Tried getting in touch with a Wake Forest beat writer for the "Enemy Lines" feature on the Deacons and came up with nothing but tumbleweed.
Figured "what the heck" and made a request to interview the head man himself. Jim Grobe came through and gave me a call yesterday, proving once again that he's a good guy who doesn't take himself seriously enough to avoid the hacks and scribblers like the plague.
(The hookup with Grobe inspired me to make a request to interview Nick Saban. Will let you know how that one goes.)
We'll have Grobe's take on Wake Forest at some point in the next few days, but we also couldn't resist the opportunity to pick Grobe's brain on Clemson's offense.
When you're at Wake Forest, you have to be open to doing different things not only to thrive, but merely survive. The Deacons' offenses under Grobe have pretty much done it all.
Grobe's background is in option football -- the style that carved Clemson's defenses to bits from 2002-04 and pretty much sealed the ouster of Tigers' defensive coordinator John Lovett.
With that, here's Grobe's take on Chad Morris' hurry-up, no-huddle approach that closely resembles the cutting-edge stuff being run at Auburn and Oregon:
"I think it's fantastic, and that's what we like to do. We like to be up-tempo, we like to run the option, we like to spread people out and get the ball down the field and all those type things. The one thing that some coordinators have had the luxury of doing -- at Florida with Tim Tebow, they had the luxury of running him inside the tackles and actually running power off-tackle and lots of draw plays and actually reading the inside techniques on the option. A lot of times you pull the ball and you're running your quarterback right up over where the offensive guard lined up with the quarterback. And that's really good stuff, and it drives defenses absolutely crazy.
"But your key there is durability of your quarterback. You're going to take more shots. That's how we got Tanner Price knocked out down at Florida State. We had an inside zone-read play, and he kept the football and went up inside and got smacked by a linebacker in the side of the headgear. He couldn't spell 'Tanner' by the time we got him to the sideline. All that stuff is really, really good. But if you're committed to running your quarterback, especially up inside where there's a better chance for him to take some good shots with all that power off-tackle and inside-read stuff, you've got to have a really durable quarterback. You have to have a kid that can take some hits.
"As far as the up-tempo stuff goes, I think it's certainly something that drives defenses crazy. It's kind of got two components to it: It keeps the defense on their heels because they're having to just line up and play. But also, it keeps the offense from substituting. So you know what personnel group you're going to have on the field because you can't go hurry-hurry and substitute. If you substitute, then the defense has the opportunity to do their substitutions and they can match up with you. So that slows you down a little bit. It ends up being a cat-and-mouse game between the offense and the defense.
"I will say that I think the up-tempo stuff is good. We like it here. But I think defenses have seen enough of it now that it's not as big a shock to them as it used to be. In the past, if we went up-tempo right in the middle of the game, if we had been huddling and all of a sudden we're just up-tempo that would be a problem for the defense. But defenses have seen enough of it throughout the league that it's not necessarily going to mean disaster for defenses. I think defenses adapt to it better than they used to because we've seen more of it."
LW
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