You run faster to gas the defensive line and force the secondary to disclose to you through stance, head positioning, eye direction and alignment pre-snap whether it’s going to be a run or a pass and to limit their ability to mask or rotate coverage if it’s a pass. You can look at a safety’s shoulders or his knee lock or eye glance and tell what is coming if he’s only given seconds to get ready. Secondarily, it limits substitutions.
Most of the defenses in our conference have the discipline to avoid giving away those clues. Many do not. In particular, UCF who relies on defensive basics and superior speed to make up for the mistakes that can’t be erased by scoring more points.
Montgomery knows this and he knows that some schools with experience with our offense know how to build a base defense that can protect the line to gain and not give away the clues that gives Montgomery a slight advantage with the hurry up. So he’s been dialing it back to allow he and the QB to do the initial read of the backfield numbers and linebacker cheat that we’ve discussed in recent threads.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The move to HUNH was schools exploiting vulnerabilities in the rules to make up for speed and talent imbalances. The schools that enjoyed those advantages have changed the rules to eliminate many of those vulnerabilities such as holding the ball to allow defensive substitutions.
The core idea behind the veer and shoot isn’t speed to the snap like the Malzahn offense. It’s a pass first triple option offense designed to force the offense into a +1 situation somewhere on the field, if the QB correctly locates it and it’s not being given away by cues from other offensive players and there’s sufficient talent to move the ball into the space where the advantage exists. Its being run better at a slower pace when Montgomery isn’t in a down and distance that favors the defense, most of which in our conference usually know what is coming and have set up to deny anything that would concede a first down.