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Necessity was the mother of revolution.
When Rich Rodriguez installed a beta-version spread offense at Salem College in 1988, the firsttime head coach’s blueprint was based on his successes and failures as a defensive coordinator. The two-minute drill gave me the most difficulty, Rodriguez thought; let’s just do that, but all the time.
Around the same time, coaches at Iowa Wesleyan University were searching for new and nontraditional ways to attack opposing defenses. Then-offensive coordinator Mike Leach’s theory attempted to marry two seemingly juxtaposed styles: Brigham Young ’s passing game, with its emphasis on attacking space, and Oklahoma’s wishbone, a run-first scheme predicated on spreading the football among its skill players.
A decade later, spread forerunners — Rodriguez, Leach, Sonny Dykes, Dana Holgorsen and Kevin Sumlin, among others — began meeting each offseason on various campuses, sharing ideas and comparing schematics of an of- fense beginning to take grasp on college football’s highest level.
“It wasn’t like we were solving the world’s problems or anything like that, but it was neat,” Rodriguez said. “Football is different. It’s not like Fortune 500 companies that don’t tell their secrets. We share ideas, probably too much.”
Step by step, these offensive minds developed and honed a system that can only be described as revolutionary — radical, even, as the most football landscapechanging development of its era. It evened the playing field, bring-
ing offensive ingenuity to the forefront at the expense of defensive production, and ushered in an era of scoring proficiency unmatched in the sport’s history.
And that version of the spread — four wide receivers, one quarterback, one running back, fullspeed tempo — is, if not dead, no longer a viable conduit for success. During the past decade, the offense has gone through so many iterations and overhauls, on an annual and even weekly basis, that the term “spread” has become a catch-all phrase for any offense of a certain spacing, speed and tempo.
“There is no ‘spread’ offense,” Nebraska coach Mike Riley said. “What people call spread is the quarterback in shotgun and receivers spread all over the field. You’ll hear it. ‘ That’s the spread.’ But they’re really way different from each other.”
No, the spread isn’t dead. It has merely evolved and, in a sense, devolved, as more and more coaches take the system’s foundational concepts and bend it to their will.
“When I hear ‘ spread offense,’ I kind of chuckle a little bit,” said Holgorsen, West Virginia’s coach. “It means evolving. To me, that’s what ‘spread offense’ means. The days of the spread offense 100% of the time are long, long gone.” DIFFERENT WRINKLES Again, as during the system’s origin, necessity has driven the revolution.
Few college football offenses don’t utilize at least some aspect of the spread formula: in tempo, in no-huddle sets, in formations, in the run-pass options — plays packaged with running and passing possibilities, executed at the quarterback’s discretion — now in vogue in nearly three-quarters of the Football Bowl Subdivision. Even Stanford, a between-the-tackles throwback, embraced an up-tempo bent during the final month of last season; the Cardinal ended 2014 on a three-game winning streak.
The proliferation of spread-based teams has led to increased defensive awareness, as teams faced spread offenses more and more frequently but also drilled against the same concepts during practice. As many as eight teams in the Pac-12 Conference use a spread foundation, for example. Though each offense differs, defenses are able to see the same basic formations and philosophies on a regular basis.
“The defenders are so wellschooled at defending the spread,” Ohio State coach Urban Meyer said. “The spread originally was a novelty, a little bit like the wishbone. Now it’s the majority of the deal. So teams are just much better at defending it.”
The spread has seen two distinct changes in the last five years. The first is seen in tempo, which has come to imply speed — how quickly a team runs from one play to the next against a beleaguered opponent — but is better described as pace: an offense’s overall rate of activity.
As defenses caught up to spread concepts, teams found less productivity in a foot-on-the-pedal approach; for starters, moving at full speed limited the scope of the playbook and thus lessened the opportunity for offensive complexity, and such a pace prevented offenses from mixing personnel to match down-and-distance situations.
The second pronounced change is seen in schematics: Many teams have embraced more traditional personnel packages, even blending pro-style tendencies and formations within the spread’s overall approach.
“The spread offense in college — which is one back, four receivers — and the pro-style offenses that you used to see in the NFL have merged,” Holgorsen said.
This is evident in two-back sets, in fewer wide receivers and in the increased importance of the tight end — the latter a recent game-changer for programs fortunate to have a bigger receiving target with the ability to make an impact on running downs.
A two-pronged tight end — one who can dominate defensive backs on first down and run past linebackers on passing downs — is the newest spread-based mis- match nightmare for opposing defenses. TRIPLE PLAY Early spread adopters such as Rodriguez and Meyer look back fondly on its beginnings. “It used to be fairly easy,” Meyer said. “Teams just couldn’t defend it.”
Said Rodriguez, “It was fun the first 10 years when no one ever saw it and you were different. Now you’re not different, so you’ve got to try to create ways to adapt to that.”
Fittingly, those who first crafted the spread’s basic outline have been most responsible for its recent evolution. For these offense-first coaches, the key has become remaining one step ahead of the curve — pursuing fresh thoughts and ideas even through what some might perceive as a turnback-the-clock acceptance of prostyle philosophies.
“We talk about it all the time,” said Dykes, California’s coach. “What’s the next great frontier out there?”
The revolution might come full circle, Dykes says, bringing teams back to an old-school style once seen across all of college football and now only used at a handful of programs: the triple-option offense.
At West Virginia, Holgorsen took Leach’s pass-heavy system and added an inside-power ground game, providing more offensive balance and creating additional space on the outside. Over time, Meyer’s spread has replaced tempo with multiple options on a given play; the latest wrinkle is the fly sweep, borrowed from Clemson.
Baylor coach Art Briles has blended the spread’s spacing and tempo with a downhill running attack: Baylor leans on multiple running backs and, more recently, the tight end — this year’s version, 400-pound senior LaQuan McGowan, “is the experiment,” Briles said — to open up its vertical passing game.
“You can’t do the same thing over and over again or you’ll get stale and you’ll get beat,” Briles said. “To me, that’s the exciting part. You’ve got to keep growing and you’ve got to keep changing. That’s the thing that motivates me. Because it’s fun, it’s exciting.”
Yet some aspects never change: Spread-focused offenses want to have a certain pacing, often fast, sometimes slow; they want to be the aggressor; they want to wear down defenses; they want to score in bunches, obviously; they want to stay on the cutting edge; and, above it all, they want to remain committed to an offensive style that has drastically changed the way the game is played at every level of competition.
“Sometimes, we try to make ourselves look like we’re too smart and act like it’s chess,” Rodriguez said. “I tell our guys it’s checkers, not chess. You don’t need to think six moves ahead, only maybe two moves.”