here's how I see it

by HumanRobot , Cybertron, Thursday, July 09, 2026, 07:18 (13 days ago) @ Domer99

If it's 3rd and short, you basically do one of three things

1) You stay in your identity -- "it's just a normal down and our normal offense is good enough to get one yard"
2) You stay in identity but add a wrinkle -- "show them what they expect and punish for overplaying it"
3) Change the problem entirely -- come out in something different from the normal offense.

My feeling is that Denbrock tried 2&3 early on, with RPOs and wildcat. They seemed to spend a bunch of camp building those concepts but they all got scrapped after TAMU. So then they went with #1. Unfortunately, the "normal offense" was more of a big play offense than a consistent grind-it-out affair. They were definitely keeping things easy for Carr early on which led to safeties getting crept up. Ironically, we were sometimes at our best converting short yardage by throwing it deep and counting on Fields or a receiver to beat single coverage deep.

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Freeman's got so much riz they need to call him Aura Parseghian