Tonight’s CFB National Championship (7 p.m. on ESPN) between No. 1 Alabama and No. 3 Ohio State became much, much more interesting to Texas fans when Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian was hired as the next Texas head coach. I plan to dive into this more thoroughly for Wednesday’s column, but many of you are tuning in tonight to intently watch Sark’s offense.

Recently, I was able to get hands on Sarkisian’s segment about his Alabama offense from the Nike Coaching Clinic in Atlanta late January 2020. I thought, based on the Google Drive link and downloads, I was one of the only to get access, but All-22 actually published the video on YouTube recently and it’s making the rounds on Twitter. So, enjoy:

A few of my main takeaways from the 40-minute segment, which was all above offense:

--- I think the beauty of Sark’s offense is the simplicity, although what the defense sees isn’t so simple. Sarkisian, who gave a great anecdote about changing the Washington offense to more RPO instead of zone read for Keith Price after Jake Locker moved on, has designed an offense capable of taking what the defense gives without significantly changing or deviating from their best plays and concepts.

The offense is built off RPO, then to play pass (what Sark calls play action) and then finally the dropback passing game. There’s very much a layering element to the offense as it builds from RPO, to the illusion of RPO, and then to the dropback passing game to attack man-to-man when defenses predictably adjust coverage to combat RPO and play pass. As Sarkisian says, one of the most important things he’s learned over the years is the more things you can do better on offense the harder you are to beat. However, his offense can’t get to all these next layers well if it doesn’t execute RPO consistently and effectively.

“…And it's more so the formations the motions the shifts how we get to them are what make it unique,” Sarkisian said while describing beating man-to-man coverage. “But for me it's about the quarterback and how can the quarterback play the best that he can play. And so, we don't change concepts. I'm not going to out of the blue tell a Z to run a post route right here. I will never do that to our guy. Our reads remain the same over, and over, and over…”

For example, Sark asked the room, in a way strongly suggesting he’s hasn’t and won’t do much of it in college, of high school coaches who still uses two tight ends. And then he showed a clip of the Falcons running the same man-to-man beater out of a two-tight end formation. It was fascinating to see the Falcons running basically the same offense Alabama does, including RPO.

Speaking of tight ends, as the new Texas head coach was describing RPOs as “advantageous throws” for the quarterback to get a free completion, he made it a point to say sometimes that is to the tight end. The offense is designed to create the best possible matchups on the field and exploit those matchups...

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