Football Concepts, Schemes, Formations: TDG Football Seminar Starts Season 3

Welcome back to the third season of TDG’s Football Seminar!

What is the seminar? As I wrote last year, by seminar I mean the academic sense of a conversation relating to a specific subject. More specifically, we want to sound smarter when we drunkenly yell at a television. Our subject this year is once again football strategy. With a brand new staff, Minnesota will look much different on both sides of the ball than they did last year. The hope is that the defense continues to improve and the offense discovers an actual productive offense.

Last year, we spent a bit of time trying to digest Jay Johnson’s offense before discovering that the Gophers were mostly just offensive at running it. This year, we’re hoping to learn more about what makes Kirk Ciarrocca’s offense and Robb Smith’s defense work. As a result, we will begin next week after the Gophers officially take the field for the first time under P.J. Fleck.

Since this is a new year with a new coaching staff, we want to know what you want to learn about. From some internal polling, we think that we should cover run-pass options, zone blocking, and how to pull off a quarter zip with a tie, but we know that there are many other possible topics. Let us know in the comments what concepts you would like us to cover. They do not have to be Minnesota specific because football is a simple game made complicated and most people still from everyone else. Perhaps there is a phrase or an acronym that is unclear.

We are going to start next week by discussing the run-pass option, one of the more revolutionary obvious ideas in football strategy over the last two decades.