For the past decade and a half, San Diego State's football program has been led by Brady Hoke and Rocky Long. These two had a defensive mindset and were happy to control the clock and win the match 13-10. Aztec fans were accustomed to a physical but not innovative attack.
The SDSU faithful can now watch the offense led by Sean Lewis. The difference is…how should I describe it?
I feel like I'm watching Adam West in 1966. batman Watch movies on your portable 9-inch black and white TV dark Knight At IMAX. Strictly speaking, both are Batman stories. They're just presented in completely different ways.
SDSU will continue to play offensive football. It will look like you are from another planet. Lewis sums up his own offensive philosophy this way:
“Think fast, know quickly, and act quickly.”
When he was Kent State's head coach, the Golden Flashes used the play clock as a timer. Here are the average minutes between snaps under Lewis (national rankings in parentheses):
Kent State seconds per play
2022 – 20.7 years (6th)
2021-20.3 (2nd time)
2019 – 21.7 (7 days)
2018 – September 2018 (6th)
Average – 20.9 seconds (5th)
And how does that compare to the pace of the Aztecs, which Hawk coached during that span? It's fair to say SDSU is a little more methodical.
San Diego State seconds per play
2022 – 29.2 (125th place)
2021 – 28.1 (112th)
2019 – 27.6 (103rd)
2018 – 27.3 (102nd)
Average – 28.1 seconds (110th)
We abandoned the 2020 coronavirus season for obvious reasons, but it's interesting that Kent State led the nation in scoring that year. Now that we know the tempo this offense wants to maintain, let's ask the most pertinent questions.
How are you doing?
After all, despite being a skill position that requires players to line up in all kinds of different formations, there is one way this offense is similar to other schemes because everything starts at the line.
“All we can do is as fast as they can get up, get ready, identify and make the call,” Lewis said. “We will work on this issue and strive to bring it to the level we need and make it a huge competitive advantage for us.”
While the leading players are preparing, the coaching staff is also in a difficult situation. You should receive a call immediately after the end of the previous play. This means your delivery methods need to be smart, not complicated.
“I'm not smart enough to complicate it. It has to be simple,” Lewis says with a laugh. “For us to go the fastest, we can't talk too long about what we're doing. It's simple and concise, and that's the only way we can do what we're doing. ”
You know those sideline signs with random pictures on them? It's one of the ways signals get to the offense, and you never know what's going to happen.
“There's colors, there's numbers, there's mascots, there's pirates, there's instruments, there's a little bit of everything,” says Lewism, who can even talk quickly when excited. “Our concepts are in buckets. When we come up with something new, we ask our kids: 'How do you remember this?' We can execute it at a high level. Like, what are the cues you're going to remember?'
The pace is set during practice, and the phrase “15 out of 40” may be heard, the benchmark Lewis and his staff like to set.
“You can make 40 plays in 15 minutes of practice. That's what we've done in the past,” Lewis says.
This averages out to 22.5 seconds per play. This is actually a little later than what might happen on a Saturday.
There are 11 guys on offense, all doing different things, but the time to do it is minimal. Mistakes are bound to occur in the early stages. In fact, throughout the season, mistakes can be made on plays that ultimately work.
Think of it like a great guitarist. Jimmy Page makes mistakes during his solos, but he does them so perfectly that you don't notice them at all. An 80-yard touchdown could be a missed challenge in this offense. Because no matter what everyone was doing, he was 100% sure that's what they were supposed to be doing.
“We're going to talk a lot, and good teams communicate, but as we go along, there may be times when we don't make exactly the right decision. As long as we communicate with each other, make what we believe is the best judgment, and do it on the same page, we can be wrong and still be right. Because we're doing it together with confidence,” says Lewis. “Then we refine it and get better at making the right decisions more consistently. But again, if we're on the same page and we're holding our beliefs, As long as you have and act on it and believe it's the right thing to do, the power of the belief, “Hey, I believe this is the right thing,” is sometimes amazing. And you have to go do it. That's very powerful for the players.”
And it can compete against elite competition. In his final year at Kent State, the Golden Flashes scored 22 points against the University of Georgia. That may not seem like a big deal, but only LSU and Ohio State scored more against the undefeated national champions that year, and those clubs also had Jaden Daniels at quarterback. and CJ Stroud.
As Lewis states on one of his social media profiles, “Life is too short to spend together.” I hope that's the title of the book he writes if he leads SDSU to the College Football Playoff. San Diego State University's final week of spring football concludes with the aptly named FAST Showcase on Saturday at Snapdragon Stadium starting at 1 p.m.
