Denbrock, Leonard and the Offense

by HumanRobot , Cybertron, Monday, September 09, 2024, 07:45 (32 days ago)

I’m hardly a scheme expert, but I like to think I can spot high-level offensive concepts. Here are bits and pieces of background that I can look at and understand:

Leonard stuff:

• Leonard 2022 highlights (video)
  
• Every snap vs Wake, his best passing game (video)

Denbrock stuff:

• Blog posts on his offense at Cincy (article 1; article 2 ; article 3)
  
• Denbrock+Kelly offense at Lsu (article 1 ; article 2; article 3)
  
• CoachTube 2022 – Skip RPO (premium video)
  
• Denbrock@UC Coach’s clinic (video)

Analysis of Leonard at Duke:

• Passing: most comfortable hitting underneath routes, seems to prefer hitting hit and stick routes. Not comfortable throwing deep. Very few PROs
  
• Running: great athlete that seems most comfortable running improvisationally. Seemingly very few true “read-option” reads
  
• Very little play action, waggle, or throw-on-the-run

Analysis of Leonard at ND:

• Not quite as good of athletic burst as 2022 highlights, likely due to lingering issues from ankle surgery
  
• Appears to have a much better designed QB run package compared to Johns’ work at Duke
  Similar short passing concepts
  
• Occasionally attempts at bread-and-butter Denbrock concepts like Skip RPO that go pretty poorly and only show up once/game.

Conclusions/thoughts: Denbrock must have thought he was getting a Desmond Ridder type player, but he’s largely had to shelve the majority of his concepts. You can say what you want about Daniels/Kelly/LSU, but Denbrock’s time at Cincy was his own and ND’s offense has been stripped down even compared to that. I don’t think the offense gets much better with Leonard at the helm as I don’t see a lot more for Denbrock to try to bake in.

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