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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 4031576, member: 27"] Hoping to get some of our coaches and other knowledgeable football posters to weigh in on this. Please let me know your thoughts. I think this will be interesting for many to know more about. For most of the season, we have seen SU line up mostly with Tucker behind the QB, with an H back on a wing, a TE and 2 WRs. Some variations on this, sometimes 3 WRs no TE, every once in a while 4 WRs, no H back, etc. But at some point (I think is was relatively late in the V Tech game) we started using a 5 WR naked backfield look a lot. As in almost every play. It worked against the Hokies. Really well. I was curious if we were use it against BC as well. And it turns out we did. A lot. At first glance, it seems like a bad move. Why take Tucker out of the game completely or leave him in and have him line up wide, so far from the action? Especially given we do not have a bounty of capable WRs to rely upon right now. I think a big reason why is to react to what defenses have been doing to us. Shrader has established himself as a weapon and teams are starting to use a spy against him. A spy is a defender whose sole job is to stay in front of Shrader and not let him get past the LOS. That naked backfield formation spreads a defense as much as possible, and forces the DC to make some tough choices. They want to sub in extra DBs to make it easier to cover everyone but if they do, Tucker can motion back to the backfield and the offense has a big advantage against undersized defenders. It also makes it hard to keep a defender assigned to spy the QB (or Tucker for that matter). Trying to cover the entire field with presumably only 7 defenders (assuming 3 will be rushing the QB and the fourth spying the QB) is almost impossible and really exposes things for long passes (like the one Shrader threw to Alford to beat VT), where the guys covering receivers are not going to get much help from the safeties. Anyway, I think this is why we are using the naked backfield look so much these days. Correct? Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated. Personally, it looked to me as though Shrader had an injury that prevented him from throwing the ball accurately and that saved BC from losing by 40. Hope he is able to heal up over the next 2 weeks and be 100% down the stretch. [/QUOTE]

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