re: Why no pulling guards this year?

We haven't been passing out of power running formations very much this year, thus teams play heavy against the run whenever we are in those situations (usually in short yardage situations), and it makes little sense to run counter plays with pulling guards.

Also, it's not easy to run counter plays in those multiple-receiver, single-back sets that we've been going to so heavily this year. We've been relying a lot on Dickson or Joseph lining up in the backfield as an extra TE to get our extra blocker for our RB, rather than running counters.

I'm not sure if you'd call that a new philosophy for our O-line, or just running different plays out of different formations (to utilize a running QB and multiple TEs), but it is true that our O-line has often found itself with wide splits and not much help in trying to block up the middle at times, which is not very conducive to pulling guards.

The one exception that I can think of are those counters where JJ (usually) fakes a handoff to a RB running against the grain, and then takes the ball himself around the edge. I'd have to look at the video again to check, but I'm willing to bet that we might have a guard pulling for the RB for those times that JJ actually hands the ball off to him.