The hottest trend in college football isn't the 3-4 defense, the zone-read, or the triple option.
It's paranoia.
Football offices are guarded like military fortresses. Practices are closed to the media and public. And now, a growing number of coaches are worried about having their lips read during games.
Paranoia is growing in popularity because it works, theoretically at least. Bill Belicick might be considered the pioneer of paranoia, and his immense success with the New England Patriots has produced a number of disciples who do the dictator thing quite well.
Nick Saban at Alabama. Urban Meyer at Florida. Jimbo Fisher at Florida State. Derek Dooley at Tennessee. And surely a few others I'm missing.
Coaches always imitate what works, so the bountiful success achieved by Saban and Meyer has led coaches across the country to adopt similar lock-down tactics.
One thing I'll never understand, though: During the season, coaches go to great lengths to keep even the most mundane bits of information from finding their way into the hands of opponents. But in the offseason, these same coaches freely share insight into the schemes with their college coaching brethren who come to campus to study their systems, or with hundreds of high school coaches who flock to campus for annual coaches' clinics.
Anyway, deceit and thievery are big in this game. Just about every team out there has a graduate assistant positioned in the press box, his main duty to study the opposing signals with hope of cracking a code.
The result: Great lengths taken by every staff to mix their signals. Just this week, Dabo Swinney told us Clemson's signaling process is difficult to decode.
"We're very in tune to knowing what people are watching, making sure we are hard to read as far as what we're going to do from a signal standpoint. We're really hard to pick up, especially when we've got one guy live and two guys dummying. Initially, it may look the same. But then protections and things like that are always different."
With all this as a backdrop, it should come as no surprise at all that someone out there came up with a way to capitalize on the paranoia trend.
Introducing "Boom Guard," a microphone shield device that keeps coaches' lips from being read during games.
Looking at some of the supplied pictures and videos, this thing looks almost like a spoof.
One would think this, uh, innovation, is going a bit too far and venturing toward absurd.
The reality? Coaches will love the idea, and these things will be on sidelines everywhere in short order.
Moving on to some Friday linkage...
By far the most insightful piece from last night's game is Columbia is by Chris Low of ESPN.com.
Sounds like everything was in disarray less than two hours before the game.
Saying the Gamecocks were totally in the dark is putting it mildly.
In fact, they were staring squarely down the barrel of being without 12 players, just about all of them starters.
“Our Plan B wasn’t very much in place,” South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier said. “I don’t know exactly what we would have done. But anyway, all the guys except a couple were able to play.”
On Wednesday, the day before the game, the NCAA had notified South Carolina that all of the players linked to the Whitney Hotel investigation were ineligible pending further review. And making matters worse, a couple others were added to that list, including prized freshman running back Marcus Lattimore and senior cornerback Chris Culliver.
A snag had cropped up with Lattimore and Culliver in separate matters and had nothing to do with the NCAA’s investigation into the South Carolina players’ living arrangements at the Whitney Hotel.
So the 12 players in limbo were completely separated from the team. They didn’t go to the hotel with the rest of the team, didn’t eat the pre-game meal, didn’t ride the team bus to the stadium.
For all intents and purposes, they weren’t members of the team.
And later...
As the clock ticked down closer to the game, the South Carolina coaches were bracing themselves to go with redshirt freshman Billy Byrne at middle linebacker. Byrne had never played in a game.
That’s how crazy it got, and it was equally tension-filled all week in practice.
Nobody knew for sure who was going to be available and who wasn’t.
One South Carolina assistant called it the “hardest week I’ve had in coaching.”
Was not able to closely watch the first half of last night's game, but here are my observations from watching the second half:
-- Running game looked good, and Lattimore looked smooth and instinctive. But it's hard to make lasting judgments on the running game because we don't know how good (or how bad) Southern Miss' defense is.
-- Sakerlina's secondary is legitimately elite. Speed and athleticism all over the place.
-- Hard to remember the last time the Gamecocks had this much depth at tailback. Kenny Miles is more than serviceable, and Jarvis Giles is a heck of a No. 3 back.
-- Garcia looked good, but let's reserve judgment on him until Jawja comes to town.
Ron Morris of The State explores the Gamecocks' refined offense.
USC ran the entire length of its 41-13 victory without a huddle, displaying a crispness in getting plays off that has been lacking in the past. Not once did the offense get called for delay of game.
“I do like to call the play at the line of scrimmage kind of stuff,” Steve Spurrier said. “I sort of like that, it gives you a little extra time, as long as you have the signals down, the code words. It works pretty well. It’s a good way to go because it gives you time.”
Wake Forest took care of the Presbyterian punching bag last night, and Dan Collins of the Winston-Salem Journal offered some candid thoughts in the aftermath:
I didn’t really see a bowl team at BB&T Field tonight, which shouldn’t be of any concern to anyone considering that bowl bids aren’t extended after the first game of the season.
I did see a Wake Forest team that will have to make serious improvement to fulfill the prediction of 7-5 that I had in the Journal Thursday morning. Coach Jim Grobe knew as much after the games and so did the players. Some of the same problems from last season appear to have carried over. The offensive line didn’t protect as well as it should and twice allowed running backs to get stuffed on third-and-one. The secondary got burned a couple of times, and that’s not even counting the trick play Presbyterian ran where the quarterback bounced a lateral to a wide receiver, who, in turn, threw deep downfield to an open receiver for a touchdown. And Jimmy Newman, who should be settling in by now as the kicker, missed a 43-yard attempt that a solid college kicker is going to make around 75 or 80 percent of the time.
Here are some notables from Miami's annihilation of Florida A&M.
Here's some Auburn insight from beat writer Jay Tate.
MOST INTRIGUING TREND: Roof’s substitutions at linebacker and cornerback
The situation at linebacker last year was laughable. There were no backups at times, which left Josh Bynes and Craig Stevens to play entire games without a break. Auburn now has several young linebackers in the system to provide relief, but they have to play. Roof has to make the conscious decision to give those young guys meaningful snaps to get them acclimated for future challenges. Can he do that often enough? My guess is no. We shall see.
Here's some ammunition for folks who think the SEC's so-called supremacy is overblown:
Here are some facts about the SEC's nonconference schedule this season:
-- Thirteen percent of the games are against teams ranked in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll. The probable three toughest conferences rank the lowest in this category, with the Big Ten at 7 percent and the Big 12 at 13 percent.
-- No BCS conference travels less than the SEC, which often can afford to stay home by attracting large crowds even for low-profile games. Fifteen percent of the SEC's nonconference games are on the road; the BCS-conference average is 28 percent.
-- Fifty-six percent of SEC nonconference opponents come from either the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) or a Football Bowl Subdivision (I-A) school that hasn't had a winning record in at least four years. That statistic looks like this for other leagues: Big East (50 percent), Big Ten (39 percent), Big 12 (38 percent), ACC (38 percent), Pac-10 (32 percent).
OK, folks. That's it for now. Great time to be a fan of college football.
Happy Friday...
LW
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