A Forceside incut

When I say something at a team meeting or a practice Yngve gives me grief because I “said something vague about …, and no one knows what you’re talking about.”  My initial reaction is always anger derived from frustration.  I accuse my audience of being idiots and incapable of critical thought.  Somewhere in my personal fuming BK usually points out “they don’t know what you know.”

So here’s a post on something I think is painfully and brutally obvious: “forceside in-cut”. 

First, allow me to establish what a “force-side incut” is.  The thrower is the orange dot at the bottom of the schematic.  There is a purple line, “the mark”, showing the defender who is putting a “mark” on the thrower.  This mark is “forcing” our thrower to throw to the right side of the image, or a “forehand”. 

In order for the thrower’s teammate, who is at the top of the schematic, “the cutter”, with no defender in sight, to be able to get open for the thrower he can either run “deep” or up the page and toward the endzone, or he can go “in” and run down the page and toward the thrower.  If he selects to go in, he can either go in on the “force-side”, this is the right hand side of our diagram, or he can go “break side”, this is on the left hand side of our diagram.

Say we elect to make a forceside incut. We have an infinite spectrum of angles that we can take in order to make a good cut.  I attempted to draw this spectrum with a few choice green arrows, the red arrows show where the spectrum has ended and you are now in the territory of making a workable cut.  Let’s step through this left to right.  The red angle on the far left shows the cutter running straight at the cutters back.  This cut is atrociously bad; there is no reasonable throw a thrower could give us that would make this cut an option.  Exploring this further, the mark is able to take away a piece of the field.  The shape of what the mark takes away looks like a V extending out of his spine.  An elite mark has a V with about an 80 degree angle, a good mark has about a 60 degree angle, and a terrible mark has about a 15 degree angle.  Even if the mark is terrible, the red arrow on the left is running straight into this 15 degree V.  See below:

The green arrow to the far left is the first good in-cut angle.  The cutter is running at a spot just barely to the left of the marks left hip.  He is showing his thrower a straight cut, and although this is a narrow alley to operate in the thrower has a chance here. 

This spectrum continues with infinite possibilities until we get to the furthest right green arrow.  Look at the thrower, extend a horizontal line from the thrower to the sideline so that this imaginary line and the sideline intersect perpendicularly.  The intersection point of these two lines is where the cutter is trying to go.  See below:

The red line furthest to the right represents an in-cut that is too flat, or a “wide throw”, that is also a bad cut.  These are easy for defenders to “under cut” and get a d on, and they are difficult throws to hit.

Now that we have a universe of cuts, we can talk about how to throw to them.  Let’s use the schematic below:

Again we have our thrower at the bottom and our cutter at the top.  The cutter is currently making a cut, this is a freeze frame, and the green arrow shows us his vector.  The thrower is going to see this cutter, get excited and try to whip it right into his gut.  What stinks about this is that this is how our eye works.  If you ever get the chance to go skeet shooting the instructor will tell you to let your eye track the skeet and then just shoot.  In the Patriot Mel Gibson tells his sons to aim small and miss small, meaning aim for the button on the red coats jacket, and when you miss you’ll still hit his chest.  Unfortunately for us, Frisbee’s travel slowly, we can’t point and shoot at what we see we.  We have to throw at what we know.  The thrower knows where this cutter is going, he can throw a soft, tightly spinning, slight roll curve pass along the blue arrow that the cutter can run onto.  He is not going to “fire this one in there” he is just going to softly sit it into space, again tight spin, slight roll curve, traveling slowly, and he is going to let his receiver catch it.  What’s a roll curve?  See below:

A good curve is a curve that gets the disc out in front of your receiver and then curves back into him.  What I’ve drawn here is a roll curve; a roll curve is thrown away from your body and then rolls back in.  What I’ve drawn below is an invert; an invert is thrown across your body and then comes back.

 

In the original schematic:

For every single one of these cuts our thrower wants to throw it early and put some roll on his throw.  Below is another drawing:

The yellow dot is our thrower’s hand; the lines coming out of the yellow dot are examples of different amounts of roll curve.  Our thrower is throwing a forehand into the page.  The red line represents a flat pass (spoiler alert: choosing a flat pass has never been a bad idea), going up from the red line we increase the amount of roll curve we put on our throw.  Connecting these two diagrams, as we go from left to right along the green incuts we need to go bottom up in the diagram of roll curves.  The wider a cutter is going, the more you’ll have to throw it in front of him and the more roll curve you’ll need.  The narrower a cutter is going, the less you’ll have to throw it in front of him and the less roll curve you’ll need.  In all of these situations an invert will send the disc away from your receiver, that’s bad.