Most of what I've read recently makes me a lot less ashamed to be a Browns fan. One of the best new guys is Vincent Rapisardi of Dawg Pound Daily, but in this article, he overlooked a few things:
He did a great job on the running backs, up until he said "This team will rely almost solely on the run game".
Vince forgot DeFellipo and the Infantyan scheme. There will not only be a lot of short quick passes to crossers and slanters, but also a lot of passes to the running (and full) backs.
Yes, it's kind of cheating. Most quarterbacks with any touch at all will complete about 90% of these, and they really should be called extra-long handoffs, but they're passes.
Vince wasn't wrong to doubt that McCown could look as good as he did in Chicago, because there's no such crew of stud receivers here.
He understands as well as I do that it's the offensive line that makes the big difference for McCown, but you do have to compare the receivers. He just went a little overboard.
The key with the receivers is the missing deep threat. (Three of them--and Terrelle Pryor--have that kind of speed, but Pryor is a work in progress, and the others are so short that they get less open the deeper they get).
But again, Duke Johnson, Gabriel, and Hawkins are among his receivers in this scheme. These are weapons. So Ray Farmer has provided McCown excellent body armor (the line), some hand grenades (the backs), and a pretty decent gun.
He might not be the Chicago McCown, but he should be average or above.
Finally, by the time the dumpoffs and screens are added up, this offense will probably pass more than it runs.
Before I go, I looked into the inside zone blocking scheme recently, and it's really interesting--and, uh...not exactly what I thought it was.
At it's most basic, if there is a guy in front of you, you drive him back--so it's physical. No scoops or fancy angles: You just plow into him and drive.
BUT if you are "uncovered", meaning that there isn't a guy right in front of you, you fire out at an angle to hit the nearest bad guy (ie you double-team the nearest bad guy--helping out the nearest "covered" team mate.)
You "move the man" (ie you make him take a balancing step away from you so that your team mate has him off-balance--this is a solid "chip"-block, see?). Then you go vertical to attack a linebacker.
This assumes a two-gap defensive line. When it's one-gap, and the defensive linemen are avoiding contact, it gets much different. Three to all five linemen will fire out at an angle to drive the defenders in the same direction. This is the zone-blocking that I was familiar with.
This is really entry-level stuff, and I got a headache trying to get more detail. There were around forty different diagrams.
Another common element is backside protection. Somebody is always watching the back door to make sure a fast blitzer or defensive end doesn't sneak in from behind the direction of the run to blow it up. But this is sometimes a back or a tight end.
The basic principle in both cases is not to create a specific hole, but rather to move the entire front seven backwards, and allow gaps to naturally develop.
But this is part of the reason that the Browns will have a strong running game. The Browns three interior offensive linemen all fit this scheme perfectly. They can get a vertical push AND not get embarrassed by safeties and linebackers in space. They can execute this stuff before the running back either has to wait too long, or else overruns them.
Just passing that along.
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