Zoe
It's funny how sometimes I beleive guys understand what I am talking about. The OC for my old team was a student of mine for 3 years. I had gotten a lot of head nodding & "yeah I get it". Only to realize he didn't get it. I try to simplify things so the players understand exactly what they are supposed to do. I found communication to be paramount. What I think happens is the coaches on my staff communicate daily, where as the rest of the coaches in our orginazation don't work at it the same way. We constantly go over every assignment so to us it's very clear, IMHO it's paramount the players understand their assignments.
It's not enough to just learn a play off a sheet of paper, a coach has to understand what it is the team is trying to accomplish. Our concept on Power is the get a vertical push, where as on Zone we want to create a chain & get a horizontal push to create a seam. Even though our OLine makes the same calls, they understand what our goal is.
I don't run OZ, we do run Stretch, very similar in design we just try to push it outside a little more then OZ. We took a page from Oregon this year & ran QB Power of the Stretch fake. It was super easy to install & very effective. We didn't make it a true read like Oregon does( If I had been there in the Spring we probably would have).
The big thing for us was we had a small OLine, so we had to be sure we could get a push when we needed it. It really helped our team when they understood the concepts, & when you take into account we were a small private school it was fairly amazing. One of our lineman was an international student from Turkey. It was his second year playing football. He was able to grasp & understand our concepts & did a great job for us. So, IMHO it's about how you teach the plays, & how you rep them that makes the difference.
Joe