Stanford head coach David Shaw was a quality control coach for three years under Jon Gruden with the Oakland Raiders.

Stanford runs a number of different formations designed to confuse the defense.

 “He would say it every single day: ‘What you want to do on offense is present the illusion of sophistication but all in all remain very simple and basic,’" said Shaw of Gruden. "So very often we’ll throw a whole bunch of different stuff at them, but we’re going to run a basic day-one installation play. Something we’ve run thousands of times. Something very, very simple. But for the defense, it looks very complicated. So we want to present these illusions, then run a regular play that we just want to execute right.’’