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imo.. one of the better sports writers in Nebraska. Beck sounds a lot like Bo when he describes his defense.
NEBRASKA FOOTBALL: Off the Hook, and Onto Beck
Commentary: NU's new offense built teaching methods more than playbooks
By Samuel McKewon
March 08, 2011
Story image 1
File Photo
Tim Beck wry, confident persona struck a chord with the press Tuesday.
It's fourth down in the Big 12 Championship. Four yards to go. Nebraska wide receiver Brandon Kinnie sprints out to his spot left of quarterback Taylor Martinez with an assignment: Quick slant. It's an easy read for Martinez, and one of the passes he can throw well without patting down the ball with uncertainty. Kinnie knows this. Shawn Watson, the man who called the play, knows this.
Just one problem: The OU cornerback knows this, too. He creeps up to Kinnie until he's just inches away. Kinnie hasn't been given the option of a counter move to this coverage. He'll run what he's been told to run. He's Brick Tamland, essentially: He loves slant. He's memorized the play, not the concept.
He'll run his quick slant to no avail. The Sooner jams the hell out of him and the route isn't there. Martinez, panicking, throws it anyway right at Kinnie, who's well short of the first down. Doesn't matter – the pass in high. Probably because Kinnie isn't open. Game over.
“It was annoying,” Kinnie says.
If you want a sense of why Bo Pelini parted ways with Watson and hired Tim Beck to simplify and literally “deprogram” the Huskers from a West Coast Offense, there you have it. Wats called a play. Martinez didn't change it. Kinnie couldn't change it. Huskers lose.
Beck said Tuesday he'd create “multi-purpose routes good against any coverage.” Option routes. Choices. Playing ball. Shifting on the fly.
Here's another: Watson never figured out how to run the ball on an odd, 3-man front that put a fat defensive tackle over center Mike Caputo. The DT would blast the smaller Caputo into the backfield and disrupt NU's deep, mid-line zone read play. Martinez and Cody Green would comically try to read this snarling bull charging into the backfield, as if that served any point. Watson never sufficiently worked around the problem.
“A lot of losses came against defenses that played odd fronts,” Caputo said. “Maybe we did have some scheme issues there.”
The way Beck and Bo broke it down Tuesday, the problem wasn't necessarily Watson's plays. It was that he taught plays. Assignments. Directions in a vacuum. Run a hard ten, pivot here, turn there and drive the defender to the sideline. That kind of stuff. Watson, like thousands of football coaches, operates like that. Beck, like Bo – will teach holistic concepts.
“I want them to run our offense,” Beck said. “I don't want them to run plays. They need to know why I'm doing what I'm doing and what they're doing. And how it fits. And if they can understand that, then when teams try to change during the course of the game, we can make adjustments. If it is simple and the verbiage is small, we can communicate.”
Yes, the assorted wags, mugs and hacks chewed on slightly-cold Valentino's Pizza and listened to a seminar on semiotics. A primer on pigskin epistemology. The Husker O is no longer hooked on football phonics. They're learning via whole language precepts. If you want to speak Japanese fluently, do you conjugate verbs until you're kichigai, or just live with Charlotte in Tokyo for a stretch?
The new formula: Know the culture, know the concepts, know the offense, then perfect techniques.
“It'll actually give us more time to spend on footwork and fundamentals and things like that,” Caputo said. “It'll be simple. There will only be so many concepts. And then the plays fall into 'families.'”
Beck's offense is not a machine adherent to a blueprint. It is an organism, shifting to environmental conditions. Or so the theory goes. I'm not one to put a cap on tortured analogies. We'll get to astrophysics here pretty soon.
Story image 2
File Photo
Rex Burkhead. Just because.
Anyway, Bo sure loves it. He ought to – Beck's borrowing his teaching methods. Bo pitched his new offense - in the vaguest terms possible, of course – as one nasty piece of business once “we roll the ball out in September.”
“It's going to create a lot of problems for defenses,” he said. “That's how I look at it. What can do you to give defenses problems? Trust me, we're putting together a scheme that's going to take advantage of what teams are trying to do to us. We're going to be able to attack them.”
Bo knows this, too? The vast library of offensive history and innovation? He claimed there's enough carryover from Watsonville that NU's offense won't take a full year to get up to speed – like the Blackshirts needed in 2008 when Bo rebuilt them from scratch. If there was a line from Tuesday's presser I doubted, it was that one.
Meanwhile, Beck - comfortable, wry and winning in his presser after a slightly nervous start (he saw more than 40 of our burnished, cherubic faces and said “Wow, go easy on me boys.”) – created the narrative of a self-made intellectual Tuesday. Journalists – who frequently style themselves the same – love that.
“I've picked plays off of Monday Night Football and drew them up off the VCR and run them,” he said.
Take note, couch-bound coaches.
He even nodded to the crowd, something Watson never bothered (or perhaps knew how) to do. Beck used a deer hunting analogy. (I'll wait while you look wistfully out the window, pondering a tree stand west and north of wherever you're sitting.)
“Guys go deer hunting, and they know how to do it,” Beck said. “They get their places and hide. They smell the right way and all that stuff because they're hunting for something specific. A defensive coordinator – you better know what he's about – all about. You just don't show up and play.”
So which Big Ten defensive coordinator has the biggest antlers? OK, besides Bo and Carl?
It was a good afternoon for Nebraska football. Bo didn't dodge any questions. Beck seems capable of telling a press conference joke like it's supposed to be told. Even Carl dialed down his trademark acerbic wit to entertain a few queries. They like this time of year. This staff is comprised of educators at heart, flaws and all, and they sounded like it. How to push buttons. How to create standards and expectations. Defining leadership and demanding results. All that stuff they debate endlessly in “Waiting for Superman,” or whatever it is we're supposed to call Rex Burkhead these days.
While other programs thrive on iconography or CEO dynamics, Nebraska's braintrust are those fit, impatient history instructors in your high school with hard-to-read handwriting and short haircuts. One of those kind of guys stuck my dad in a closet once. That was the 1950s, though. Maybe it still is in Youngstown.
Case in point: The press asked Beck how he planned to resolve the penalties and turnovers that plagued Watson's era – even in the days of Joe Ganz, who never met a scramble-to-the-boundary interception he didn't like throwing.
“I've got a plan in place,” Beck said. “The team's accountable for it. Penalties and turnovers both. We have a plan. At some other stops previous in my career, we've addressed these issues in this manner and it worked.”
So a drill to solve the problem? A technique issue?
“More like a fear issue,” Beck said.
NEBRASKA FOOTBALL: Off the Hook, and Onto Beck
Commentary: NU's new offense built teaching methods more than playbooks
By Samuel McKewon
March 08, 2011
Story image 1
File Photo
Tim Beck wry, confident persona struck a chord with the press Tuesday.
It's fourth down in the Big 12 Championship. Four yards to go. Nebraska wide receiver Brandon Kinnie sprints out to his spot left of quarterback Taylor Martinez with an assignment: Quick slant. It's an easy read for Martinez, and one of the passes he can throw well without patting down the ball with uncertainty. Kinnie knows this. Shawn Watson, the man who called the play, knows this.
Just one problem: The OU cornerback knows this, too. He creeps up to Kinnie until he's just inches away. Kinnie hasn't been given the option of a counter move to this coverage. He'll run what he's been told to run. He's Brick Tamland, essentially: He loves slant. He's memorized the play, not the concept.
He'll run his quick slant to no avail. The Sooner jams the hell out of him and the route isn't there. Martinez, panicking, throws it anyway right at Kinnie, who's well short of the first down. Doesn't matter – the pass in high. Probably because Kinnie isn't open. Game over.
“It was annoying,” Kinnie says.
If you want a sense of why Bo Pelini parted ways with Watson and hired Tim Beck to simplify and literally “deprogram” the Huskers from a West Coast Offense, there you have it. Wats called a play. Martinez didn't change it. Kinnie couldn't change it. Huskers lose.
Beck said Tuesday he'd create “multi-purpose routes good against any coverage.” Option routes. Choices. Playing ball. Shifting on the fly.
Here's another: Watson never figured out how to run the ball on an odd, 3-man front that put a fat defensive tackle over center Mike Caputo. The DT would blast the smaller Caputo into the backfield and disrupt NU's deep, mid-line zone read play. Martinez and Cody Green would comically try to read this snarling bull charging into the backfield, as if that served any point. Watson never sufficiently worked around the problem.
“A lot of losses came against defenses that played odd fronts,” Caputo said. “Maybe we did have some scheme issues there.”
The way Beck and Bo broke it down Tuesday, the problem wasn't necessarily Watson's plays. It was that he taught plays. Assignments. Directions in a vacuum. Run a hard ten, pivot here, turn there and drive the defender to the sideline. That kind of stuff. Watson, like thousands of football coaches, operates like that. Beck, like Bo – will teach holistic concepts.
“I want them to run our offense,” Beck said. “I don't want them to run plays. They need to know why I'm doing what I'm doing and what they're doing. And how it fits. And if they can understand that, then when teams try to change during the course of the game, we can make adjustments. If it is simple and the verbiage is small, we can communicate.”
Yes, the assorted wags, mugs and hacks chewed on slightly-cold Valentino's Pizza and listened to a seminar on semiotics. A primer on pigskin epistemology. The Husker O is no longer hooked on football phonics. They're learning via whole language precepts. If you want to speak Japanese fluently, do you conjugate verbs until you're kichigai, or just live with Charlotte in Tokyo for a stretch?
The new formula: Know the culture, know the concepts, know the offense, then perfect techniques.
“It'll actually give us more time to spend on footwork and fundamentals and things like that,” Caputo said. “It'll be simple. There will only be so many concepts. And then the plays fall into 'families.'”
Beck's offense is not a machine adherent to a blueprint. It is an organism, shifting to environmental conditions. Or so the theory goes. I'm not one to put a cap on tortured analogies. We'll get to astrophysics here pretty soon.
Story image 2
File Photo
Rex Burkhead. Just because.
Anyway, Bo sure loves it. He ought to – Beck's borrowing his teaching methods. Bo pitched his new offense - in the vaguest terms possible, of course – as one nasty piece of business once “we roll the ball out in September.”
“It's going to create a lot of problems for defenses,” he said. “That's how I look at it. What can do you to give defenses problems? Trust me, we're putting together a scheme that's going to take advantage of what teams are trying to do to us. We're going to be able to attack them.”
Bo knows this, too? The vast library of offensive history and innovation? He claimed there's enough carryover from Watsonville that NU's offense won't take a full year to get up to speed – like the Blackshirts needed in 2008 when Bo rebuilt them from scratch. If there was a line from Tuesday's presser I doubted, it was that one.
Meanwhile, Beck - comfortable, wry and winning in his presser after a slightly nervous start (he saw more than 40 of our burnished, cherubic faces and said “Wow, go easy on me boys.”) – created the narrative of a self-made intellectual Tuesday. Journalists – who frequently style themselves the same – love that.
“I've picked plays off of Monday Night Football and drew them up off the VCR and run them,” he said.
Take note, couch-bound coaches.
He even nodded to the crowd, something Watson never bothered (or perhaps knew how) to do. Beck used a deer hunting analogy. (I'll wait while you look wistfully out the window, pondering a tree stand west and north of wherever you're sitting.)
“Guys go deer hunting, and they know how to do it,” Beck said. “They get their places and hide. They smell the right way and all that stuff because they're hunting for something specific. A defensive coordinator – you better know what he's about – all about. You just don't show up and play.”
So which Big Ten defensive coordinator has the biggest antlers? OK, besides Bo and Carl?
It was a good afternoon for Nebraska football. Bo didn't dodge any questions. Beck seems capable of telling a press conference joke like it's supposed to be told. Even Carl dialed down his trademark acerbic wit to entertain a few queries. They like this time of year. This staff is comprised of educators at heart, flaws and all, and they sounded like it. How to push buttons. How to create standards and expectations. Defining leadership and demanding results. All that stuff they debate endlessly in “Waiting for Superman,” or whatever it is we're supposed to call Rex Burkhead these days.
While other programs thrive on iconography or CEO dynamics, Nebraska's braintrust are those fit, impatient history instructors in your high school with hard-to-read handwriting and short haircuts. One of those kind of guys stuck my dad in a closet once. That was the 1950s, though. Maybe it still is in Youngstown.
Case in point: The press asked Beck how he planned to resolve the penalties and turnovers that plagued Watson's era – even in the days of Joe Ganz, who never met a scramble-to-the-boundary interception he didn't like throwing.
“I've got a plan in place,” Beck said. “The team's accountable for it. Penalties and turnovers both. We have a plan. At some other stops previous in my career, we've addressed these issues in this manner and it worked.”
So a drill to solve the problem? A technique issue?
“More like a fear issue,” Beck said.
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