I hope you caught an interesting football piece on Howard Mudd’s offensive line philosophy in last week’s column by Nick Fierro for the Allentown Morning Call. The story got somewhat lost amid the tragic passing of Fierro’s fellow Eagles beat writer Larry O’Rourke, who died on June 15 at age 46 after a long and inspirational battle with ALS.
Howard Mudd, Eagles new OL coach…
As you know, Mudd was convinced by head coach Andy Reid to come out of retirement last February.
Mudd is an amazing guy. If you ever meet him, you’ll notice he can’t even walk upright anymore. At age 69, his body is ravaged by old football and motorcycle accident injuries. Yet he carries on…coaching the sport he loves.
“I just do it a little differently, that’s all,” says Mudd.
What are the major differences we should look for in a Howard Mudd offensive line technique?
The short answer: Guards firing out on pass plays. Tackles angling in their dropbacks. All the linemen turning their backs on the line of scrimmage, if necessary.
And a lot of technique borrowed from boxing and basketball…
The “boxing” technique starts with the OL players, particularly the guards, initiating contact with the guys across from them on some pass plays, including all the ones that involve play-action.
“I don’t know any other way,” Mudd confessed. “I mean, that’s the way I was taught, and that’s the reference point that I use today. Other people are more passive and they retreat and let the defender come to them. And pass protection kind of lends itself to thinking that it’s more of a passive maneuver.”
“I think of it as more of an aggressive maneuver. Initiate contact rather than initiate space. I want to reduce space at the snap of the ball. Others retreat and increase space. There’s two different ways to do it.”
Mudd will also ask his outside protectors to angle their backs to the pocket instead of taking straight drops, as they had been taught under Juan Castillo. Left tackle Jason Peters, for example, had to change the technique he developed in Buffalo to fit into Castillo’s system upon his arrival in 2009. In 2011, “our tackles will do it like Jason did before,” Mudd revealed.
The basketball angle? Mudd was especially influenced by a defensive method employed by late NBA guard Dennis Johnson some 30 years ago.
“When he played defense, he got real close to the offensive guy at the top of the key,” Mudd said. “Now he wasn’t picking up his man in the backcourt … but he would stick his hand out, and in those days they would let them hand-check. So he would stick his hand out and he would hop back. As soon as he felt the guy back into him, he would hop back and just maintain that distance that he had established by putting his hands on the guy. I thought that was pretty cool.”
“So I do that. Most people, in the old days, they would reset their feet and plant their feet in the ground to stop the defender. I don’t do that. I just maintain that distance. So combine that concept with a boxing term — the jab. It’s called a measured distance. You measure the guy. That’s why you jab, to keep him off balance, to keep him at the distance you want him. So when I hop back, it’s not to stop the guy, it’s really to get a leverage advantage, not just horizontally, but vertically. You want to maintain a relative position to the quarterback and you want to have vertical leverage on [the defender] so that he’s using his leg strength to run through your hands as you’re hopping back trying to get underneath him.”
New information for me… but as Nick Fierro points out in his column, it still boils down to the athleticism of the Eagles personnel:
“One potential stumbling block: Mudd has generally worked with smaller, quicker linemen who are thought by some to be more capable of doing what he wants than the Eagles’ mammoths, among the largest at their position in the league.”—Nick Fierro
“Howard likes athletic linemen,” left guard Todd Herremans said, “so I figure I’ll do my best and train as an athlete right now.”
Herremans is the team’s most versatile lineman, willing and able to play guard or tackle, and now willing to adapt to Mudd’s changes, no matter how difficult.
“Juan would make the vertical sets for tackles, and now Howard wants them to come out at 45 [degrees] more,” said Herremans, the left guard. “And we’re going to be more aggressive inside. Hopefully that will make a bigger pocket and more room for Vick to work around it.”
At this point, it’s impossible to say who will thrive or who will flourish under Mudd. Since the system is changing a bit, the mystery deepens with every day of the lockout and no real proving ground of minicamp.
“Hopefully this thing will get ended soon,” Herremans said. “Otherwise we’ll have a lot of work to do when that happens.”
“Actually, that statement is true either way,” said Fierro… “For the offensive line, it will be survival of the fittest.”
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