Seeing the field

I was watching a highlight reel from Atlantic Coast regionals, and saw a lot of what I guess I would call inside-lane hucks to a parallel receiver.

Nate Castine rips one here:

Hayley Wahlroos was highlighted doing the same thing this year for Oregon:

When I first started playing ultimate, I had no idea how to see the field, but pretty soon I figured out (or was maybe told?) that if you're on the far sideline, that's a good spot to run deep from. So the flight path of the disc in relation to the route of the receiver looks like that on field A (whereas the two above hucks look more like that on field B):

As a result of that, it conditioned me to think that good deep cuts come from spot X when the disc is in spot Y, when the defense is forcing Z. However, as shown above, a good deep cut can still come from spot X when the disc is in spot Y when the defense is forcing...uh, -Z.

It's been fun watching some parts of the Illinois practices this fall, where kids who have never played before will do things like throw OIIO breaks without realizing it, just because they see a possibility of getting the disc somewhere and recognize that if they throw it a certain way, they can get the disc to that spot. Granted, it may not have tight spin [yet] or anything, but...it's the creative thought that counts, here. Another thing that almost every rookie does at one point or another is throw to an upline cut on the around side (field C) instead of an upline on the invert/force side (field D), which is traditional.

Is there any advantage to waiting to throw an upline until you can throw a "force side" throw?

1. It's the norm, so it's expected by the receiver.
2. It's easier to put out to space (if it's not, maybe you shouldn't be throwing it)/there's a bigger window you can hit.
3. It's a "force side" throw, so an "honest" mark is unlikely to block the throw.

Disadvantages:

1. It's the norm, so it's expected by the mark/defender.*
2. Stall count gets higher as you wait (the difference between 9 and 10 is a turnover) (this can be negated if you throw it sooner and put touch on the throw, provided space is present upfield).

Advantages to throwing an upline while the receiver is still in the "around" portion of the cut:

1. It's not the norm, so it's not expected by the defender.
2. If you wait too long, the mark may react to a call to go more straight up and take away the "force side" upline throw (heaven forbid the dead side of the field opens up).
3. Stall count is lower.

Disadvantages:

1. The window to hit your receiver is likely smaller.
2. It may be nigh impossible to throw due to the position of your mark.

I'm sure I could fill up the list with more pros and cons for each throw. But after some simple picking apart, it seems to me it still makes the most sense to throw uplines to your receiver on the upfield side of your mark (assuming the receiver is cutting from the breakside; "hardest" uplines from the breakside are a different discussion entirely). But it's always interesting to me to see new players try it the other way. Obviously, they try it because they think it can work. Maybe it can. Will the game ever shift towards a majority of these throws over the way upline throws to a receiver coming from the breakside are currently thrown? I doubt it.

Sometimes a "good" team gets scored on by a "bad" team because of a "lucky" throw. What if people worked on "lucky" throws and got really good at throwing them, so they were a sustainable option? The game would have to evolve defensively. Right now, defense is dictated by the way offense plays. Yes, you can switch a team out of a vert stack by throwing a junk look or whatever, but the defense is generally conditioned to position themselves based on their historic understanding of how a team plays offense/how most teams play and understand the game. The most basic example is downfield defenders positioning (generally) on the "force side" of their defensive assignments, because generally throwers look for easy passes on the open side (if every thrower tried relentlessly to break the mark and ignored open side cuts, perhaps we would play defense differently). A more complex example is a defender at the front of a vertical stack in the endzone faceguarding/standing almost on the breakside of his/her defensive assignment, because in many vert offenses a common play is a quick break throw to the front of the stack. Players are getting better at throwing and developing a wider range of release points/flight paths, so defense has to adapt accordingly to account for these things. I'm interested to see what the game looks like in ten years; is the rate the game is changing more exponential, or logarithmic?

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*This may actually be an advantage, and a lot of simple yet effective vert stack plays are based off of this idea of getting the mark/defense to assume you are attacking the live side, so that you can get an easier break throw to score/move the disc off the sideline.