

Washington and Ateman are both gone now but OSU’s middle of the field triumvirate of Hill, Stoner, and McCleskey are all back and Tyron Johnson is probably ready to build off his solid 2017 debut (293 yards, 10.3 ypt, three TDs) on the outside at the X or Z receiver position. Oh yeah, and Justice Hill still ran for 1467 yards and 15 TDs. Then McCleskey and Stoner had 647 and 576 yards apiece with McCleskey gaining 9.8 per target with five TDs and Stoner 10.1 with six TDs. Washington had 1544 yards at 13.2 yards per target and 13 TDs in 2017.Īteman feasted on single coverage with 1156 yards at 13.3 yards per target and eight TDs. If the LBs didn’t match those really precisely then the Cowboys could hit one of their speedy inside receivers on the move.įinally there was Marcell Ateman, the 6-4, 220 pound freak, running a go route on the backside and Rudolph often throwing to his back shoulder. If you were leaving your safety deep to help on the post, which you should, then it made it that much harder to effectively cover both the dig and the shallow. The second was on the shallow cross and dig routes in the middle of the field. The first of course is the post route to James Washington, there wasn’t a CB in the league that you wanted to trust to defend that sucker without help.


In particular, the “dig-post” route combo that always made up the main thrust of the OSU offense with Rudolph and Washington on the field would regularly come out of the shallow cross concept:Īs I’ve noted in the diagram, this play really put teams in a bind with three areas of the field where the defense probably needed a numerical advantage to guarantee success. While the 2016 OSU offense was defined largely by OSU’s “Cowboy backs” creating room for freshman RB Justice Hill and helping to create matchups here and there for the Cowboys, the 2017 offense was more about 11 and 10 personnel sets and pushing the ball down the field to their brilliant collection of wideouts. The WR situation this past year year was insane for OSU because in addition to returning James Washington they also had 2016 MOTP Jalen McCleskey, 5-star transfer WR Tyron Johnson, big Marcell Ateman returning from injury, and emerging young Dillon Stoner. My assumption about Oklahoma State this coming season was that they’d recover from losing Mason Rudolph and James Washington just fine since those two have been starting for three years now, giving OSU plenty of time to develop back-ups.
