For the better part of a decade, Georgia Tech built its football reputation on a schematic penchant for doing more with less. Powered by the flexbone option, the Yellow Jackets were able to close the gap between themselves and more talented rosters. But in a new era of college football where offenses have coalesced into the same blob of “pro-style spread option RPO”, coaches must find new ways to find winning edges during the course of a game. In the NFL — a league notorious for its institutionally-enforced parity, teams have started to find these edges in two ways:
Let’s focus our discussion to just fourth-down decision making.