On October 24th, we had a hoot of a game when the FAU Owls beat the Rice Owls 51-49 in an absolute shootout. While Rice came up short, their offense put up 608 total yards, including 499 rushing yards, with backup quarterback Gael Ochoa leading the way.
If you haven’t followed Rice lately (I haven’t either), you should know that they run a shotgun/pistol spread option offense. A majority of the time, Rice operates out of a heavy flexbone pistol set. They heavily utilize pre-snap motion built into their option attack to create angles, manipulate defensive leverage, and seal perimeter blocks.
Rice has some fun concepts in its playbook, including zone read option, duo read option (which we’ll cover in a later article), stretch speed option, stretch midline, and just about anything else you can draw up in a gun option attack.
Today, we’re going to focus on their power concepts.
Power Option
Here is a play that I really enjoyed coaching years ago. Eventually, we moved away from it when we had better talent at quarterback and wanted to take advantage of other parts of our offense.
The concept gives you a typical power play from the playside. The nuances come from the backside guard and the fullback (running back).
We are going to read the edge defender with the quarterback.
If the defensive end plays upfield or sits for the quarterback, we want the pulling guard to fill for the playside linebacker. This should give us a give read to the fullback. The defensive end has essentially eliminated himself from the play by committing to the quarterback.
If the defensive end squeezes, we assume the quarterback will pull the ball. The fullback attacks the play side linebacker, while the pulling guard works around the squeeze to get to the next-level defender.
This is the hard part to teach and rep. The timing between the quarterback, fullback, and pulling guard has to be right. The guard must be able to adjust his path based on the quarterback’s read without getting caught in the traffic created by the fullback.
The first time Rice runs Power Option, the defensive end squeezes. The fullback fills for the play side linebacker, but unfortunately trips up the pulling guard.
The backside wing goes in motion to get into pitch phase. Luckily, Ochoa is speedy enough to outrun the mistakes.
Because Rice only has a tight end and wing to the strength, once they read the edge defender, the only players left to account for are the corner and safety.
