Chalk Talk: Baylor’s Big Influence and the Cowboys’ Favorite Play

The OSU offense flourished in the Cowboys’ 45-38 win over the Pittsburgh Panthers, racking up over 640 yards of total offense.

Wide receiver James Washington had a career day, but while he did rack up almost 300 yards, there’s not much to analyze when it comes to the deep ball.

The run game was simple, again, and while senior running back Rennie Childs had four rushing touchdowns, that by no means indicates that the run game is fixed.

These are the obvious things, though. The Cowboys showed a lot of interesting schematic things against Pitt, some that the average viewer might have missed. Today, we’re going to analyze two of them.

Jalen McCleskey as a Deep Threat

The Baylor offense has long been the cause of a lot of trends in college football. Teams all across the country have copied what they do, whether it be their spacing or their use of a simplified downfield passing game, and implemented it into their own offense. OSU is no different.

The Cowboys used Jalen McCleskey in a Baylor staple — the slot seam read — multiple times on Saturday.

This play has the slot man as the primary receiver. The receiver has a seam read, which means that after about eight yards of his initial vertical release, he reads the coverage and adjusts his route according to the coverage.

If the coverage is MOFC (middle of field closed), meaning there’s a middle safety, he can either split the sideline and middle safeties on a skinny post or run a seam, depending on where that safety is. If the coverage is MOFO (middle of field open), then he can cut more toward the middle of the field on a post. If the defense shows one-high, then he can adjust his route on a slot fade and push his route toward the sideline.

This sounds complicated, but all the receiver has to think is “run to open space.” Chris B. Brown explains it well on here on his website. He was also one to point out that Texas used the play multiple times in week one against Notre Dame.

Long pass to Heard is a Baylor staple: Outside WRs sit down on sideline at 8-10 yards, slot has a "Win" route: make moves, get open deep

— Chris B. Brown (@smartfootball) September 5, 2016

The Cowboys ran this multiple times but it never worked. This wasn’t by fault of the play design, though, but rather the execution (and more specifically, the throws) were occasionally poor. Still, it gave us great cutups of McCleskey running all three routes —

The skinny post:

Seam:

And slot fade:

It didn’t work this week, but Mccleskey will likely rack up tons of yardage on this play going forward.

The Cowboys’ Favorite Pass Play

One of the Cowboys’ safest and most effective passing plays is a play-action curl-slant route combination out of their two-back set. The Cowboys have relied on simple three-man play-action passing concepts as of late, and offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich uses them, and the two-back personnel, a bunch. They are keeping their base offense simple — that’s for sure— but that doesn’t mean that it’s not effective.

The curl-slant combo is effective because of its simplicity. If the linebackers suck in on the run fake, then the quarterback throws to the slant over the middle.

If the slant occupies the linebackers in coverage, the quarterback throws to the curl on the outside.

This particular curl route is hard to defend. When the receiver makes his break to the inside, he opens his hips to the quarterback and runs toward the sideline, creating more separation from him and his defender. The cornerback in coverage has almost no chance of an interception if the ball is placed correctly.

One way that Yurcich keeps defenses off-balanced is by tagging a different route on the twins side. Instead of a curl, they frequently replace it with a post:

And on Jhajuan Seales’ 86-yard reception late in the fourth quarter, Yurcich ingeniously called up a stutter streak. You can’t see it on the EPSN broadcast very well, but Seales hesitated for a moment, and the cornerback bit on the fake and ended up tripping on the turf.

Now I’m not one to say that Yurcich is perfect, but it was smart of him to save that until when they needed it most.

Miscellaneous

• Mason Rudolph threw high on all of his short throws. He did this last week as well. Weird.

• The Cowboys have all but committed to the zone scheme, and more specifically, the two-back stretch for their run production. I’d like to see more variety in the future.

• OSU is now a two-back offense, whether you like it or not. A cowboy back and running back are on the field almost every snap. Doesn’t leave opportunity for a lot of personnel/formational diversity.

How do you think the offense performed against Pittsburgh, and how do you think the Cowboys will perform this Saturday against Baylor? Leave your opinions below in the comments!