many plays. It was a few plays out of a lot of formations. The OL could get reps. Lining up in one formation and then switching showed a lot about the defensive scheme.

It did require a qb with a lot of football knowledge. A big arm or great speed wasn’t necessary for the qb to be successful. They just had to know who was covered by who.

That was Fridge’s downfall at Md. He hit a string of qbs that processed to slowly. Talented guys, just didn’t have that football instinct to pull the trigger at the right time. Much like the option, that can be hard to gage from HS film where every D1 level player can out athlete most the guys on the field.
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A few plays out of various formations has been attributed to Paul Johnson as well.
 
beej67 said:
Godsey did fine. Even knocked in a 30+ yd QB keeper on the triple option vs UGA.

The late 1990s Freidgen offense is sort of the holy grail of offenses, in my opinion. But I don't know anyone who could develop it outside of him, and he's very old.
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CBK can.
 
Yukonwreck said:
A few plays out of various formations has been attributed to Paul Johnson as well.
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He definitely ripped off some of CPJ's stuff while CPJ was at Southern.

The Freidgen approach was very different than the CPJ approach, but it included option for important reasons. Fridge said he kept the 3O in the playbook because if the other team didn't practice against it that it was a goldmine of easy yards, and if they did practice against it then they wasted a lot of time on one play and we would just run different stuff. It was a way to warp opposing team's practice time.

CPJ's system was to have one personnel group, run ten plays out of slight formation variations with the same personnel group, and look for schematic mismatches, often by adjusting blocking. Fridge's system was to pick ten plays, run them out of ten formations, and then you end up with a 100 play playbook. Then you vary the formations and skill groups until you find a personnel mismatch to take advantage of.

The advantage of CPJ's approach is that he had a very deep decision tree memorized. Sorta like chess. The first 15 moves of Queen's Gambit have been basically mapped at this point, to give you the best results, so if you always run Queens Gambit, you can do it by the book and basically win. Since games aren't very long, CPJ just ran down the decision tree until he found something that worked, and then wore them out on it.
 
One thing that Fridge supposedly did with the 3O to simplify it and make it so it didn't absorb so much of our own practice time, was he'd run it but he'd predetermine the mesh read in the play call. So it was either a called dive with some motion distraction, or it was a double option that started with a dive fake. Less useful in general, but way easier to run, and if the other team doesn't realize that's what you're doing, then they have to spend a lot of extra time figuring out how to defend the thing. And then if they don't line up to defend it, you run it. And if they do line up to defend it, then you run some of your other stuff.

I heard this a while back from someone who appeared to have some knowledge about it. But I can't be sure it's true.
 
I like fridge, but he failed to succeed at Maryland. Its a good system, but I'm not convinced it's the holy grail.
 
QuadF said:
I like fridge, but he failed to succeed at Maryland. Its a good system, but I'm not convinced it's the holy grail.
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Fridge put in 70 hr weeks as a OC at Tech. Couldn't spend near that amount of time on offense at Maryland.
 
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