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Originally Posted by skinsfanthru&thru
I thought I had heard that former assistant, who now is the Vikings offensive cord., of his was running an offense built upon Gibbs' there.
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I've been spending a lot of time this offseason re-building the rosters and trying to compile an offensive playbook similar to what I think Gibbs will be running.
I was reading about Viking O-coordinator Scott Linehan's background, but I wasn't able to draw a definite correlation between him and the Coryell-Gibbs offense. There might be a fuzzy relationship there, though. I do know that Mike Tice, the Vikings' head coach, was a tight end for Joe Gibbs in '89. I'm not sure how much he might have learned about Gibbs' offense in one year, but he's definitely inclined towards using tight ends as blockers and H-backs-- hence the emergence of Jimmy Kleinsasser as a premiere blocking TE/H-back.
I've looked through all the offenses, even the generic "Run-heavy", "Run-balanced", etc playbooks, and none of them are entirely reflective of a true Gibbs-style one-back offense. The closest thing I've found is the Colts' singleback, or "Ace" sets. I built the bulk of my patchwork "Gibbs" playbook using the Colts' singleback looks, with the rest pieced together from the Panthers' one-back, two-tight end sets. The Panthers' O-coordinator, Dan Henning, was a Gibbs assistant during two of the Skins' Super Bowl runs.
What's been most difficult is finding a Posse-esque "bunch" set with the trips bunched on the weak side, a look Gibbs often used to confuse defensive coverage schemes. Ironically, I found such a set in the Gregg Williams playbook, though there aren't many plays to choose from.
I've actually had a lot of fun creating "Gibbsian" plays to bring these playbooks a Hog-friendly running game. I've thrown in a lot of counter plays with pulling blockers, and the counter-trey I created has been wreaking havoc in practice. Portis is absolutely devastating in this offense. If the real offense works even half as well as my computer-generated facsimile, the Skins' offense over the next few years will rival anything Mike Martz fielded in St. Louis... ahhh, to dream!
One thing you will want to pay attention to when creating running plays for this offense is the blocking trajectories of the wide receivers. It can take a lot of tweaking to get the wideouts directed into blocking schemes that create effective running lanes-- regardless of the defensive look-- especially in the trips sets. But it's a lot of fun to tweak the plays and practice them until you find that magical combination of blocking scenarios.
To sum up, I think you'll find the best approach is to steal some of the singleback sets and plays from teams like the Colts and Panthers, but leave yourself enough free playbook space to create your own plays. I've found that there are very few running plays in the Madden-generated singleback playbooks that do justice to the original Gibbs-style running game. In order to effectively run-block in the singleback offense, you really have to get creative with the blocking schemes, and it seems like few of the pre-built Madden plays possess such creativity.
It sounds like a lot of work, but if you truly enjoy Madden, you can really have a lot of fun-- and learn a lot about the one-back offense-- by taking the time to build your own Gibbs offense from scratch.