I'm going to forego the blog and just post stuff here.
What to expect from Oregon's offense.
If you've been paying attention by now you realize that Oregon is a running team. They will mix in the pass effectively, but they want to run the football. Most of their concepts are finesse/zone blocking schemes, but they will include some power football by pulling multiple linemen (I've seen them pull 3 a few times even) and using their tight end (#15, very good player) as an H back/lead blocker. All that said, the base run game for Oregon is zone read/option and they will read anyone and everyone in the front 7 of the defense. They run true zone read where they attack both edges, zone read with a bubble route on the edge, triple option when motioning Thomas to the backfield, using Barner as the dive back, and Thomas as the pitch man. They will attack all edges of the defense until Kelly figures out the weakness in the defense. ON zone read they run both inside zone and stretch, they really like to let Barner/Thomas run to the edge until they find a vertical crease. Mixed in with all this zone read will be some tosses, a few leads (TE leading), occasionally a counter trey type power run, and a few draws for Mariota. Based on what I've watched I'd say we'll probably see 2/3 to 3/4 of their run game be zone read/option football.
The passing game is fairly simple. Mariota spread the ball well, but the biggest threats are their big WR Huff #1, Lyerla #15 the TE, and Thomas #1 (usually a slot WR, but will be anywhere). They will run a ton of zone read play action, sending the TE down the middle seam of the field, or looking for Huff on deep vertical/posts, but they don't throw vertical a lot. I'd say that's the biggest difference from Baylor, Oregon doesn't look to attack down the field a lot with the passing game. They like to test the edges and run a ton of 2 or 3 level routes against zone coverages with a deep route, intermediate route, and short route, often a swing by the Thomas/Barner. Against man they run quite a few short crossing routes as well. Finally, Mariota is really dangerous scrambling, Oregon's biggest play against Stanford was a 70+ yard run when he broke contain.
Formation wise Oregon is fairly simple, almost exclusively a 1 back team. Occasionally Thomas will line up with Barner in a 2 back set, or Thomas will motion to the backfield. Oregon will also often motion their back to either side of Mariota to get the proper alignment for their zone read running game. They mostly run 3 WR/1 TE sets, and balanced formations (2 by 2) with a TE or with 4 WR. They also like 3 WR trips formation, and they will unbalance the defense with the TE lined up to the 3 WR side. Finally, they will run quite a bit of TE with 2 WR split to the same side for TE trips. They are varied game to game, but a big key will be figuring out their tendencies by formation. Its pretty clear Kelly comes up with a game plan going in, and they generally have a package of plays out of each formation and will stay with that package. As the game goes along they won't deviate a lot from that; they are counting on the tendencies they see in the defense and especially for defenses to get into bad alignments because of the speed that they play at.
Keys:
Simply getting lined up right (Zimm back should help tremendously) and tackling. They want to spread you out and create vertical creases in your defense and often the breakdowns occur because defenses aren't gap sound. Also, when you watch Oregon you see a lot of runs where defenses seemingly have Barner/Thomas tackled or contained, and they break one tackle and are off on a 20+ yard run. K-State has tended not to blitz a lot, and that's wise against Oregon's offense. Another way to stop fast pace offenses is to force TOs, but Oregon has gotten a lot better over the season with only 3 TOs their last 5 games. As a result they have won the turnover margin battle in 8 of their last 9. Finally, try to force some FGs. Oregon leads the country, scoring TDs 80+% of the time in the redzone. As a result they've scored at least 42 points in every game except against Stanford. I'm not expecting us to hold them to 14 like Stanford did, but hopefully we can keep them at 35 or below. If the Cats can manage that I think we have a good shot.
