A hopeless attempt at playing catch-up on college football coverage

Just when you stopped worrying and learned to love the (zone read) spread option offense, Gary Danielson, former Purdue quarterback and current CBS college football analyst says its dead.

A while back we wrote of how Rich Rodriguez’s arrival in Michigan from West Virginia with the spread option offense represented the full mainstreaming of that offense into college football culture and how it would continue the trend of other schools mimicking the offense.

In addition to “big boys” such as Oklahoma and Florida using this set as their primary offense, Auburn has adopted it also this year but with disastrous results. 4-3 Auburn’s HC, Tommy Tuberville fired his offensive coordinator Tony Franklin last week.

But no matter, we figured this offense to represent a seismic shift in offensive philosophies across the country and the type of athletes that were recruited to a) run it and b) defend it. We thought we saw the future during the 2006 Rose Bowl when a 7-point favorite USC and their fast, free-flowing defense simply did not have an answer for uber-athlete QB Vince Young running the Texas Longhorn offense out of the spread option set.

We envisioned a move away from the traditional power running game and the vertical passing game to this more horizontally-oriented multi-faceted attack. 300 lb. defensive linemen were out and a front seven that averaged between 220 and 260 lbs. and which could all run 4.5s was going to be in.

Or perhaps not. Not that Danielson necessarily thinks it’s a gimmick but rather, much like the veer and triple option-type attacks that have been used by the service academies over the years to compensate for a lack of size and speed, the spread option has been used by non-traditional powers to vault themselves into the national spotlight. See: Missouri and West Virginia. And lack of talent is something that the traditional powers should not have a problem with. Here’s Danielson:

"Instead of teams going more to it, I think you'll see teams going to it as part of an offense. The top schools can get the best talent. For them, there's no need to do it ... I love it as a part of my package, not as the only package."

And for a system that is so reliant on the quarterback, Danielson doesn’t think the risk is worth the reward:

"Still, it's somewhat of a high-wire attack, and as West Virginia has learned recently, when you're quarterback (Pat White) gets nicked, you lose your passing game and a good part of your running game. You go away from that, and it's not a great fit.
"When an Alabama, LSU or Ohio State falls (from their offensive scheme), they land on the sidewalk, brush off the scratch and walk away. When a Missouri, Kansas or West Virginia falls from the high wire, they break their legs. You've got to have more that you can do."

Danielson claims he saw his own version of the future earlier this season when the spread option jumped the shark.

"The spread officially peaked (early this season) when I saw Michigan spread out and running a fake snap count, (with the quarterback) looking to the sideline, trying to fool Miami of Ohio ... which Michigan used to just line up and run over."

We respect Danielson quite a bit and think he is a very good analyst and while we don’t think that we’ll ever see a program like USC, for instance, go with the spread option as its primary set, we still think that as defenses continue to load up with speed and athleticism, offenses will need an effective counter by which a well-run spread option offense will affect.

Story here.

The "Tiffany Network" gets Its Man

In the grand tradition of college football, “back-ins”, this is perhaps one of the most fortuitous. We’ve seen some dandies lately…. Nebraska backing into the BCS title game after getting whipped by Colorado in their final regular season game in ’01 and Oklahoma doing the same two years later after getting crushed by K-State in the Big 12 title game.

Ohio State in a supposed rebuilding year, finished up their one-loss regular season this year by beating Michigan which put them in the 5 hole in the BCS standings on November 19th. Nice season. The Buckeyes were eyeing a trip out to the Rose Bowl to renew some classic 70s match-ups with USC. Of course, zany antics and hilarity ensued in the subsequent weeks and when the Bucks regained consciousness after their tryptophan-induced coma, they found themselves in the title game against LSU. (Yep, there’s a system that works).

Anyway, after Michigan… ummmm…. after Lloyd Carr stepped down as the Michigan coach it became painfully obvious that they weren’t used to hiring head ball coaches. The last time they actually went through the head coach hiring process is when they brought in Bo Schembechler from Miami (OH) nearly 40 yrs. ago. Subsequent hires, Gary Moeller and Carr were all “company men” that had been in the Michigan program for years.

Michigan clutzed around with Les Miles of LSU and Greg Schiano of Rutgers before backing-in to Rich Rodriguez the now former West Virginia coach and the guy they should’ve been going after all along. This is significant for no other reason than Rodriquez is the man primarily responsible for socializing the college football world to the “spread-option” offense that is currently the rage. Irony being, Michigan, itself, couldn’t stop this offense when playing App. State and Oregon in its first two games of the season.

And after being eyed suspiciously by much of college football as being “gimmicky”, the fact that Michigan has hired its guru is now a tacit acknowledgement of the full acceptance of the spread-option offense.

Let’s face it… Michigan is the CBS of college football. They are the embodiment of the stodgy, gray-flannet suit establishment of college ball. And like CBS, Michigan’s presumed dominance has been taking some hits of late – the program was showing its age and subsequently the ratings… and rankings were beginning to slip.

This is a great hire. This will inject life back into the program and rejuvenate the rivalry against Ohio State that had become rather one-sided of late with head coach, Jim Tressel being the man, for all intents and purposes, that forced Lloyd Carr into his resignation.

Ohio State, another “establishment” program though far more forward-thinking than Michigan, has had trouble themselves with this offense losing in the BCS title game to Florida last season and Ron Zook’s Fighting Illini this season.

With the Michigan/Big 10-type athletes Rodriguez will have, its going to take a couple of years to fully implement this offense but it will be fascinating to see how the Big 10 and the rest of the nation will now respond to the “nod” given by college football’s “Tiffany Network” to the glitz, hype and flash of the spread-option offense.