Film Look: Three Takeaways from OSU’s Offense against Kansas

Oklahoma State rebounded from its first loss of the season with a 20-point road win over the Kansas Jayhawks this weekend. The Cowboys put up 568 yards of total offense and were able to get things going both on the ground and through the air as they finished with 48 points.

I wanted to take a look at three things that stood out to me in this game and dive into them a little bit further below.

Trips Formation

The Cowboys were without two inside receivers on Saturday in Jalen McCleskey and Dillon Stoner. As Mike Gundy noted in his presser last week, McCleskey has decided to redshirt and transfer and Stoner was sidelined with an injury. However, the Cowboys were able to find receivers to step up and ended the day with 312 yards passing.

Against Texas Tech, Oklahoma State did not line up in trips formation (three receivers to one side) very often. On Saturday in Lawrence they showed trips on 15 of their 66 total plays, or 22.7 percent. The unbalanced formation allowed the Cowboys to exploit the Jayhawk defense both in the rushing and passing games.

They found some success running away from the Trips formation. Including this touchdown run by Justice Hill.

It also opened up the intermediate passing game.

In addition, it allowed OSU to take the top off the defense. However, Taylor Cornelius overthrows his man here.

The goal of trips is to overload one side of the field and try to find open areas in a zone defense. With KU running a lot of zone coverage in the games leading up to their matchup with OSU, I thought this was solid game planning by Mike Yurcich. They saw a good amount of success with this formation on Saturday and they were able to exploit the Jayhawks for a few big plays.

Fly Sweep Motion

Against the Red Raiders, we only saw the fly sweep motion a couple of times in the first half. They showed it several times in the second half, but without consistency throughout the game, it’s not as effective. However, against the Jayhawks this weekend, we saw this motion about 10 times and there were a lot of positive plays that followed.

This motion was used on the first touchdown play of the game. You can see in the clip below the motion from Landon Wolf causes both the KU defensive back and linebacker to move towards their right and respect the threat of the sweep. Once the ball is snapped and the offensive line blocks towards the motion, you can see every Jayhawk defender moving with the flow of the run play. Cornelius sees the linebackers and safety cheating towards the run, so he pulls the ball back and hits Tylan Wallace in stride on the slant for a score.

We see the fly sweep motion used again in the clip below. The safety on the bottom side of the screen comes up to play the sweep and run fake to that side. Tyron Johnson runs a nice in-and-up route, and with the safety cheating up to play the run, Johnson is able to blow right by the KU secondary. TC makes a solid throw and Johnson has nothing but green grass on the way to the end zone.

This motion also opened up some things in the running game, as we see in the play below. The defense again flows with the sweep motion, including the safety to the top side of the screen. Once Chuba gets past the second level, with the safety on that side out of the picture, all it takes is one block from Wallace and he’s off to the races.

You can tell offensive analyst Bob Stitt has really put his imprint on this offense with the utilization of this motion we’ve seen this season. It’s something the Cowboys have shown in the past, but there’s been some new wrinkles and better usage of it so far this year. One complaint I have is that they don’t give it to the motion man enough, we saw the reverse on Saturday, but I believe that was the only time the motion man got the ball.

Decent but Inconsistent Run-Blocking

My initial take away from yesterday’s game was solid run blocking from the offensive line. After re-watching the game, I still think the run blocking was above average, but there were still a few too many missed assignments and general confusion from the big guys up front. There were too many plays which were either stopped for a loss, no gain or minimal gain attributed to the offensive line. In addition, there were multiple plays where Justice bailed the line out by opening things up for himself. For example, the play below.

It looks like there was some miscommunication here on Marcus Keyes’ part, because he allows the defensive lineman to blow right by him and almost make a play in the backfield. Luckily, Hill threw a ridiculous spin move and is able to bust this run for a first down.

On the other hand, the offensive line did open some absolutely monstrous holes for the Cowboy running backs.

In addition, they did a good job, at times, of sealing off the defense and creating a running lane for Hill.

Overall, I would give the line a B grade. They were dealing with injuries as left tackle Arlington Hambright went down early and Teven Jenkins missed a few plays, but they still assisted in a 256-yard performance on the ground. Additionally, the Cowboys as a team averaged 5.6 yards per carry on the day, and 6.8 yards per carry when you look at just Hill, Chuba Hubbard and J.D. King. These are pretty impressive numbers, and although Hill had to do it himself at times, a lot of this success should be attributed to the offensive line.

P.S.: Oklahoma State ran it in the image shown below, but if they throw the screen pass to Chuba here it’s a touchdown. That’s probably an exaggeration, but the point is lining Chuba up outside needs to happen more often.