I have heard a lot of talk about how Denver is going to use less zone blocking than they did with Gary Kubiak and how that is going to help Devontae Booker.
So … what will the Denver Broncos’ new offense look like under Mike McCoy?
The power blocking up front that McCoy has used over the years will be implemented — along with zone-blocking principles that Gary Kubiak used the past two seasons. “The best of both worlds,” as Joseph said, has the potential to breathe new life into an offense that, collectively, has been stagnant for the better part of two years.
They also hired Jeff Davidson to the the offensive line coach who has a history of preference for man blocking schemes, although he uses some zone blocking as well.
What has been confusing to me about this, is that Booker comes from a primarily zone blocking scheme in Utah that he was very successful in.
I have an opinion that RB who have effective vision for the zone blocking scheme can be effective in any blocking scheme. Now maybe I just don't understand the different nuances of what a RB reads should be in different schemes. I did read some interesting things about this earlier this year, related to Leonard Fournette who has issues reading outside zone plays compared to runs that use man blocking. Brett Kollman points this out at the 5:55 mark of
this video that outside zone runs are read outside to inside, while man blocking plays are read inside out.
In Utah Booker played for Dennis Erickson who has coached for the Seahawks and 49ers at the pro level. Here is an
interesting article that goes into his coaching philosophy for the running game.
2. A running game consisting of inside and outside zone, Power-O and the counter trey.
Devontae Booker does not have excellent speed to threaten the edge as much on the outside zone runs, but is effective enough to find the cut back lane. It isn't his best play though, he thrives more on inside zone runs than outside.
Gary Kubiaks ZBS used more outside zone runs than inside and I found
this article which goes into detail about some of Bookers struggles with the outside zone, where there are some examples of him making bad decisions of following failed blocking outside, instead of cutting back inside as he should.
For this article, I tracked his previous three games versus the New Orleans Saints, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Jacksonville Jaguars to see the trends of his performance. In these three games, Denver ran outside zone 28 times, or 43% of their called running plays. Out of those attempts, Booker's offensive line has blocked an average of 2.7 yards per carry, while he has only mustered 2.4 yards per carry. While 0.3 yards may seem insignificant, the Broncos use this play religiously on first and second downs to set the tone for the rest of the drive.
While I don't find a sample size of 3 games to be very telling about a players abilities, and using yards per carry on such a small sample size is also not very compelling, I really like this article because it does specifically point out some plays where I agree Booker had a better option if he would have cut these runs back to the inside. Not that there was a lot there for Booker on these plays, often just a difference of a couple yards. This at least shows specifically Booker not seeing those cut back lanes that are there. Later on in the article the author points out some outside zone runs that Booker does read correctly and cuts those to the inside. So it is not a matter of him having poor vision, he can read these plays, he just didn't do so consistently enough, and Denver was running the outside zone frequently.
Because of Bookers speed limitations, I don't think the outside zone is his best play. Where he thrives is off of inside zone runs. So therein lies my confusion when people say that Booker is not well suited for the zone blocking scheme. It makes sense that Booker would be more successful on outside zone plays at the college level, where defenders are not as fast or as good as defenders at the pro level, and I don't think the outside zone is Bookers best play to begin with. So with Kubiak using him in this fashion, it isn't using Booker at what he does best.
OC Mike McCoy has a track record of fitting the offense to what his players do best, rather than finding players who fit what the coach wants to do schematically, which seems to be what Kubiak was doing.
Some of the examples of Booker failures detailed in the article above are just poorly blocked plays as well. There was only one example where I thought there was enough space for Booker to actually do something good with it, and even that play is somewhat questionable without seeing how the defense reacted to the inside cut he did not opt to take. Other plays the inside cut could have possibly prevented a loss, but its not like Booker was leaving a lot of ungained yards on the field.
To illustrate the difference in the effectiveness of the blocking
here is an article comparing the Dallas offensive line with Denvers, and how Denver was not really doing a very good job of blocking these plays, for any RB.