Cutting Against the Grain

Even the most avid football lovers usually express mystification about the vibrating maelstrom known as electric football.  Most could never make those little plastic men do more than spin in place; anything resembling a life-like play was impossible to achieve.  The game was to them, frankly, stupid.  My brother and I, on the other hand, created cosmos from the electric chaos; we even kept statistics compiled from a play by play log of each game.  Even though I rarely play electric football anymore, I still think I could beat anyone in the world using right out of the bag players, given a couple hours to work out a couple good plays.  Nothing more is needed to beat any defense; the key is to threaten every part of the field on every play.  Any overload by the defense can be punished.  The same is true in real football, but few offenses do that well.  

It was with great dismay that I witnessed the hiring by my beloved Auburn Tigers of a guru of the latest trend in college offenses, the spread offense.  The "spread" is a quarterback-centered offense that uses a "shotgun" snap.  Depending on the strengths of the quarterback, the offense can be run-oriented or pass-oriented.  The main running play is a read option to a running back--the quarterback puts the ball in the running back's belly and either leaves it there or pulls it out and runs in the other direction himself.  The formation is spread without a tight end so while spread offenses can run the ball effectively, it is not a power, "smash mouth" running game.  Tim Tebow of Florida is the prototype quarterback for this offense.

The experience of Auburn in 2008 with a spread offense was a disaster.  The Auburn culture is a running culture.  Now former coach Tommy Tuberville thought the spread was the future of offense in college.  Top recruits out high school wanted to run it; it was an offense in the midst of a bull run, even if runners in it more resemble deer. At Auburn, the spread offense needed to roll up big point totals early and often; capital in the form patience on the plains of Auburn would not be in great supply.  Halfway through the season, the new spread guru, Tony Franklin, was fired.  

As James Grant says, the trendy is at its most risky when it is at its most popular.  While Tommy Tuberville was trying to catch a rising star in the spread offense, another kind of spread offense based on, in college football chronometry, ancient principles was earning first-year Georgia Tech coach Paul Johnson "coach of the year" nominations.   The triple option was invented by Bill Yeoman.  His "split back veer" made the University of Houston an offensive juggernaut in the 1970s.  Paul Johnson honed his spread version of the triple option at Division I-AA Georgia Southern, winning multiple national titles.  Johnson then made Navy the powerhouse of the service academies, repeatedly embarrassing rival Army in their annual showdown.  Sure, conventional wisdom held, the spread option can work at lower levels of college football, but big-time college defenses are too fast, defensive foot speed being, supposedly, krytonite to the spread option.   Georgia Tech, at the end of its first year running the spread option, ran up obscene rushing yard totals against fast defenses from the ACC's Miami Hurricanes and the SEC's Georgia Bulldogs.  

It is embarrassing for a defense to have a quarterback throw for 400 yards against it.  Such an event does not call a team's toughness into question the way giving up 300 rushing yards can. Passing yards are gained by trash-talking gazelles at the expense of trash-talking cheetahs; few true football lovers get excited about the success or failure of these glib speedsters.  Lineman are the foundation of the game of football.  Linebackers and running backs are true exemplars of the game--tough, tight-lipped gladiators who dish out and absorb the most of the game's punishment.  No aerial circus trumps running the football well.

Paul Johnson's spread option is difficult to defense because it threatens the entire field on every play.  Superstar defenders are used to having latitude to be instinctual in making plays.  The spread option forces discipline on every defender; load up to stop one type of play or get sloppy about assigned responsibilities and the spread option will exploit it.  We usually associate the "big play" with the passing game, the long bomb being its most dramatic form.  The spread option gives a "big play" running game.  Up the middle or around the end, any play can go all the way.  Paul Johnson proved that the spread option is a viable big-time college offense this year.  Since it is so explosive and no one else is running it, opposing coaches have a difficult time preparing for it in one week.  The spread option is the ultimate contrarian offense, this is, until the single wing makes its comeback.  

It seems Tommy Tuberville, like a wayward teenager, lost his job because he chose to run an offense just because everyone else was running it when perhaps a more contrarian play would have better served.