The Air Raid, Spread, or West Coast is Easy For QB's that Know How to Make These Reads .
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Offenses have gone through a series of progressions and changes over the course of years. They adjust to new defensive schemes then defense adjusts back. We'll get into that with a video later on. But right now, offenses are heavy into pure progression reading. A lot of that is to simplify the offense for quarterbacks, especially young quarterbacks coming into the air raid system, the spread offense, even a lot of the West Coast teams now run a pure progression read system for quarterbacks. And so I want to explain what that is.
Going back to my college years. I was playing in a slimmed down version of the West Coast system under Terry Shea and then under Steve Mariucci.We ran West Coast concepts at Cal. That meant, for a quarterback, it was all about defensive key reads and understanding what you're seeing in terms of coverage. Then knowing within that route concept, who my key read was. Which player I was reading, to take me to my first decision. When Steve Mariucci took over as offensive coordinator, Dan Cozetto, also took over as our offensive line coach. I love Danny, he's a fantastic coach and brought a ton of attitude to the team and had some experience in Dennis Erickson's spread system, where they did a lot of this full field reading and progressions. But I had been trained in defensive key reads as part of that West Coast system. It was hard for me to wrap my head around a full field read how could I read and tell what's going on on the back side. If I'm reading front side to start, I couldn't get my head around a pure progression. As a young quarterback without the experience of having been in a system where we did pure progression reads, I was trying to wrap my mind around, who do I key on here? And how do I know that I've got this guy in the back side, if I can't look at this guy early. I was trying to find the defender rather than just playing street ball and finding if that middle read was open. And so it was hard for me.
Your takeaway from this video should be that full field reads are not only possible, they're actually really successful and they can get you big chunks. They can be shot plays and they can make the game easier on your quarterback and spread the defense. You can spread that defense out, there's no way they can cover everything as long as your quarterback doesn't fall in love with the route. And as long as you're giving him the right reads, where it makes it a simple eye progression, then you are in good shape as a coach as a quarterback.
Being efficient as a QB or coach in a progression system is all about mastering full field reads progression reads and making the game simpler on your quarterback to execute from the pocket.