1975 was the year Belichick entered the NFL with the Baltimore Colts. The modern-day Colts used an unbalanced line often against the Eagles on Monday night while the Patriots – featuring Cameron Fleming – have used it frequently in their first two games as they look to bolster the protection in front of
Tom Brady while also strengthening the running game.
That’s all the daylight Belichick needed to begin his lecture.
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I’d say the main issue you get into would just be the commitment you make to it,” Belichick began. “Putting an offensive lineman in for a tight end, I would say you’re going to get less of a defensive adjustment, normally. I would say you’d get less of a defensive adjustment because the spacing is still the same, it’s just who is that guy? It’s a lineman instead of a tight end, but if it was a blocking tight end or lineman, how much difference is there? I’d say there’s a smaller degree of grade of adjustment for the defense.
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Once you flip a lineman over, now you’ve totally changed the defensive spacing. What was a three-man surface is now a four-man surface. What was now a three-man surface is now a two-man surface. That creates some fundamental blocking angles potentially for the offense. I’d say that there’s a lot more involved in that. The issues you get into offensively are things like protections where, here’s our rule on protections but now we’re in a different look so how do those rules change, how do our assignments change?
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I’d say normally you’d have to simplify your protections quite a bit rather than try to run them all from an unbalanced line. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it, but it would take a lot of work, I would think. The same thing defensively, once they unbalance, then you have to decide how you want to handle the ‘ normally, say you have three guys to one side of the center and two guys to the other side, but the two guys to the other side are ineligible. Now you put a guard and tight end on the two-man surface and then you get three offensive linemen on the three-man side, it changes your passing strength. It changes the surface that you have to defend defensively and it changes the location.
“Normally that two-man side is ineligible so now you’ve kind of flipped that around so there are some things you have to handle defensively. But
I think it certainly limits you some offensively. Some of your weakside runs that you were running behind a tackle, now you’re running behind a tight end, so you have to know where there defense is going to be when you call some of those plays, which gets again, a little bit more involved. I think it’s hard to be in an unbalanced line and just run one or two plays because you don’t know if the defense is going to move over or not move over, rotate away from the formation passing strength, rotate to it.
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You know, there’s too much uncertainty. But, if you have a number of plays then no matter what they do then theoretically, just like everything else in your offense, you can, ‘If they do this, we do that. If they do that, we do this.’ So, you need some kind of volume to be able to handle that unless you just want to run one or two things as a changeup just to kind of make the defense work on it. I don’t want to say it’s a whole different offense but it definitely presents some different problems for you.
In order to be good at it, you would have to commit a decent amount of time and scheme to it so that if the defense does this, we have that advantage. If they don’t, rather than if we go over and, ‘Here’s what we think they’re going to do but, oh, they didn’t do it, now we’re stuck.’ When you’re in that kind of situation it’s kind of not worth it.”
Does Belichick feel the unbalanced line is primarily used in option football?
“Again, in the running game
it’s much easier to handle in the running game, particularly if you check the play. So if they move over, then we can come back here. If they don’t move over, then we have the advantage to the overload side and we can go that way. I’d say that’s a lot easier. Once you get into the passing game and a lot of protections and ‘Who is the linebacker?’ when you’re on the two-man side, you’re not thinking usually about a secondary player being over there. I’m not saying he couldn’t, but that’s infrequent.
“The secondary player is usually over on the three-man side where the tight end is. Now you’ve got him on the backside, now who’s got him, what’s the quarterback’s read? There are some things you have to handle. If you’re running away from them, then great, it doesn’t matter. I think when you get into the read-option game or the triple-option game or that type of, then that’s kind of a different ballgame.
“But it’s certainly an interesting aspect going all the way back to the single-wing days. That was the whole single-wing offense was the balanced single-wing, then the overloaded single-wing then the box shift back to the weakside.
It was all overload blocking angles trying to create. I don’t think the plays were checked back then. You were just trying to show power over here, now you’ve got power over there and show power over here and run counter back the other way and all that. That’s really what football was in the ‘40s; ‘30s and the ‘40s. That was a huge part of the game. It’s interesting to see how all that, how they tried to handle those different things, both offensively and what they tried to create and defensively what the answers were to them.”
