Originally posted by Niners816:
Originally posted by darockzillahitman:
There are many different ways to run a "drive," which can be any number of different route combinations. It's just a high/low concept. If that's how you wish to define "concept," then every single offense has this "concept" in their playbook, as well as every other, which would mean everybody is running the same system. But they're not.
And Vic Fangio agrees with me:
"The West Coast Offense that everyone claims they run, nobody really runs the West Coast Offense that Bill Walsh used to run. All these self-proclaimed West Coast Offenses really are not running Bill Walsh's offense. They use his nomenclature in defining and naming formations, but they're really not running the offense that he used to run. Everybody's taken their own version of it and put their own little mark on it, but to me, I don't see anybody running the West Coast Offense."
Nobody has ran Bill's offense in the nfl since he retired in Jan of '89. What Vic is saying is nobody is running Bill's offense. Nobody has ever denied that.
Those that say they are running a WCO are doing so because they subscribe to a philosophy of passing to set up the run and are using the verbiage associated with the WCO.
So Green Bay, uses WCO verbiage, obviously passes to set up the run and uses all the tried and true passing concepts. That my friend is a WCO. It just isn't Bill Walsh's offense just like NE E-P isn't the same as the one that Parcells was using in the 80s. Time change and the game adapts, but saying an offense isn't a WCO because it doesn't use the traditional red, brown and blue horizontal stack formations is ridiculous.
Passing to set up the run" doesn't define the system. That's just a silly little media narrative. Walsh himself didn't really pass to set up the run that much. There were years where his offenses were more run heavy than anything else, and plenty of games where he would come out trying to "establish the run."
Heck, people talk about Mike Shanahan as a "WCO" guy because of his time in SF, and define his Denver Broncos' offenses as "WCO," yet the main thing they loved to do was run to set up the bootleg.
Yeah, people who define systems are talking about "verbiage," but that's stupid, and that's the whole point. They're not the same systems. Not in any meaningful way.
What the Patriots run today is pure football-killing nonsense. That's why they take scrap heap players and go to the conference championship game every year, if not the Super Bowl.
