Cutter’s Paradise: A Closer Look at the Two Best Offenses in College Ultimate (Part 1)

What makes the UBC Thunderbirds and Carleton CUT offenses so potent? Let's go to the tape.

March 21, 2025 by Edward Stephens in Analysis

Ultiworld’s 2025 college coverage is presented by Spin Ultimate; all opinions are those of the author(s). Find out how Spin can get you, and your team, looking your best this season.

From surprise contenders to star turns to rookie splashes to the annual bid drama, there has been a lot of meat to marinate in the 2025 college season. A lot of the time, we get caught up in those big picture storylines, and as a result we don’t quite notice developments that are happening on a different scale: either much larger or much more granular than the standard tournament-by-tournament spring view. I am as guilty of this sort of blinder as anybody, but somehow this season I have noticed a bit of a shift. The offensive systems of some of the best teams are changing, and in my opinion, it’s for the better.

Much has been made over the years of the small-ball approach that cemented itself in the landscape by leading both UC San Diego and Brown to championships on a windy weekend in Round Rock, Texas. You know the routine: cuts from the front of the stack, lots of inter-handler passes, break throws for small gains to create potential connectivity continuations with deeper cutters. The UNC teams, Darkside and Pleiades, combined for seven titles in eight chances with dominator sets as the bedrock of their entire offense, and at last year’s Nationals Brownian Motion, mid-tournament, pared down their offensive playbook to not much more than a game of keepaway between their front four players to win the championship. Club teams put their own spins on it, sometimes to hypnotic effect.

Then, when Portland Rhino Slam!’s Raphy Hayes declared “Small ball is dead,” and added, “The deep game is back, and it’s sexier than ever,” on a day when both Rhino and San Francisco Fury hucked their way to emphatic championships, it seemed like the pendulum for the game’s meta had swung back the other way: shallow cutter, wide open deep spaces, and throwers whose first look was end zone. And that is how some college teams are playing the season.

But they’re not the best offenses.

The best offenses in the college game today, UBC Thunderbirds in the women’s division and Carleton CUT in the men’s division, have found a space in between those extremes. They are running classic downfield-driven cut-and-clear sets. The result is not only stupendously effective, but also, in my opinion, the most aesthetically pleasing offense I have seen in years.

Maybe the most fascinating thing about them is that while they share similar principles, the mechanics are quite different. Let’s take a look at how they work to keep the disc moving from open cutter to open cutter using some game film.

For this first part, we’ll dive into the success of UBC. Next week, we’ll follow up with CUT.

Thunderbirds: Ho-Stack Heaven

Much like Fury have made a dynasty on horizontal stack sets to initiate movement from a centered disc, the UBC Thunderbirds look for the same movement to start their sets, more or less. Here’s an example: