El Cambio

Understanding Zone Blocking and Florida State's Offensive Line
 by Bud Elliott on Jun 9, 2009 7:25 AM EDT in FSU Football
 
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Today I will try to teach you something about offensive line play.  Specifically, I will discuss Florida State's offensive line.  In this article, I'll cover the questions "why zone blocking?", "what is zone blocking?", and"what type of players do we need to run a zone system?"  In future editions, I'll cover specific plays and the passing game.
First, you may have heard that Florida State is primarily a zone blocking team.  This is a departure from the days of Mark Richt and those who preceded him, who favored "man blocking" schemes.
Zone Blocking developed as a response to the increasingly athletic defensivelinemen seen over the past 20 years.  These defensive linemen would kill plays before they even began by achieving penetration in the backfield.  The more traditional style, "man blocking", required players to block a specific player, often one of those elite defensive linemen (think FSU beating on Kansas in the Meadowlands in the '93 Championship year).    It was very difficult for teams to findfive offensive linemen who could man up and block their specified player, particularly when that assignment was shifting before the snap and running in all different crazy directions after the snap.  To do so would require exceptionally strong, smart, and athletic offensive linemen, and those type players do not come around too often.  As a counter, coaches began to devise ways for their players todeal with these freak defensive linemen.  Instead of blocking each lineman one on one, what if the entire offensive line blocked the defensive line, functioning as a unit?  Instead of each lineman having to adjust to the pre-snap movements, stinting, and post-snap twisting and stunting, the offensive line adjusted as a unit?  What if linemen worked as a unit instead of chasing around these freaksthat teams were now employing at defensive tackle?  Welcome to zone blocking; the thinking man's way to block.  Again, the entire goal is to eliminate penetration.
 
Before I get into the mechanics of zone blocking, I want to establish a few philosophical goals.  Think of these goals as Florida State's end, and zone blocking as the means the 'Noles will use to reach that end. 
According tothe father of zone running, Alex Gibbs, the man who designed the Denver Broncos running game with Terrell Davis (orchestrating one of the biggest super bowl upsets in the modern era), the entire key to the running game is to stay positive:
WE WANT NO NEGATIVES!  We look at pass as yes/ no, big/ little, big plays and zero plays (w/ negatives).  Out of a certain number of passes, we expect a certainnumber of failures.  That is the nature of the passing game.
But the run game the exact opposite.  We want NO negatives.  We do not want to run plays that are big/ little, even at the expense of big plays, we do not want it.  We want the system where even the "bad" play gains something.  The entire objective is to stay out of 3rd and long.  We throw out the run plays with which we cannotconsistently avoid negatives.
Screw averages.  We want medians.  The back might average 7 yards per carry, but how often did he get stuffed and put us in 3rd and 10, causing a turnover.
And we do this by eliminating penetration and running a limited number of plays to perfection.
Gibbs was way ahead of his time.  NFL and college teams are now spending a lot of money to reach the same conclusion thatGibbs reached:  it's not what you average, it's what you consistently gain.  It is better to have a back average 4 yards per carry with minimal carries going for 0 or negative yards, than it is to have a back average 6 yards per carry but attain that average on a mix of long and bust runs.  This concept of staying out of unfavorable down and distance (2nd and 8+, 3rd and 5+, etc) is known as...