1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - Barry Thompson (Fairfax Football Academy): April 14th, 10am

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

What did you see from the Spring GameLay ups were there all day, is that going to be something we see all season and will taking those dictate the Huskers success?Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's time to go one-on-one with D.P. Coming at you live from the Koppel Chevrolet GMC Studios, here is your host, Derek Pearson, presented by Beatrice Bakery, on 93-7 The Ticket and the Ticket FM.com. Welcome to one-on-one Thursday. Thursday means we get smarter. We get smarter on Thursdays. That's what we do in this one hour.

Why? Because our guest brings knowledge. 4-264, 5685. If you have questions for the coach. Sorry to him and text on Honda-Lincoln Hotline. He is on the Honda-Lincoln Hotline. You can follow live on the video stream, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Get there. Get there. Get there. Get there. Get there. If you would, Erika, I'm kind, sir. The autumn wind is a pirate. blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along, swaggering boisterously. His face is weather-beaten. He wears a hooded sash with a silver half about his head

and a bristling black mustache. He growls as he storms the country, a villain big and bold, and the trees are the trees of the world. And the trees all shake and quiver and quake as he robs them of their gold. The autumn win is a raider, pillaging just for fun. He'll knock you round and upside down and laugh when he's conquered and won. The quarterbacks will lead them.

That can be said about the Raiders. That can be said about the Huskers. That can be said about our next guest. Let's bring in. Honda-Lincoln Hotline. Barry Thompson, coach. Hey, man. Kind sir.

You better put a muzzle on, Jay. Somebody's going to hire him. He makes too much sense. Talking about all this money. Somebody smart out there needs to hire him and put him, of course, he can do his radio spot, but put him in charge of at least a sounding board for the decision-making and things like that. Jay is a real one.

I'm going to blow your mind. I'm going to blow your mind. And Rico, we'll vouch for it. So as we're going into, we're ending old school. And we start having a conversation about quarterback play and the spring game, et cetera. And he goes into some narrative. And I went, pause. Pause.

I said, let me play you a message that I got from Barry Thompson. And it's almost as though you two talked because it was. Word for word. Yeah, I don't know if you know Jay's friends or if Jay's friends know you, but you guys must have been talking and swapping notes. Well, like we like to say, it's a VA thing. You know, sometimes people don't understand. He likes crabs.

We're from the right. We're not geographically not that far apart. It's just the way of looking at it. Jay is just, I listened to the whole last segment, D.P., you've been talking about money all week. Well, because, right, it shows up, right? It's interesting. Yeah.

Go ahead. You go through Barry, through, through conversations, and then those common eyes. So he was talking about an NFL scout who was talking about quarterback play. And then because he was saying it, and then as soon as he said it, I just, I pulled up the video you said. And I said, Jay, listen to this.

And I went, it's almost as though you guys were in the same room. Yeah. Having the same conversation. So, you know. And, D.P. Just one more thing on this subject before we get through it. You know, one of the things that Jay was kind of hinting toward is there is an alchemy that, you know, it's not a sign. But there's a lot of moving parts in terms of how a player gets to someplace.

He was mentioning agents sometimes or just throw people. There are teams that have a particular liking for players, certain types of players, or certain players from small school versus big schools. And it was very real to me because, like I said, I've got a guy who's moving through that process at a very lower level, but those same kind of dynamics are involved in, like, what's going to be best for him, what situation, those types of things. And it's funny when you have all those discussions,

although money is the first thing you talk about. You really, you're looking at positioning to what's going to be best for, the athlete long term? Can he get to the second contract? And what's kind of fit for the organization? It's a really interesting thing. From a texter that we both know, and this one will lead with this question,

because I think this will take us down the roads that we want to travel. It says, do coaches pay attention to spring games of other teams in their conference for scouting purposes? That's interesting. I don't know. maybe a bigger staff can kind of look at something, but I just think that it'll be, I don't, the answer is I don't know.

I just, my tendency, never been in that environment. I think that spring is coming on, spring is the first thing that you're worried about. Maybe after the game, you might look if you can catch some tape over the first opponent, you know, if you start to repair in case there's something on film that you don't have or you want to assess them maybe briefly. But all coaches know that what they're seeing is, you know, just it's, you know, it's not very much. You know, it's basic.

It's, you know, players in different spots. Guys you may not see, you know, a lot of, in college in particular, there are a lot of injuries around the offensive line, particularly the offensive line. You know, I've got quarterback several places, and some of them couldn't really have a quote spring game. They don't have enough healthy linemen. Others of them are on the defensive side. They're making up different kind of combination front,

so at least they can practice their front and still keep their defensive alignment healthy. So this thing in particular, I'm not so sure that it has any value. Well, I think, you know, and here's the thing that some of, especially in the Big Ten Conference, where the games are on the network. and as a part of the professionalism, part of the job that you do, if your opponent is going to be visible, you really should pay attention.

Oh, they're going to look. Right, you really should pay attention to see what you have. Like, to not understand. Look, look, I watch spring games and go, oh, well, that's going to be a problem. Or no, that's going to be bad for them. So, yeah, I would have. imagine that the DVRs of the Big Ten Conference covered all of the spring games and they're in slow-mo and some of them even, you know, shared some of the stuff that was out there.

And, you know, again, in a lot of cases, as we know now with social media, these things are posted, shared otherwise. So you can find, you know, the spring games in their entirety online. And if you are a student of the game, as you should be, for the volume of money that's being paid for these coaches, that, yeah. And the players. And the players. Well, the players certainly pay attention, right? The players, look, man, to having talked to players, I can tell you, the players are paying attention because they want to know what the rivals are doing.

Yeah. Right. And, yeah, it's some of its distraction to get you out of just going through your daily routine. Right? Right. It's, after a while, if you face the same eight players for a month and a half, you're ready to see somebody else and you're ready to be measured by something else. but ultimately it's about you. You know, are you doing the things you're supposed to do?

And then sometimes it helps to look at somebody else and go, okay, well, man, I don't look like that. Or they seem ahead of me or behind me or otherwise. Right. I think one of the more interesting questions is how much players are paying the thing. Young players are famous for not watching a lot of football. But I'm wondering, you know, are they paying attention to this coach? Like I said, from a coaching standpoint, yes, it's on TV. he's successful.

Coaches do that all the time. You know, you have a full day of football, football games are on, you watch. Right? So I understand that. I was just commenting about the value of those tapes. But I'm really curious, the better question for me is

how many of the players are watching other opponents. Well, look, man, it should be mandatory viewing. Well, it should be. But, you know, comment this isn't a flower on the groves and everybody's guard, right? Right, right? Like, we understand it. Listen, I mean, we're film.

film dogs. Like we dive in and to, almost to a fall because we like to be, we like to know as much as we need as we can. And to go through that,

but it's all fascinating. And so Barry Thompson joins us, Fairfax Football Academy. You got the opportunity to dive into some of Nebraska's spring game tape. Yeah. And I,

I had to, I started lean back in my chair. and then ended up leaning into the screen. And I need to send these to Rico. So he and Jay asked for them as well as, you know, per our conversation that we were having before. And I played him one of the clips and he was like, you know, he did what you did.

Oh, like somebody should probably have that dude around because he knows what he was talking about. What did you see? Let's start with the basics, right? talk about things like footwork eyes, that sort of thing. So let's just start year over year. Year over year, right? I could look at the tape and kind of understand.

That's the reason I commented. Because I could visually see what was going on. I could see the play design. And it made sense to me. Right? So that's a very good thing. Now, what kind of got revealed was me was, was there are some issues there.

So one, there's a protection issue, left tackle, on the clips that I looked at. And I'll go back and look at my head. But it seemed to have big problems. And if I remember correctly, the right defensive end up back had a big day. But there were some sack that came from that side. And so that's an issue.

And you talked about that earlier. So that's one thing. The other thing from the quarterback perspective is this clearly is an offense where there's going to be a premium on the quarterback decision-making to understand, right, what to look at and how to make a decision off it. So the thing I think I can describe most accurate to the listeners or viewers is early on Casey Thompson completed a nice path, and it was a heck of a catch for first down, and it was over, or out the reach of the linebacker, right?

And there was a guy behind it. It just kind of fitted in there. That is a big-time throw. And you certainly want a quarterback who has the accuracy, the timing, to complete a throw like that. Because sometimes it's a game of inches, and you complete that pass, and he catches that ball, first down move the change. But as you look at the play from pre-snap basis,

So if everybody can visual, if you look in front of you, I'm first going to talk about what's to the right of you. To the right, there were two receivers. Defensively, there were three defenders. So right there, from a numbers perspective, they have you outnumbered, three defenders for two receivers, which in football terms means that they're shy somewhere else. On the left side, this turned into a five-man pattern with the back check relief. they had two receivers, the furthest receiver to the outside. They were closer in the formation, but one receiver was the furthest outside.

We called that the number one receiver. And then the number two receiver, the guy was actually on the line scrimmage, was there. On that side, the underneath coverage, they had three defenders. So they weren't in man. They were kind of in a trap thing, which means to your listeners, they're all responsible for the three guys, but they're not going to leave their area. It's kind of manned, but it's kind of zoned at the same time. And so as a quarterback, the way I would have played it, or you think that he could play it one way,

is that you see that there's three over two. So the linebacker who has the underneath responsibility that is something goes short, he's going to be responsible for it. Something goes long, the defensive backs take over. when I go back, if I see that that linebacker expands toward the sideline, my eyes cut immediately back to the middle. The reason for it is on the left side, you had that number one receiver. He cut underneath the number two and cut toward the middle of the field. Now, when you pause the tape, you see that number one receiver.

He's running with his eyes up. So, congrats to Mickey Joseph. Right. Great scheme. Because that gives me an individual. that that guy was reading the middle linebacker. If the middle linebacker sat, he was going to take a different route. If that middle linebacker bailed out and vacated like he did, then he was running a different route.

So go back to the flight. Three snap, I see three over two. Okay, I like my guy. But if that backer expands, I know I got an advantage back to the left. So he takes the ball, he sees the backer expand, the guys, I think, should go to the middle linebacker who was bailing, and there's a guy wide open in the middle of field. I'm never mad at the completion, and this is about moving the change, but that was a high-risk throw in a situation where you didn't need to make a high-risk throw, right?

I saw some good play design. There's a play called METCH where you typically have two receivers coming from opposite side. There was a great play design. What they did mesh is they did mesh with a tightest. in coming from one side and the back coming from the other. So it was neat because what happened was the defender who was on the tight end side. His rules were when number one disappears, goes away from him, then his eyes go to number two, which is the slot receiver on the other side of the field. So as that guy goes vertical, that defender goes vertical with them and it

clears the space, and it had the net effect of isolating the middle line back. He jumped the route that was going across the space as the back is coming the opposite direction. And remember that other defender lifted vertically. So that was an easy, kind of simple completion that took advantage of the defense's rules, and it was an easy first down pass by the running back number 23. The other thing was, I saw third and nine, this was clear cover four. We call it country cover four.

There's no movement, line up, three backers underneath. You know exactly what's going to happen. And third and nine, quarterback goes back, and he takes the vertical route to his left. Now, when he does that, there's a safety on the hash and the cornerback, and there's nothing to occupy the cornerback. So both the safety and the corner are getting deep. And so essentially have two guys playing one round. Again, he could look there, but his matchup was in the middle of the field.

Through play design, they had only two backers left underneath, but they had run three Nebraska players into that area. And one is what we call vertical stretch. There was a receiver, the running back in front of the linebacker, middle linebacker, and there was a person behind them that's called a vertical stretch or high-low. and the ball should have gone there, but the ball is just thrown away down the field. And so you see design,

you see how this offense is going to run. There's going to be a quarterback who understands the offense, understands where he, and when he makes this decision, he's going to have something really good, and then he's just going to get the ball to him. So the structure is good, the decision making is not there,

so from now until fall, and I think Jay referenced it, earlier. He said he saw Casey talking to Whipple a lot. Right? And that's a good sign based on what I saw on the film. A couple of things in this, these conversations you and I

have about quarterback and receiver play in general. Is that I find that the greater level success for quarterbacks comes when they are willing to accept the layup. Take the layout.

Like the spectacular big play thing is going to happen. It does not always have to be forced. But what I noticed Saturday was that within the scheme, there were a lot of layups. That schematically, it was set up for this offense to have something that the defense cannot cover every play. Like there's literally something there that's easy and good at the same time on a regular basis.

Now, is it fair to say that Casey Thompson's success is going to be dependent upon his ability and want to accept and take the layup. In part, yes. What you're doing, so go back to that first down throw, right? It's just me personally. I'm not, I'm not ever mad at a completion, and I never get mad at a touch sign. I may have a question to the quarterback, but I'm not mad at it. Right.

Right, so it's a high risk. That is the type of throw that you want a quarterback to be able to make. I remember there's another, I didn't review it, but there's another throw that he makes, a corner route, which would be to his left, right, that fits it in, threw it high, got it, you know, you want a quarterback who can make those throws. So from that part, it's good. What's going to be interesting with Casey and whoever else is going to battle them is that they're going to have to learn to moderate when they take those chances, right?

and so you're just putting a lot of faith in Whipple off a proven record that he's going to decide through practice and how much rope to give these guys to make those decisions. Right. So, yes, the layup is there. Like I described it, there was a layup, but he did get the first down, right? So he's got to go back, all of them need to go back and figure out, you know, am I starting right? Is this a correct decision? So there's a little bit of art there. But you're right.

It is about moving the change. And so they're just going to have to learn through down and distance, time and score. All right. Am I taking this? Right? Because it's there. Do I really understand the offense that he's designed for me, right? That if I see something that's not there, then I come to the second thing and I probably got an advantage, right?

I don't think in this offense, from what I saw and I'll keep looking. I think it is aggressive office. That first look is the aggressive throw. But the second one is the one that gives them the man advantage. It seems like when you watch NFL tape, NFL tape has a lot of these high-low structures in it, where they can isolate a cornerbacker, isolate the linebacker, and they have some high-low or vertical stretch on the guy.

And so I think it's going to be interesting to do things. So the next thing for me is that a lot of, lot of those layups are the perfect throws for quarterbacks that easy right in front of my face clean pocket right down the middle between the hash is throw which which simplifies listen if i'm running an option route and and and i'm keying a middle linebacker and that middle linebacker shows me his name on the back of his jersey that should be an automatic trigger for a quarterback that I've got a crosser and somebody right in front of my face that gives me six yards with running room if I'm willing to take it.

Right, but you also have to understand, right? So this is new to them. But I'll say something else that's that the structure's different. It makes sense to me. When you go back and look at the pocket, their protection was pushing the pocket, the rush to the side. So talk about play design. There was a lot of isolating the middle. linebacker. So there's a multi-fold thing that's going on there.

One, you're giving them a pocket design where he has a clear view of the middle of the field, right? And two, because you're going to high load the middle linebacker and a defensive coordinator sitting up there, you're kind of controlling that guy. You know what I'm thinking? If you send him, you want to come with an X-split, you're going to, that defense coordinator's got to know he's got concepts coming into the middle of the field. You're going to make them pay. You're going to make them pay. Yeah, so I'm saying there's a lot of stuff that kind of made sense.

It isn't that a defense court, I can't figure it out. Don't get that wrong. But a lot of it made sense. And you've got to remember that, you know, these quarterbacks may be being asked to do things that they haven't done before. It doesn't mean they can't do it. But they're being asked to do it. So that'll take the film study, and this will be great for them.

and once they understand it even more fully, they can start to look at other tape, maybe Pittsburgh tape, right? And they can start to understand why Kenny went here and why Kenny went there and what he did and it'll start to have context and meaning for them. So hopeful. I'm more hopeful.

It's a part of this thing, right? And it's two-sided and it's probably why. Can you hang for another segment, Eric Coach? I can. All right, we'll throw the break. Barry Thompson, Fairfax Football Academy. me. There's lots to talk about it. Again, I want to get into what Pickett did with Whipple, some of the things that can be transferred over to Nebraska and Casey Thompson. We'll talk about

those things when we'll come back. Download our app by searching 93.7.7 the ticket in your app store. You're listening to one-on-one with DP on 937 the ticket and the ticketfm.com.