Back to the winter of '97, we (being TUKA, which eventually morphs into magnUM) assemble at the astroturf of Oosterban Fieldhouse to learn our first offense.

First, the set-up of our team that year.

Throwers: Jon (big throws, cautious with the disc) + Brian (big backhand, not cautious with the disc)

Kind of Throwers: Wu + Jaegs

Receivers: Me, Kevin, Phil, Alex, Jamie, Geoff (but really wanted to be one), Dave Hunter, Skow, J, Karl (should have been), Dan, Tuve!, Wags, Russ, anyone else here?

Really, what kind of offense can you have when you have only 2 guys competent enough to complete 20 yard throws on a consistent basis? Well, the horse + buggy.

Very, very complex. I will try to simplify. 2 handlers. Always a dump present. Cuts from the back of the stack. Only from the back of the stack. Whenever we get the disc, get in a line and the guy in the back start cutting. When we received, I do not even think we called a first cutter. Just 2 handlers. And usually it was very obvious who was handling. Nowadays, it is like a book on tape before the pull.

We either hucked it or dumped it. That is about it. No starting plays. No other cuts. No break mark options (besides the dump).

Pros of this offense: it kept the disc in the hands of our throwers. It kept the disc out of the hands of our non-throwers. Really, the only offense we could have run. If we tried to swing the disc in a sort of 3 handler set, we would have probably had just as many turns as our force it down one sideline and occassionally get a swing off strategy.

As been pointed out by another blogger, you have to figure out what you can and can't do when you are trying to close the gaps with the elite. And try to maximize what you can do. And minimize what you can't do.

We could run and play defense with pretty much anyone. A lot of teams could not run with the top teams. We only played a couple of those teams that year and they never beat us on being better athletes. Most of our "kind of" throwers and "receivers" were ex-athletes of some kind. And about 6'.

We could not spend a lot of time trying to move the disc from side to side. Again, lack of break mark throws, but lack of skills at that position. Had we tried to do a Stanford type offense with a lot of emphasis on going from side to side, we would have turned it over near our endzone much more. [Note: we did work on breaking the mark and improving throws a ton, but we were starting from a very low point.] This killed on the endzone. We definitely scored more on fast breaks and hucks then in any endzone offense. Of course, our endzone o was our regular o.

We could throw it deep, or at least some of us could. Brian, Jon, and even Jaegs backhand could go a good distance. Anytime an open deep shot came, we took it. We had to. If this taught me anything, it taught me to go deep whenever given the option.

It worked about as well as expected. We were ok, we could hang for ~8 points with teams. Then our lack of skills came into play. How'd we do? Well, you'll get the '97 summary sometime soon.

Sidenote: Did anyone else see the video of the high school football coach in LA moving the chains on 4th down when the refs weren't looking? Good stuff. Apparently, the coach regrets that cheating incident. What was the guy holding the chains thinking? "Oh, this is ok." Seigs or J-co, try to rationalize this!
Goto: http://www.dailybreeze.com/hottopics/articles/2018037.html