What is old is new again

Look like the bunch formation to anyone else? That's from Percy Duncan Haughton's 1922 book, Football and How to Watch It.

H/t CoachHuey.

The quarterback

Some things never change.

The quarter[back] is, under the captain, the director of the game. With the exception of one or two uncommon and rare plays, there is not one of any kind, his side having the ball, in which it does not pass through his hands. The importance of his work it is therefore impossible to overstate. He must be, above all the qualifications of brains and agility usually attributed to that position, of a hopeful or sanguine disposition. He must have confidence in his centre himself, and, most of all, in the man to whom he passes the ball. He should always believe that the play will be a success.

That is Walter Camp, in his 1893 book, American Football.

Q&As with spread gurus and those entrusted with stopping them

ESPN is doing some kind of spread week, and they have posted a bunch of Q&As with coaches from around the country chiming in on the spread, what they do, and how to stop it. There's some chaff but also some good stuff, so I thought I'd provide the excerpted highlights (with links):

• Paul Johnson on his spread-option:

How similar is what you do to what Urban Meyer and Rich Rodriquez do?

PJ: I think it's very similar. . . .

Why do you think then, that most college football fans, when they think of your offense, probably don't automatically think of what Urban Meyer and Rich Rodriquez do?

PJ: Because one is under the gun and the other is under the center.

That's it?

PJ: Yeah, and most fans, quite honestly, couldn't tell you what plays they ran out of the gun. It's like anything else -- if you're successful and you have big plays, then it's great. If you're not moving the ball and you're not scoring then it's no good. If you look at last year with what Rich did at Michigan, it's the same offense they ran at West Virginia, but it was a learning process, different personnel and they didn't have near the success. In fact they had very little success. But nobody was questioning whether it would work or not. As soon as we have one game where we don't score 30 points, boy it's like, I told you this wouldn't work, everybody figured it out. That's what drives you nuts.

• Arizona's offensive coordinator Sonny Dykes (formerly of Texas Tech):

How about with receivers? Does the spread require different things out of them than if you were lining up in a pro-style set?

SD: Yeah, definitely. The quarterback and receivers have to spend a lot of time getting on the same page. If you run the ball, guys are going to try to sneak more guys in the box. When they do that, you need to find a way to get the ball on the perimeter, whether it's throwing the [bubble screens] or whatever, to try to get the ball away from the guys packing the box. When you're doing that, it looks like an easy throw, but it's something that requires quite a bit of timing and work between quarterbacks and wide receivers. If you're going to spread it out and do that, your quarterback and receivers have to spend a lot of time developing a feel for each other. . . .

One way guys recruit against spread teams is they tell recruits that if they play in a spread offense they are not going to get the respect from the NFL in the draft. What do you say to that?

SD: It's weird. Remember [the University of] Miami was one of the first teams running the one-back and running a spread offense with three receivers on the field? They were doing it with guys like Bernie Kosar and Vinny Testaverde and all of those guys were getting drafted. Back then, Miami was using it as a real advantage -- hey, we're spreading the field and throwing the ball. That's how you get into the NFL. What's happened is the spread has changed and there are a lot of different kinds of spreads. You've got what Penn State was doing last year which is more traditional type stuff. And then you've got the stuff that is way out there, the run-and-shoot stuff, what Tech's done. I think anytime a quarterback can drop back and throw the football, that's important. All that does is make him better, whether he does it under center or out of the shotgun. I don't see how a quarterback can be faulted when he takes a snap, avoids a rush, shuffles in the pocket, goes through reads, finds a receiver, throws an accurate ball and does all the things you have to do to drop back and throw. I don't see how he becomes a better quarterback by being under center and handing it to a running back. There's been a little bit of a knock, but I think that's just because of the personnel. If you're Texas Tech, you don't have to recruit 6-foot-6 quarterbacks who can stand in the pocket and throw the ball. And those are the guys the NFL is always going to like. Now, some of those guys don't work out and guys like Tom Brady do, who's not very big and doesn't have a particularly strong arm. They're just good players. Whether it's college or pro, the important thing for a quarterback is just finding a good fit.

• Tulsa's offensive coordinator Herb Hand:
  

How hard is it for a receiver to learn a spread offense with so many different options going on?

HH: I think it's a lot simpler because what you're trying to do is you're trying to create one-on-ones. And I know that you're trying to do that in about every offense, create one-on-ones. But in the spread, because you have people spread out so much, it's a numbers game ... So, in most spread offenses, the beauty of it is that it creates a lot of one-on-one opportunities for wide receivers. That's all a guy really asks for.

• Mississippi State's Dan Mullen, formerly of Florida:

What type of player are you looking for at the skill positions?
Dan Mullen: The first thing we look for is a guy who's multi-talented, a guy that can play a crossover position or hybrid position. You want a receiver who can also line up at tailback or a tailback who can flex into the slot or move up to the fullback position. Guys who have multiple skills make it hard for defenses to match up on you. . . .

When you have several of these hybrid players, why does it make it so difficult for the defense?

Dan Mullen: One thing we're hoping to get to here at Mississippi State is where you don't have to change personnel groupings very often. Everybody has the same skill set, which makes it harder for the defense to pick up on what you're doing. You don't have to substitute to run different things.

• Missouri offensive coordinator David Yost:
  

How much has the talent you guys have accumulated over recent years provided you the opportunity to make your offense different from one season to the next?

David Yost: Coach [Gary] Pinkel is a very direct guy and he thinks things through and doesn't fly by the seat of the pants. And that's the beauty of this offense.

When we had [former Missouri quarterback] Brad [Smith] we ran him more. Then we got Chase Daniel in here who could run the football, but also could also lead us to more passing because of his talents. That helped us transform our offense into more of a passing philosophy.

At one time when we had [tight ends] Chase [Coffman] and Martin Rucker, we were running a lot of two-tight end offenses. Then we had a set of receivers, but not necessarily ones that would be as suited to running the spread. Then, we started recruiting guys like Jeremy Maclin and stopping using as much two-tight end sets.

Now, after losing Coffman and Maclin, we'll be a little thinner at wide receiver this season. Because of that, we're kind of adjusting what we're doing. We'll be using three wideouts and our tailback more as a rusher and a receiver.

We feel our offense gives us a chance to get our best 11 players on the field. And we can do things differently depending on the personnel we have on hand.

Defending the spread

• Virginia Head Coach Al Groh:

How do you prepare for it and what's your philosophy in going against it?

Al Groh: . . . .One of the things we have observed is that defensive teams have to be willing to take some risks in order to take the initiative back. When you're so spread out, and one of the features of the spread, and the spread offense is just a formation. Having been in conversations with people, the two things I noticed is, last year Missouri finished fourth in the country in passing and Oregon finished fourth in running. Both are called spread offenses. The word spread is no longer associated with specific plays. It's simply a formation that spreads the defense from sideline to sideline and in doing so creates some natural spaces in the defense. It's harder to go from far away to attack the offense and you leave yourself vulnerable to certain things. By the same token, what we're observing is defense are afraid to take any risks. They just stand there and they're a standing target.

What we do like about being in the 3-4 defense is the flexibility it provides because defense, so much these days, that fourth linebacker as opposed to a fourth defensive lineman in the 4-3, gives us significantly more options. What defensive coaching is now, no matter what the system, you have to find some ways to adapt to what the other team is doing. We think this gives us the ability to adapt and react. You'd like to be on the attack defensively and set the tone, but to a degree the offensive will always control that. You have to be able to adjust and adapt.

How different is what Georgia Tech does? It's the spread option. How does that make it a little more difficult to prepare for, or does it?

AG: They are in their own way, yes, they fall under that umbrella because while the plays are different, it's out of sync with what teams face on a repetitive basis. That's the only time that most teams see that offense every year. There's no accumulated familiarity by the coaches or players going against it. That's a big part of the difficulty of playing against that or any offense that isn't common to what the defenses generally see. There's different plays, but it accomplishes similar things.

You guys beat them last year. As a coach, you get it. But how do you get your players prepared for it in what, five days, when they never see it?

AG: You're exactly right. One of the things we thought that was very important in the presentation of it was to demystify it for the players. In some cases, players can get frustrated. For example, this Wildcat formation that's gaining some notoriety. Really, in a lot of ways, it's a reduced down spread. It's spread out, but a lot of times it's with a player back there getting the direct snap who's a real good runner, but is not a passer. Actually, in talking with the Patriots last year, and all of a sudden it got sprung on them by Miami. In doing so, the unfamiliarity of it really threw them off during the course of the game and they could never quite get it back and in talking with the coaches there, they had issues during the game with getting the players settled down because there was still a mystique to what they were up against. From that point on, they had a detailed plan, and the next time they played against it from other teams as well as the second time they played Miami, they fared much better. You've got to demystify these unique offenses for the defensive players.

How much has it helped you as a defensive coach to understand it and scheme for it because [new offensive coordinator] Gregg [Brandon] is on your staff now and that's the way he's thinking?

AG: Very much so. It's helped us to establish a significant period of experimentation. We put some things out there and run them, and we really haven't tried to defend our team so much as let's just run our stuff and see what we like and what we don't like. It has certainly been helpful to us in that degree. . . .

Do you think there's any benefit to preparing the guys for the NFL to run one particular offensive scheme or another?

AG: Not really. I think that if the players are well-trained fundamentally, those are the things that carry over from league to league. The fundamental skills of how to execute their job, how to defeat the player across from them. It's highly unlikely that most players are going to go - with only 32 teams in the NFL - it's highly unlikely they're going to go to a system that's exactly like the one they came from. They're going to have to make some adjustments system-wise. The big thing is they have the fundamental background that can translate to any system. If you can block guys in one system, you can block them in another. If you can beat blocks in the 3-4, you can beat blocks in the 4-3. If you get blocked in the 3-4, you're going to get blocked in the 4-3.

Makes sense. Why do you think more ACC teams haven't caught onto this?

AG: It gets trendy within leagues. What you have to go against, whether it's offense or defense, you have to prepare for those things. You kind of become influenced and spend more time looking at those things and become influenced by those things. And of course a lot of it has to do with the philosophical backgrounds and beliefs that coaches bring with them. And really your background, too. At a point, sometimes what you know how to teach best, what you know how to utilize during the course of a game is the best for a particular team as opposed to something that is intriguing, but when certain things happen during a game maybe you just don't have the wherewithal to make those in-game decisions because you don't have enough familiarity with the system. Therefore, a team would be better off with something they're really fluent in.

Do you think your players will be more comfortable playing Georgia Tech the second time around?

AG: They should have a certain element of confidence. Their circumstances should be a lot more positive than if we would have given up 40 points. Then you have to come back the next year and convince the players we can really do this. 'Well wait a second, last year we were completely bamboozled by it and we haven't played against it since.' Yeah, I think we don't have to overcome that type of situation to start with, but no matter what, they run those plays every day. Their opponents, and this is the value of being a little bit out of the norm, whether it's with your offense or defense, their opponents only practice against those plays for a week.

• Cal defensive coordinator Bob Gregory:

I remember in high school preparing for wishbone teams: It was pure assignment football. Is it like that preparing for a spread-option vs. a typical pro-style, multiple offense?

BG: Yeah, it definitely is. In the old days, you had three backs in the backfield and everybody was doing option defensive assignments and concerns. It's the same kind of deal. The quarterback can carry the ball. He can hand off. He can motion a guy around to be the pitch guy. It really is the same idea. You've really got to make sure you stop all those elements. And then they throw in the no-huddle with it, which most of them have, and that can slow you down a little bit more. So we talk about that with our guys -- it's assignment football. You can't be quite as reckless, unless it's third-and-long and then you can get into your normal blitz stuff.

More than a few defensive coordinators have said that when you have a running quarterback, it stresses a defense and makes it difficult to match up. Is the spread not effective when the quarterback is not a good runner?

BG: I don't think it is as effective. I think when you've got a guy like [Jeremiah] Masoli at Oregon -- or a Dennis Dixon -- man, that makes it even harder. If a quarterback is not a great runner, you don't have to worry about him keeping it. And even if he does keep it, he's not going to gain a lot of yards. You can kind of load up in the one aspect, whether it's defending the ball inside or the pitch guy coming around, you don't have to worry about the quarterback. But if the guy can run, it adds a whole different dimension to it and makes it more difficult. . . .

How about blocking assignments: is that an adjustment also?

BG: Yeah, because so much of it is lateral. You really don't see the downhill, power running game that you see with most two-back teams -- power with pulling [linemen], lead plays, that kind of thing. So much of it is lateral, with guys moving in one direction and the back has the ability to really cut back and wind it back. You've really got to be conscious of not running so far out with the offensive line -- the term we use is "getting washed." Sometimes you see a back cutting all the way back and part of that is a defensive line over-pursuing and getting washed past the holes and the gaps up front so a back can stick it back. It's tough stuff and it is different. A good offensive line, like Oregon, that is big and strong and moves well, can really work guys past that initial point of attack and a good back can just break it back against the pursuit of the defense.

• Pittsburgh defensive coordinator Phil Bennett:

First of all, what is the challenge like when you're going up against a spread offense?

Phil Bennett: I played for a guy at Texas A&M, Emory Bellard, who invented the wishbone. With option football, everybody says it's an equalizer. I think if you have that quarterback, then the spread can be an equalizer.

I think it equalizes the field. I know as a defensive coach, it can take the aggressiveness out of you, because you have to be so concerned with assignments, just like the option. I was nervous last year when we played South Florida and Matt Grothe, and then obviously West Virginia. Our ends are big get-off, speed guys, and it really makes your ends go into a different mode. I don't think with the spread, in the run game, that you ever just really have to mash a guy. If you've got a body on body, then it becomes assignment football. But then you work on it so much that it can take a little bit of aggressiveness out of you.

How do you go about avoiding that?

PB: One of the things I try to do is, I try to treat it like the option in the run game. I want obviously a guy on the outside end and an inside-out guy on the quarterback. In the passing game, the thing I think is the toughest is the play-pass, because you're geared up to stop the run. I watched West Virginia against North Carolina, and they were so geared up to stop the run that Pat (White) threw for 330 yards, and it was off of play-pass.

I go back to our disaster game last year against Rutgers, where I had our guys so steered in on the run the week before against Navy. That's the thing the spread does to you. Your front guys have to still be aggressive, and the secondary still has to play pass. I was very pleased in our last home game against West Virginia, because our secondary, instead of getting so caught up in the run (played the pass). And we let our front go. And that's the thing I think you've got to do.

And of course the other thing is down and distance. Just like against the wishbone, if you get a down and distance on a spread team where the play-pass is taken away, then you've got a great advantage. The other thing people don't talk about in college is hash marks. You look at every spread team and watch them, and they have tremendous tendencies when they're in the middle of the field and then tremendous tendencies when they're on the boundary. . . .

Do you think that, in general, defenses are catching up to the spread?

PB: You know, as soon as you say that, somebody will tear you up. Now, with the original spread teams, people are starting to say, hey we've seen this. I think we played (against) regular personnel, out of 880 snaps last year, I think we played 90 snaps. And the rest was one back and either one tight, three wides or even four wides. Everybody is so multiple and they're doing variations of the spread. Iowa came out against us, and they had two tights, two flankers, and lo and behold guess what they did? They flexed them out and ran the spread out of it.

I think the more you can focus on something, week after week, people will get better answers. The other thing is, there's a premium on skill players on offense. The thing the spread does is, it creates matchups. And if you got a 4.4 (40-yard dash) wide receiver against a 4.8 linebacker, that's a great matchup. You've got to be able to swarm the ball, and you can't have too many of those matchups.

• South Carolina defensive coordinator Ellis Johnson:

There are so many versions of the spread offense. What do you think when you hear that somebody is running the spread?

Ellis Johnson: Everybody just refers to it in general as the spread, but it all starts with the quarterback and whether he's a good runner. If they run the quarterback, it's a whole different animal.

What makes it a different animal?

Ellis Johnson: If the quarterback doesn't run much and it's never more than the quarterback and the running back in the backfield at the same time, it doesn't present as many problems unless they've just got so many great athletes that you can't match up. But you've got problems with any offense that has that many great athletes. The quarterback being able to run presents that extra challenge back there that almost makes it seem like you're trying to defend a 12th man.

How have your triple-option roots at The Citadel helped you in defending the spread?

Ellis Johnson: One of the things that helps me when I'm drawing it up on the chalkboard is that everybody was running the option and the veer back in the 70s when I was coming up through coaching. I understand the loaded option with the extra blocker back there. A lot of younger coaches don't understand it, and obviously a lot of players don't. It's very difficult to get taught and understood how these things work.

How does your strategy change when you're going against a spread offense?Ellis Johnson: The thing we try to do is mix up our fronts as much as possible and keep the perimeter reasonably simple. If you blitz too much, it can be disruptive. But it's not going to be sound against option assignments. And reading linemen becomes extremely important. When they get in the shotgun and the quarterback's back there beside the running back, as the ball is traveling back to the quarterback, you really don't get any flow in the backfield, so you need to be heavily keying on the linemen.

• Northwestern defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz:

How has the spread offense changed the way you put together your game plans?

Mike Hankwitz: It has changed things because in the past, you wanted to feel like you could be more proactive and try to dictate. You could stack up against the run and force teams to throw, or you could stack your coverage and dare 'em to run. The spread does literally what it says: It spreads the field, forces you to spread your defense out more and especially with the quarterbacks that can run and throw. There's all different types of blocking schemes in the spread, aside from just the zone read.

So how do you counteract all of that?

MH: We try to see what the strength of their attack is. Is it the running game? How good is the quarterback in the run game? Is he a better runner than passer? If he is, then we'll commit more to the run and try to make him beat us throwing the ball. Or if they're a better passing team, then we will play more coverages and try to make them beating us running the ball. The third element when they spread you out is the unscripted, the improvised plays with the quarterback scramble. You're spread out and you're trying to rush the passer and play coverage and all of a sudden, the quarterback that can take off and scramble, it's not easy to plan for that all the time.

How much more time do you devote to the quarterback run now versus 15 years ago?

MH: Teams ran the triple option, and you had to be sound in your schemes and then you had to have the players who had discipline to take their assignment and not let somebody run free. The passing attack off that was minimal, but now, with the spread, you have that option aspect where you have to defend the different components of the run game: the read zone with the running back, the quarterback keeping it off the read zone and then bringing a running back in the backfield and bringing him out on a pitch. The bubble is another variation of it. [The receiver] becomes the pitch man. And then you have the jail-break screens, you have draws, running back draws, quarterback draws. It's more difficult to defend all that stuff.

You mention how dictating on defense was easier before. Has the spread allowed offenses to dictate more often?

MH: It makes it a lot harder on a defense to dictate or take away certain things, just because they've spread the field and they are doing more things. The offenses are trying to keep the defense from dictating to them. And then the other big part of the spread is the audible aspect of it, the coaches changing the plays. They're going no-huddle, they have more clock to work with and then they'll go up and show a formation and go through a cadence and try to get the defense to tip its hand. Then, they'll go back and change the play and try to get in a better play from what they've seen. You used to get some of that against passing teams. They would keep you from trying to substitute, but that was still relatively one-dimensional. You had some good one-back teams that could run and pass, but you didn't have to worry about the quarterback and the option.

• Texas Tech defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeil:

When you arrived in Lubbock in 2000, Leach was the only coach in the conference running the spread. Now, seven of the teams run the offense as a base set. Did you ever expect it to be this widespread?

RM: I've definitely seen things evolve. The yards per game and points all have increased. I think it's because we've seen a development in the training of quarterbacks and offensive players through seven-on-seven camps and the like -- particularly here in Texas. Now, everybody is trying to get their wide receivers and running backs into space. And we're trying to do what we can to stop them.

Because of the way scoring has mushroomed in the Big 12, are you changing the way you judge the success of your defense?

RM: You've seen things evolve. Obviously, yards per game and points have increased. It's not three yards and a cloud of dust like it was when I was playing. We all realize these quarterbacks are pretty good and these offenses can move the ball. What we have to do is be patient and innovative with how we try to counteract their schemes. Points will increase, but maybe now we need to look at stats like third-down conversions and turnovers to determine how effective a defense has really been.

How much of a philosophical change has it been after the mushrooming of these spread offenses since you started your coaching career?

RM: When I started back at East Carolina with Pat Dye, I grew up facing the wishbone all spring and all fall. That was the offense that everybody was using and that caused problems. You saw more of a power game. Then, you saw people start using the West Coast offense to try to throw the football.

I miss those days, but I know the spread defense is here to stay for a while because of the development of the athletes to fit those offenses. I know everybody in our state (high school players) is out throwing the football, so the passing quarterback is out there. The receivers are out there, too. The guys that used to play basketball are all becoming wide receivers. I think the spread will be here for awhile, so both sides will have to keep developing.

ESPN actually does pretty decent job discussing the spread

ESPN's Mark Schlabach has a piece up today on the rise and ubiquity of the spread offense, and it is probably one of the better pieces I've seen from them on it. Now, Schlabach does seem to draw a line from Mouse Davis of run & shoot fame through current spreads like Urban Meyer's, but he doesn't carry this too far:

Even now, Davis wonders why it took college football coaches so long to adopt the principles of his offense, which was predicated on spreading a defense so wide that it created vertical seams for both runs and passes.

"I think it took coaches a while to find out how really tough it is to defend four-wide and how difficult it is to defend with either run or pass," Davis said. "The spread offense is now more of an option orientation by a lot of teams. A lot of them are running our same routes, but they don't read them as much. A lot of them are more run-oriented."

In many ways, the spread offense is still evolving. Coaches often see something they like from another coach's offense, then add their own wrinkles, plays and formations.

"You steal what you steal and put your own stuff in it," Davis said. "It's all interwoven some way."

When Rich Rodriguez took his spread offense from West Virginia to Michigan, a reporter from a Detroit newspaper called Davis. Rodriguez had told the reporter that he'd stolen much of his offense from Davis.

"He didn't get his stuff from me," Davis told the reporter. "I don't know where he got it from, but he got it from somebody else."

There are plenty of versions of the spread offense to imitate. The spread offenses at schools such as Texas Tech, Missouri and Tulsa are built around high-percentage passing games and often rely on quarterbacks and coaches to make the right decisions at the line of scrimmage. Spread offenses run by teams such as Michigan and Oregon are run-oriented attacks built around slot receivers, tailbacks and dual-threat quarterbacks.

"The bottom line is every spread offense is different," Nebraska coach Bo Pelini said last year. "Florida's spread offense is different than Missouri, and Missouri's is different than what Kansas is trying to do."

I think that's right: we have had spread rumblings for at least half a century if not further back -- from Dutch Meyer's TCU spread, Tiger Ellison's and later Mouse Davis's run & shoot, the Jack Neuimeier/Jack Elway (and John Elway) one-back spread, to the Hal Mumme/Mike Leach Airraid, and the assorted spread-to-runs of Rodriguez/Meyer/Walker et al. -- but there was, for a time, an almost complete banishing of the spread from college ball, and the spread's return has resulted in the (re)birth of a thousand offenses, each with their own spin on an old concept.

And this diversity, even within the spread, is one of the reasons that college football is so fun. Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp echoes what said earlier when contrasting college offenses from those in the pros:

"The hardest thing for your kids is to adjust every week," Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp said. "Back in 1985, every team lined up with two backs. Now everybody is running something different. That's why you see a lot of points scored now."

Now, on Rodriguez and the spread

Several readers (including by email) have told me they thought I was not unfair to Rich Rodriguez in my recent post about Randy Walker's effect on the rise of the spread. First, I didn't write this intending to dig Rodriguez or take anything away from him. I've written continuously about what an innovator he was (and is), and as I wrote in my piece for Michigan's Maple Street preview guide, I think Rodriguez ought to be able to turn the Wolverines around. In other words, I think he's a very good coach.

My point was simply that Walker made an important contribution. And keep in mind that the spread of the spread, so to speak, has in many ways been an interesting two-way dialogue between high schools and college -- and only now is the NFL listening too. True, when Rodriguez came out with the zone-read people came from all over to study it from, but Walker and Kevin Wilson really put their stamp on it and showed the way for coaches less inclined to be "spread guys" how to adapt their traditional offense to the new-fangled sets. And I do think it true that, until teams like Northwestern got going, Rodriguez hadn't quite focused on developing the shotgun run game into a robust "system."

At Tulane, the offense had the zone-read elements but Rodriguez and Tommy Bowden still considered themselves kind of pass-first guys; Shaun King threw for 3,495 yards and 38 touchdowns. His big innovation at the time was in throwing the 3-step quick game from the shotgun. It sounds quaint and kind of weird now, but at the time people really didn't think you could do it because of timing issues until they saw Rodriguez do it (along with Joe Tiller at Purdue). Indeed, no less a passing guru than Norm Chow, while he was still at BYU, visited Rodriguez to learn this funky technique, and for the first time in his career taught his quarterbacks to throw the three-step game from the shotgun. (And the BYU offense, which had slowly begin to wilt in the late '90s, saw a brief resurgence before Chow left for NC State and used the same techniques there with Philip Rivers.) These were heady days.

Moreover, in Bowden and Rodriguez's their first year at Clemson Woody Dantzler split time with Brandon Streeter, an incumbent fifth-year senior who was not mobile (he averaged 0.9 yards rushing on a meager 42 attempts). See the highlights below.



And in any event I wasn't saying that Clemson was some kind of disorganized mess when Rodriguez was there, just that, understandably, these were the early days of the spread, so a few big ideas were most of what you needed. As teams caught on Rodriguez stayed a step ahead, again, with the aid of Rick Trickett at West Virginia, an excellent offensive line coach. (Note that with Trickett the focus of the zone read changed from the inside zone to the outside zone, a subtle switch for the average fan that derived from the ideas and philosophy Trickett learned from Alex Gibbs, the Denver Broncos' famed line coach.)

All I was saying is that Walker played a very important role in this development. As Urban Meyer has said, back in those days the spread coaches were a small fraternity and they liked to swap notes. Rodriguez hit everybody over the head with his ideas, and then later, once guys like Meyer and Walker had put in full seasons running the stuff, they got back together and talked about what worked and what could be better. (And to one of the commenters who said that they never heard of anyone visiting Walker, that is just wrong: Meyer has said repeatedly that he visited Walker to learn what they were doing at Northwestern.)

So anyway, I don't think giving credit to one guy should be interpreted as taking anything away from another. These were some dramatic years for the spread, those years from 1997-2002 or so. A lot happened, a lot was learned, a lot was tried, and there were a handful of guys there at this birthing of a new style of offense. Rodriguez might be the father, but Walker helped pour the baptismal water.

Former Northwestern Coach Randy Walker's effect on the spread

A question so good it deserves a full-post response. From reader Tom:

Q: "[D]id [Randy] Walker run the zone-read at Miami (OH), like when he upset the Wildcats their Rose Bowl year, or was it something he introduced in Evanston?"

The short answer is no, he didn't become a "spread guy" until he was at Northwestern. But the details are the fun part. Rodriguez invented the zone-read. Some others have said they dabbled in it before he did, but all signs point to his having invented it while at Glenville State. Rodriguez had been a four-wide spread guy with the zone run game, and it just kind of happened.

Walker, by contrast, had run traditional offenses at Miami of Ohio and early in his tenure at NW. In 1999, Walker's first year with the Wildcats, the offense was bad and the team went 3-8. He, along with his longtime assistant Kevin Wilson, who is now the offensive coordinator for Oklahoma under Bob Stoops, visited Rodriguez and Tommy Bowden at Clemson and Mike Martz at the Rams. I believe they got a little bit from Martz in terms of general theory, protections, and the like, but the lasting impact was Rodriguez.

This was because what Rodriguez showed them was less a new way to attack the problem of good defenses but more just a new way to think about attacking the problem. Rodriguez showed them the shotgun and the zone read stuff they were doing at Clemson and had done at Tulane, but the reason it clicked for Wilson and Walker is that they realized that they could run all their old stuff -- the zones, the power, counter, option, etc -- all from spread sets.

And this was probably the great leap forward for the spread. Indeed, if you look at what Rodriguez was doing at Clemson, a lot of it is there in terms of the zone read, but a lot of it too was just Woody Dantzler running around. It was Walker that took the idea of "spread-to-run" and "zone-read" and systemized it. Again, Rodriguez had been a spread-to-pass guy originally, who just had this one really big idea for the run game. Walker and Wilson brought to it the traditionalist tinkerer mindset, as guys who had been coaching power, run-first football for years and were experts at blocking schemes, defensive fronts, and the like.

It was this marriage of the grand-new spread ideas with an old school attention to detail that helped Northwestern go 8-4 and beat Michigan in 2000, and it is this that guys like Urban Meyer and half the high school coaches in the country learned the bread and butter from. And Rodriguez's sharing with Walker had a kind of pay-it-forward effect to him, as he then began seeing how he could improve his spread-to-run offense, which became more solidified and systematic while he was at Clemson and particularly when he was at West Virginia, with Rick Trickett as his line coach.

This is why Walker deserves as much credit as Rodriguez for taking the spread mainstream. He showed how coaches could pretty much do what they already did -- and apply the lessons they'd already learned -- to a new environment, and to new success.

Fran Tarkenton on quarterbacking

Click the image to enlarge it.



Courtesy of Bill Mountjoy.

Darrell Royal on tackling

Old school. Part I



and II

Judge Sotomayor and football

In announcing Judge Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, President Obama cited her ruling, while a federal district judge, which effectively lifted the 1994-95 baseball strike. But Judge Sotomayor has decided some cases involving football, as well: she sat on a panel of federal judges who decided a case brought by former Ohio State star Maurice Clarett, challenging the NFL's rule requiring players to wait three full seasons from the time they graduated high school before they could enter the draft.

Okay, so far so good. The case -- like most federal appellate cases -- is not so much about Clarett or football as it is about the substantive law at play, where the parties happen to be a football player and a sports league. Yet the coverage of this case from the sports media has been, well, erratic. Most notably, Sports Illustrated has committed some rather basic errors. Here is its synopsis of the case:

By 2004, Sotomayor had moved onto the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District [*] when she ruled on a case involving the NFL's age minimum. Maurice Clarett, a star running back at Ohio State, and Mike Williams [**], a wide receiver from USC, had sued to be allowed into the NFL Draft before they had been out of high school for three years, as mandated by the NFL's rules. A lower court had ruled that the age-limit should be overturned, but the appeals court granted the league's request for a stay of the ruling [***]. During the hearing [****], Sotomayor asked Clarett's attorney, Alan Millstein, why players who were already a part of the NFL Players' Association should risk losing their jobs to non-members. "Those 1,500 players want to protect themselves," she said. "That's what unions do: protect those in the union from those not in the union."

The NFL age-minimum remains in place.

(H/t Dr Saturday.) I have added asterisks where there are errors or at least questionable statements of fact.

* - First, it is not the "Second District," it is the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A google search turns up the Wikipedia page and the Federal Judiciary's website. That might seem a trifling error, but (a) Sports Illustrated is supposed to be comprised of actual journalism, and (b) had they said Maurice Clarett played for Michigan, or played for the Ohio University Wolverines, sports fans would be up in arms. Details matter.

** - Second, Mike Williams was not a party to the case; indeed, he did not declare for the draft until much after Clarett. The confusion I suppose stems from the fact that Williams and his agent jumped the gun. Clarett initially won his ruling at the district court, only to be unanimously overturned on appeal before Sotomayor and the two other judges (one, another appellate judge like Sotomayor, and the other a district court judge sitting on the case by designation). Williams quit school at Southern Cal midway through a semester in reliance on the first Clarett ruling, and after that decision was overturned he had committed too many NCAA infractions to return. But to imply that Sotomayor and the Second Circuit had before her Williams's case is inaccurate. Again, details matter.

*** - Third, the court did not issue a "stay of the ruling," but instead vacated it -- much stronger medicine than a "stay" which merely delays the effect of something. The Second Circuit rendered the lower court's ruling a nullity. [Update: Fair is fair, and a reader points out that the Second Circuit did in fact grant the NFL's stay after the oral argument, but before it issued its ruling vacating the lower court's order. And the stay is what would affect Clarett the most, as that put an immediate halt on his plans to enter the NFL draft. And, obviously, after the Second decided his case he still had some avenues remaining, including trying to get the entire Second Circuit to rehear his case (called an "en banc rehearing"), or to have the Supreme Court intervene. So the stay was of some relevance, but I still think it not entirely accurate to focus solely on the stay when they later in fact vacated the ruling.]

**** - This is a minor point and, if not for the others, would have gone unmentioned. But appellate courts -- at least federal ones -- don't have "hearings," they have "oral arguments." A hearing implies witnesses, evidence, and all that good Law & Order stuff. Appellate courts are simply conversations between lawyers and judges about the legal principles; the only facts are what is contained in the record. This is less a sin than the first three (which were all flatly false -- an amazing quantity of false statements in such a short paragraph), but it is worth getting the terminology right.

Finally, the larger point is how the article ends. It somehow implies that the decision was made at the "hearing," off of this one out of context and kind of vague statement that labor unions are important, which is meaningless in the context of the SI piece since it failed to explain what the case was about at all.

But that failure to explain a rather technical case pales in comparison to SI's Peter King's pitiful attempt to explain what the case was about:

Clarett's attorney, Alan Milstein, argued keeping Clarett out of the NFL would unreasonably restrict his client's earnings. Of course it would restrict his earnings, because it would keep him out of the NFL for another year. But the question for the three-judge panel was whether this was unreasonable or unfair.

(H/t Deadspin.) Maybe I'm being "unreasonable or unfair," but I can't help but assume that Peter King failed civics. That's not the kind of question federal judges are asked to answer. He should know this.

So what was the question before the Sotomayor and the other two judges on her panel? Broadly, Clarett argued that the NFL was unlawfully keeping him out of the league -- i.e. restricting his ability to ply his trade of being a football player -- in violation of the federal anti-trust laws. The NFL argued that the federal anti-trust laws didn't apply because another set of laws, federal labor law, preempts or basically knocks the anti-trust law out from applying. Federal labor law governs companies who have entered into collective bargaining agreements with unions, which of course includes the NFL which has an agreement with the NFL Players union.

Many politicians like to ask of potential Supreme Court Justices: "Will they simply apply the law, or will they impose their own views?" Well, in this case, the actual question was not about whether to apply the law (nothing is ever as simple as the slogans make them appear to be), but rather: what law applies?

Somewhat complicating matters is that Sotomayor, who wrote the opinion in Clarett v. NFL, had to look both at what the laws Congress passed in the anti-trust and labor contexts said, but also what the Supreme Court has said as it had tried to reconcile these cases. Specifically, the Supreme Court had recognized certain "exemptions" where anti-trust did not apply because certain labor law provisions already governed. (A common thing -- unions restrict trade to favor employees, which anti-trust is designed to prevent restraints on trade; regardless of your views of it, Congress has for over a century legislated in these areas and that legislation embodies a balance between these interests.) But the Clarett case was so difficult because the Supreme Court had identified a "non-statutory exemption" to anti-trust law but had not completely delineated its contours.

That's enough of a preview. Let's go to some excerpts of the text of the opinion. Sotomayor began with the facts of Clarett's case, but also background behind the laws at issue. (The full text of the opinion can be found here.)

Clarett, former running back for Ohio State University and Big Ten Freshman of the Year, is an accomplished and talented amateur football player. After gaining national attention as a high school player, Clarett became the first college freshman since 1943 to open as a starter at the position of running back for OSU. He led that team through an undefeated season, even scoring the winning touchdown in a double-overtime victory in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl to claim the national championship. Prior to the start of his second college season, however, Clarett was suspended from college play by OSU for reasons widely reported but not relevant here. [Citing Mike Freeman, Buckeyes Suspend Clarett For Year, N.Y. Times, Sept. 11, 2003, at D1.] Forced to sit out his entire sophomore season, Clarett is now interested in turning professional by entering the NFL draft. Clarett is precluded from so doing, however, under the NFL's current rules governing draft eligibility.

Founded in 1920, the NFL today is comprised of 32 member clubs and is by far the most successful professional football league in North America. Because of the League's fiscal success and tremendous public following, a career as an NFL player "represents an unparalleled opportunity for an aspiring football player in terms of salary, publicity, endorsement opportunities, and level of competition." But since 1925, when Harold "Red" Grange provoked controversy by leaving college to join the Chicago Bears, the NFL has required aspiring professional football players to wait a sufficient period of time after graduating high school to accommodate and encourage college attendance before entering the NFL draft. For much of the League's history, therefore, a player, irrespective of whether he actually attended college or not, was barred from entering the draft until he was at least four football seasons removed from high school. The eligibility rules were relaxed in 1990, however, to permit a player to enter the draft three full seasons after that player's high school graduation.

Clarett "graduated high school on December 11, 2001, two-thirds of the way through the 2001 NFL season" and is a season shy of the three necessary to qualify under the draft's eligibility rules. Unwilling to forego the prospect of a year of lucrative professional play or run the risk of a career-compromising injury were his entry into the draft delayed until next year, Clarett filed this suit alleging that the NFL's draft eligibility rules are an unreasonable restraint of trade in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, and Section 4 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. § 15.

Not much to say here, other than that, almost five years later, the fact that Clarett is an "accomplished" football player is no longer so indisputed. (Of course she was just referring to the amateur ranks.) I also did not previously know that the age limit was imposed on account of Red Grange. (Highlights of him here.)

Judge Sotomayor then recounted the history of the NFL and the players' union's collective bargaining agreement, including changes through history. Ultimately, she reached her framing of the question (which, uh, differed from what Peter King thought the case was about).

Clarett argues that the NFL clubs are horizontal competitors for the labor of professional football players and thus may not agree that a player will be hired only after three full football seasons have elapsed following that player's high school graduation. That characterization, however, neglects that the labor market for NFL players is organized around a collective bargaining relationship that is provided for and promoted by federal labor law, and that the NFL clubs, as a multi-employer bargaining unit, can act jointly in setting the terms and conditions of players' employment and the rules of the sport without risking antitrust liability. For those reasons, the NFL argues that federal labor law favoring and governing the collective bargaining process precludes the application of the antitrust laws to its eligibility rules. We agree.

She then explained the two sets of law here that intersect and ran into conflict (I have removed some of the citations for ease of reading; the full text contains them for those so inclined):

Although "[t]he interaction of the [antitrust laws] and federal labor legislation is an area of law marked more by controversy than by clarity," it has long been recognized that in order to accommodate the collective bargaining process, certain concerted activity among and between labor and employers must be held to be beyond the reach of the antitrust laws. Courts, therefore, have carved out two categories of labor exemptions to the antitrust laws: the so-called statutory and non-statutory exemptions. We deal here only with the non-statutory exemption.

The non-statutory exemption has been inferred "from federal labor statutes, which set forth a national labor policy favoring free and private collective bargaining; which require good-faith bargaining over wages, hours, and working conditions; and which delegate related rulemaking and interpretive authority to the National Labor Relations Board." [Quoting Brown v. Pro Football, a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court case]. The exemption exists not only to prevent the courts from usurping the NLRB's function of "determin[ing], in the area of industrial conflict, what is or is not a `reasonable' practice," but also "to allow meaningful collective bargaining to take place" by protecting "some restraints on competition imposed through the bargaining process" from antitrust scrutiny. [Quoting Brown.]

The Supreme Court has never delineated the precise boundaries of the exemption, and what guidance it has given as to its application has come mostly in cases in which agreements between an employer and a labor union were alleged to have injured or eliminated a competitor in the employer's business or product market. In the face of such allegations, the Court has largely permitted antitrust scrutiny in spite of any resulting detriment to the labor policies favoring collective bargaining.

Again, this is the classic federal appellate case, for which football, Maurice Clarett, the NFL, and all that merely fade into backdrop, as legal concepts intersect in strange and sometimes surprising ways. It's not that they disappear, it is that it is no longer about Big-Time-Football-Star and the National Football League, but a person who would like to ply his trade whereas an employer owes duties to its existing employees that the law protects. How does this play out? Labor law protects a union and employer's ability to restrict some entry of new workers; anti-trust law otherwise applies to prevent any restraints on trade. Congress has made many moves to shift this balance throughout, and courts struggle to keep up. In the next paragraphs, note the shout out to Justice White, who knew a bit about the NFL himself.

. . . .Contending that these cases establish the applicable boundaries of the non-statutory exemption to be applied in the present case, Clarett argues that the NFL's eligibility rules lack all of the characteristics that led Justice White to apply the exemption in Jewel Tea. Clarett, furthermore, maintains that the boundaries of the exemption were properly identified in, and thus we should follow, the Eighth Circuit's decision in Mackey v. National Football League. Mackey involved a challenge brought by NFL players to the League's so-called "Rozelle Rule," which required NFL clubs to compensate any club from which they hired away a player whose contract had expired. . . .

Relying on Mackey, the [lower court which had held for Clarett] below held that the non-statutory exemption provides no protection to the NFL's draft eligibility rules, because the eligibility rules fail to satisfy any of the three Mackey factors. Specifically, the district court found that the rules exclude strangers to the bargaining relationship from entering the draft, do not concern wages, hours or working conditions of current NFL players, and were not the product of bona fide arm's-length negotiations during the process that culminated in the current collective bargaining agreement.

We [i.e. the Second Circuit Court of Appeals as a whole], however, have never regarded the Eighth Circuit's test in Mackey as defining the appropriate limits of the non-statutory exemption. Moreover, we disagree with the Eighth Circuit's assumption in Mackey that the Supreme Court's decisions in Connell, Jewel Tea, Pennington, and Allen Bradley dictate the appropriate boundaries of the non-statutory exemption for cases in which the only alleged anticompetitive effect of the challenged restraint is on a labor market organized around a collective bargaining relationship. Indeed, we have previously recognized that these decisions are of limited assistance in determining whether an athlete can challenge restraints on the market for professional sports players imposed through a collective bargaining process, because all "involved injuries to employers who asserted that they were being excluded from competition in the product market."

Clarett does not contend that the NFL's draft eligibility rules work to the disadvantage of the NFL's competitors in the market for professional football or in some manner protect the NFL's dominance in that market. He challenges the eligibility rules only on the ground that they are an unreasonable restraint upon the market for players' services. . . . [O]ur cases have counseled a decidedly different approach where, as here, the plaintiff complains of a restraint upon a unionized labor market characterized by a collective bargaining relationship with a multi-employer bargaining unit. Moreover, as the discussion below makes clear, the suggestion that the Mackey factors provide the proper guideposts in this case simply does not comport with the Supreme Court's most recent treatment of the non-statutory labor exemption in Brown v. Pro Football, Inc..

Whew. And this is really just lead-in: the opinion goes on for several more pages, exhaustively recounting the various Supreme Court and lower federal court cases that bear on the issue. It ultimately comes together though, as Sotomayor and her colleagues conclude that the non-statutory exemption under labor law is broad enough, per the Supreme Court's dictates, to bar Clarett's challenge brought under the federal anti-trust laws.

Clarett would have us hold that by reaching this arrangement rather than fixing the eligibility rules in the text of the collective bargaining agreement or in failing to wrangle over the eligibility rules at the bargaining table, the NFL left itself open to antitrust liability. Such a holding, however, would completely contradict prior decisions recognizing that the labor law policies that warrant withholding antitrust scrutiny are not limited to protecting only terms contained in collective bargaining agreements. The reach of those policies, rather, extends as far as is necessary to ensure the successful operation of the collective bargaining process and to safeguard the "unique bundle of compromises" reached by the NFL and the players union as a means of settling their differences. It would disregard those policies completely to hold that some "particular quid pro quo must be proven to avoid antitrust liability," or to allow Clarett to undo what we assume the NFL and its players union regarded as the most appropriate or expedient means of settling their differences, id. at 961. We have cautioned before that "[t]o the extent that courts prohibit particular solutions for particular problems, they reduce the number and quality of compromises available to unions and employers for resolving their differences." Clarett would have us disregard our own good advice.

The disruptions to federal labor policy that would be occasioned by Clarett's antitrust suit, moreover, would not vindicate any of the antitrust policies that the Supreme Court has said may warrant the withholding of the non-statutory exemption. This is simply not a case in which the NFL is alleged to have conspired with its players union to drive its competitors out of the market for professional football. Nor does Clarett contend that the NFL uses the eligibility rules as an unlawful means of maintaining its dominant position in that market. [Citing Allen Bradley Co. [Supreme Court Case, including the quote: "The primary objective of all the Anti-trust legislation has been to preserve business competition and to proscribe business monopoly."] This lawsuit reflects simply a prospective employee's disagreement with the criteria, established by the employer and the labor union, that he must meet in order to be considered for employment. Any remedies for such a claim are the province of labor law. Allowing Clarett to proceed with his antitrust suit would subvert "principles that have been familiar to, and accepted by, the nation's workers for all of the NLRA's [sixty years] in every industry except professional sports." We, however, follow the Supreme Court's lead in declining to "fashion an antitrust exemption [so as to give] additional advantages to professional football players ... that transport workers, coal miners, or meat packers would not enjoy." [Quoting Brown v. Pro Football]

Of course, needless to say that this is not the only possible conclusion. The law is vague, it involves several ambiguous Supreme Court precedents, the intersection of two sets of extensive legislative schemes (labor and antitrust law) that cut against each other, and Clarett's case and the NFL's rule present a somewhat novel issue. No doubt there are those that sympathize with Clarett -- Peter King thought the case was just about whether the rule was "unreasonable" -- but that was not the issue: it was, instead, what law controls? And in this case, the Second Circuit thought that the Supreme Court had made clear enough that it would be labor law in this context. (Indeed, while the district court ruled that Clarett had shown an injury under the anitrust laws because the NFL's reasons for its rule -- protecting young athletes both physically and by keeping them in school and away from performance enhancing drugs, etc -- the Court of Appeals simply said all those concerns were irrelevant: "“Because we find that the eligibility rules are immune from antitrust scrutiny under the non-statutory labor exemption, we do not express an opinion on the district court’s legal conclusions that Clarett alleged a sufficient antitrust injury to state a claim or that the eligibility rules constitute an unreasonable restraint of trade in violation of antitrust laws.”)

And so Sotomayor moved on to the next case, Clarett now sits in jail, Mike Williams is god knows where, and the NBA wound up following the NFL's lead and imposing its own eligibility rule. Life moves on.

[Note that comments are disabled because I don't want them to get into political sloganeering about politics or Judge Sotomayor, in either direction. I just thought this was an interesting case, on a football relevant issue, and in the news. Plus I got to learn something while writing it. If you have comments that you feel are worthwhile, either about football or the law or both or whatever, please feel free to send them to me and I will post them myself.]

Bear Bryant: spread offense innovator?

A reader passes along a video of Alabama's 36-6 victory over UCLA in the 1976 Liberty Bowl (known to Alabama fans as "Southern Discomfort"). In the clip, Bear Bryant dials up what looks like -- to modern viewers at least -- the "shovel option" made famous by Urban Meyer. I have discussed this play previously.

In Meyer's version, the quarterback begins to sprint out and reads the defensive end. If the end attacks him, he pitches or "shovels" it up to either a runningback, slot receiver, or H-back. If the end stays home the quarterback can simply continue around him, and often has a pitch read as a third option. The backside guard also pulls and leads. It's a great play; see the diagram and video below.





But the shovel play itself has been around for a long time. Compare the video of Florida this year with the video of Bryant's Crimson Tide below. All things are cyclical.



Note that in both the teams leave the playside defensive end unblocked. I can't tell if Bryant's quarterback is reading him or just baiting him, but in any event it works.

Triple Shoot Part 4 - Conclusion

[Ed. Note: This is the final installment of Coach Manny Matsakis's Triple Shoot series. I want to thank him for contributing. Check out the Triple Shoot website here. See the previous posts here: Parts one, two, and three.]

Part 4 - Conclusion: The Triple Shoot Offense from Yesterday to Today

The Triple Shoot Offense started out as a pass-happy offense at Hofstra University (NY) in an attempt to compete versus scholarship schools during our Division III to I-AA transition. We were able to put up some gaudy numbers (42 ppg and 405 ypg passing) and a rather impressive winning percentage. At Emporia State University (KS) we realized that putting up the big numbers was not that big of a deal, what was more important was winning games. In order to do so, we researched and developed an explosive running game (Belly Series) to compliment the pass attack. The results speak for themselves, as we led the competitive MIAA in Rushing, Passing and scoring during the same season and were able to get our Superback to rush for nearly 2,000 yards or more three years in a row (Brian Shay broke Johnny Bailey’s all-time collegiate rushing record in this offense). Not only were our players able to achieve this in a team-oriented setting but our two inside receivers (Pobolish & Vito combined with Shay to garner over 15,000 yards during their careers together, the NCAA doesn’t keep records like that but we have yet to see career production like that in college football).

After making a go of it at the small college ranks, we tested the concept at the Division I level at the University of Wyoming. In a single season, we were able to go from last to first in total offense in the Mountain West Conference versus conference opponents. As my good friend Tony Demeo (University of Charleston, WV Head Coach) said, “You put the Ferrari in the garage after that year.” I got out of running this offense for 3 years as I spent some quality time with Mike Leach (Texas Tech University).

After the stint with the Red Raiders, I took the head coaching position at Texas State University to once again coach this system. In a single season, we were able to go from one of the worst offenses in the Southland Conference to a single season finish of #1 in total offense and were ranked #7 in the nation with this balanced attack. I was relieved of my duties after that season for not taking full responsibility of all aspects of my program and at that point chose to leave the coaching profession.

For the next four years I went into private business to develop regional football magazines. During this time, I also spent time reflecting on my career and the Triple Shoot Offense while consulting with coaches from high school to the professional ranks. On one visit to see my friend Hal Mumme, he made a statement that I should at least start to clinic the offense again and see if it would inspire me to coach again, I did and it worked. I am excited to coach the offense again (Capital University in Columbus, Ohio) and look forward to taking the next step with the Triple Shoot. The offense has since been simplified, codified and developed to a point whereby I really feel that the system can be replicated by underdog teams anywhere in the country.

At this point, I have put together an online coaching clinic to help coaches throughout the country in implementing this system. All the video is in there, the teaching progressions, cut-ups, drills and even archived game clips. If you have any interest in this system, check out the promotional website http://tripleshootfootball.com/ or the actual online seminar website http://tripleshootonline.com/to get started. There is even a blog that chronicles issues relating to the offense http://tripleshoot.blogspot.com/.

I have enjoyed taking the time to share with you and clarify some areas of the Triple Shoot Offense. Good luck this season and if you want to reach me, please feel free to contact me at tripleshoot@gmail.com.

Respectfully,

Manny Matsakis

John Madden knows more football than you

So says Residual Prolixity in reviewing Madden's book, One Knee Equals Two Feet: And Everything Else You Need to Know About Football:

Content-wise . . . it's clear that Madden knows a whole heck of a lot about football[.] There's more really good football content that shows off Madden's expert status in any given 10 pages than in half the books I've reviewed on here. One Knee is now 23 years old, and in that time about all the rules changes Madden has suggested have come to pass, and generally because they were quite sagacious. Some random examples of football knowledge: talking about the importance of the strength of a defensive lineman's fingers-Bear great Dan Hampton, whose knees were famously ravaged, didn't seem to mind all that much, saying "I'd rather have a knee go than my fingers." As just a casual watcher, I know hand play is important for linemen, but it's not something I notice regularly or pay a great deal of attention to, but reading something like that makes me want to bust out the tapes and compare, say, Haynesworth's precise play in the playoff game against the Steelers his rookie year versus this year. Another thing -- Madden's first job as head coach was leading the Raiders. He knew he didn't have enough experience at game management to be successful. He could try game-planning, but it's tough to simulate the same type of rhythm and unpredictability within structure. So, he attended local high school games in the Oakland area and basically called plays as though his team was in that situation-on 3&8 from the 34, how do I attack this team's defense. Simple, but a very effective strategy. . . .


. . . Still, this is one of the best couple books I've reviewed on this site. I originally read this as a library book, but I'll be ordering both a copy of this one for my library and a copy of Madden's first book as well. Not recommended for getting a sense of the modern game, but enthusiastically recommended for fans looking for an enjoyable book written by an expert and who can stand the dated factor.

The "Triple Shoot" Part 1 - History and overview

[Ed. Note: For the next four days regular -- or irregular! -- blogging will be suspended and in its place is an overview of Manny Matsakis's creation, the "Triple Shoot." The offense is a hybrid combination of a fly sweep offense and the run and shoot. Check out the triple shoot website. Again, the words below are Manny's, as he has been kind enough to write this out. Enjoy.]

Part 1 - Historical Perspective

It all started with a fascination of the 3 distinctly different offenses the Wing-T, Run & Shoot and the Georgia Southern Hambone. From there it evolved with specific influence and personal contact with the following coaches, Ben Griffith (Inventor of the Hambone), Glenn “Tiger” Ellison, Darrell “Mouse” Davis and Bill Walsh. As an additional note, Leo “Dutch” Meyer’s book, Spread Formation Football gave me an idea on how to create an explosive rushing attack (albeit, it was not the purpose of his book). Having started American Football QuarterlyÆ in 1993, while waiting to take a job at Kansas State University, gave me access to all of the aforementioned individuals, except coach Meyer.

In the early 1990’s, I was working on my Ph.D. and while finishing my coursework I began a research project, which evolved into the Triple Shoot Offense. The title of the dissertation project was, “The History and Evolution of the Run & Shoot Offense in American Football.”



Development of the Offense

Researching the state of football and developing axioms and creating postulates based on those axioms created this offense. My initial axioms of the game were as follows:

• 1. The game of football has freedoms, purposes and barriers that give spread formation attacks a distinct advantage.
  
  
• 2. A systems approach to football has the greatest potential for success over a period of time.
  
  
• 3. When players are more knowledgeable about their system than the opponent is theirs they have the greatest potential for success.
  
  
• 4. A balanced approach to offensive strategy has the greatest potential for success over a period of time.
  
  
• 5. A system that appears complex, yet is simple to execute will stand the test of time.

These following postulates were the results of analyzing the previous axioms:

• 1. Spreading the field with offensive personnel creates mis-matches and distinct angles to attack the defense.
  
  
• 2. Utilizing a no-huddle attack enables an offense to control the clock and give the players a better understanding of the defense they are attacking.
  
  
• 3. A 2-point stance by offensive linemen gives them better recognition and a lower “center of gravity” at the point of attack.
  
  
• 4. A protection based on the principle of “firm: front-side & soft: backside” enables an offense to take advantage of any defensive front by keeping them off balance.
  
  
• 5. Run blocking schemes that combine Veer, Zone and Trap blocking enables an offense to run the ball versus any defensive front.
  
  
• 6. Pass schemes that adjust routes based on coverage on the run will open up holes in the secondary.
  
  
• 7. Quarterback decisions based on looks & reads give the offense the ability to release the ball anywhere from 1 to 5 steps. This will minimize the amount of time necessary for pass protection.

Triple Shoot Offense Defined

The Triple Shoot Offense is a systems oriented, no-huddle, four receiver, one back attack that is balanced in its ability to run or pass the ball at any time during a game. It is predicated on spreading the field and attacking a pre-ordered defense with blocking and route adjustments after the play begins.

Ordering Up The Defense

The concept of “ordering up the defense” is one that I learned from “Tiger” Ellison. His concept was to place a label on each defensive man (numbering), and from that to designate a specific defender that would tell his players what to do, either by the place he lined up before the ball was snapped or by his movement after the snap.

The Triple Shoot Offense took that information and decided to look at defensive alignments based on the way they matched up to a 4 receiver, one-back formation and designated defenses as either Nickel, Dime, Blitz or they were considered unsound. Nickel looks are based on six men in the box with one free safety, Dime looks have five men in the box with two safeties and Blitz is recognized when there are seven defenders in the box and no safety over the top. Anything else is an unsound defense that we hope a team is willing to attempt.

In order to keep defenses in these alignments we utilize a variety of concepts, from widening our inside receivers to calling specific plays that put a bind on any defender that tries to play both the front and the coverage. When we get to the point where we can do this, the offense is at its most optimum in production.

Tomorrow, the run game and play-passes.

- Manny Matsakis

The ballad of Hal Mumme

I have a soft spot for Hal Mumme. He was the most interesting thing to happen to Kentucky football since Bear Bryant (and maybe the entire SEC, sans Spurrier); he invented the vaunted Airraid offense which it seems like half of all high school teams now run; and he is always willing to share information about his offense, even back before Tony Franklin had his "system" or Mike Leach became the dread pirate of Lubbock, Texas. And, Mumme's sweaty, exasperated sideline performances will likely never be equaled.

Well he's back: Mumme, who was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, has taken the job as head coach of small McMurry college in Abilene, Texas. New Mexico State fired Mumme after his team went 3-9 in 2008.

Commentators like to talk about the "NFL coaching trees" of guys like Bill Walsh and Bill Belichick. Yet among active coaches -- excluding guys like Hayden Fry and Bear Bryant -- I can't think of a better college coaching tree than Hal Mumme's. Not all have been successful, but it's pretty remarkable considering Mumme's (relatively) diminutive stature in the pantheon of college coaches. Among the major coaches who have coached under Mumme -- and all of these guys were under him, running Hal's offense doing Hal's drills and using Hal's techniques -- are Mike Leach (Texas Tech), Chris Hatcher (Georgia Southern and won a D-II National Championship at Valdosta St), Sonny Dykes (offensive coordinator for U. of Arizona), Guy Morriss (Baylor and Kentucky head coaches, now head coach of Texas A&M-Commerce), Dennis Roland (head coach Southeastern Louisiana), Tim Keane (Memphis secondary coach), and Darrell Patterson (linebackers coach at Stanford).

Obviously the guy that sticks out in this list is Leach. For roughly a decade after a brash high school coach named Hal Mumme became the head coach of Iowa Wesleyan college in 1989 and hired Leach, a guy whose previous coaching job had been in Finland, the now-head Red Raider played second-fiddle to Hal. As the storyline goes now -- usually in the context of discussing Leach -- the two are credited with dreaming up the potent Airraid offense (named that as part of a marketing campaign by a staffer at the University of Kentucky). Yet, until he broke out on his own, Leach was not well-known, nor was he so credited by the media. Indeed, as the storyline went then, it was Mumme who called the plays, and it was "Mummeball" that his teams had varying degrees of success with at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta, and Kentucky.

And then they split. Leach took the job as offensive coordinator job at Oklahoma under Bob Stoops. (And how different might history have been: a season earlier Leach had considered becoming head coach of a very small D-II college himself.) It's almost bizarre how different life has been for the two men.

Leach's story has been well-documented. He's not quite Bear Bryant (or Urban Meyer or Bob Stoops for that matter), but his trajectory has almost entirely been upward: a quick turnaround of Oklahoma and particularly Oklahoma's offense, and OU wins a title the next year running "his" offense (which isn't entirely fair either way, as Stoops really wanted to hire "Mumme's offense" and the next season, without Leach, Mark Mangino had some input as well); and Texas Tech's unprecedented streak of bowl games, high rankings, and upset victories over Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M in the past several seasons.

Then there's Mumme. He lasted only two more years at Kentucky. In the first, UK surprisingly went 6-5 without Tim Couch and went to a then record two-straight bowl games. But in the second, it must simply be known as the beginning of the end. After the 1999 season, Chris Hatcher left to take over at Valdosta State, and Tony Franklin was promoted to offensive coordinator, though at Kentucky everyone knew that Mumme really held the title.

Then things got weird. Mumme benched productive but uninspiring returning starter Dusty Bonner in favor of the infamous hefty-lefty, Jared Lorenzen, then but a wee true freshman. (Around this time I heard Terry Bowden good-naturedly tell a room of coaches, as a jump-off from some anecdote I don't remember: "And then there's Hal Mumme, who doesn't hesitate to bench to bench the SEC leader in passing and pass efficiency!") In Lorenzen, Mumme got what he apparently wanted -- arm strength -- but he also got a bevy of interceptions and erratic play, waffling between a 500 yard game against Georgia to disastrous interceptions against South Carolina, and the team wound up a pitiful 2-9.

Yet that doesn't even tell the whole story of how bad 2000 was. It was so bad, by midseason Mumme no longer spoke to his offensive coordinator Tony Franklin (though history now tells us that Franklin is himself a prickly guy). And then came the NCAA: apparently an enormous behemoth known as Claude Bassett, Kentucky's recruiting coordinator, had flatly been paying players. (I once rode in Bassett's golf cart: I rode by grasping onto the roof and rail because there was little room in the passenger's seat for . . . obvious reasons, and the entire time I was convinced the cart was going to tip over.) Mumme was never formally implicated, but if nothing else he had little control over Bassett's clandestine activities. And, between the 2-9 finish and the infractions, Mumme's time at Kentucky was done.

All was quiet until Mumme took over at Southeastern Louisiana in D-1AA, and resuscitated a dead football program (literally, the program had been terminated) before leaping to New Mexico State, where things never congealed. In his first year he went 0-12, and never won more than four games. He takes the job at McMurry, in Abilene, Texas, presumably because there were few other options.

Who can explain how Mike Leach, his friend and former assistant, can go on to such heights while Mumme seems to face nothing but personal and professional tragedy? Chris Hatcher too, who had both played for Mumme and coached with him, has an exceptionally bright future. And who knows if Mumme will have any success at this small school, and even if he does, most won't remember him for that. Mumme, whose wife is a cancer survivor, will also have to wage his own cancer battle.

In the last decade, likely Mumme's entire career in D-1 football, his high water mark was a 7-5 season with Tim Couch as his quarterback -- hardly the stuff of legend. During his time he became notorious for goofy calls, an obsession with how many passing yards his team had (sometimes at the expense of winning), and a tenure forever tainted with recruiting violations, either with knowledge or simple lack of control. For these reasons, to many, if Mumme is a tragic figure, then he's somewhere between MacBeth and Dr. Faustus, as figures who got what was coming to them.

But that offense. That elegant, "backyard"-yet-disciplined approach to throwing the damn football. Many of Mumme's hallmarks -- throwing the ball repeatedly with a grand total of about ten passing plays practiced endlessly, warm up drills instead of stretching, relentless passes against "air" with five quarterbacks dropping back on every play, and an unyielding belief in "throwing the ball short to people who can score" -- can be seen not only in places like Texs Tech and the University of Arizona, but in countless high schools across the country. (I really cannot overstate this.) Tony Franklin, Mumme's St. Paul, proselytized the word of the pass-first, shotgun spread offense, and while Mumme may not be divine, he is not without messianic qualities: the rise of the spread and passing offense in the last decade, particularly in the lower levels of football, may have been inevitable, but Mumme's little system, mesh, shallow, Y-cross, Y-sail, Y-stick, and the others, along with his ingenious practice methods, delivered football forever from its more ancient roots.

The spread to run offense of Urban Meyer and Rich Rodriguez may ultimately prove more viral and sustained than the pass-first Airraid. But Mumme's legacy is assured; as prophet, harbinger, and technician of the explosion of the passing game throughout football, particularly at the lower levels. In his way, Hal Mumme might prove to be the most influential coach of the last two decades. I wouldn't bet against it: Hal always likes his odds.