TRIPLE OPTION LETS DAVIE DO MORE WITH LESS
‘Great equalizer’ helps New Mexico
As part of a USO tour in the summer of 2011, Bob Davie and Urban Meyer sat side by side for a 16-hour flight from Washington, D.C., to Kuwait, killing time in the way only coaches do: by sketching out X’s and O’s across multiple legal pads, piquing the curiosity of flight attendants more accustomed to sleeping passengers than football schematics.
It was another moment that, in Davie’s words, caused “those demons to come back” — meaning the urge to return to coaching more than a decade after his unceremonious dismissal from Notre Dame, which in turn came less than a year after receiving a five-year contract extension and just months after he and his wife began construction on a home.
Davie had spent that decade as an analyst for ESPN, collecting tips, hints and ideas from his various stops across the Football Bowl Subdivision. Three schools stood out: Air Force, Army and Navy, for how the service academies attempted to even the playing field despite their inherent disadvantages.
He’d land at New Mexico the winter after the USO tour, taking the reins of a program mired in one of the worst runs in recent history — the Lobos had won a combined three games during the three seasons under his predecessor, Mike Locksley.
Davie thought he’d return to coaching — he’d had opportunities, though they didn’t fit — but he knew that if he did, it would be “at a New Mexico of the world.”
“Whatever conference it would be,” Davie said, “I knew it would be at a place that had to do more with less.”
One of the first calls Davie placed after taking the job was to Kansas State’s Bill Snyder, himself no stranger to from-the-bootstraps rebuilding projects. Davie asked for advice, to which Snyder replied: Let me tell you, that’s a tough job. Whoa, Davie thought. “Then we dove into it,” Davie said. “I knew this was a very difficult situation. I didn’t really care. I didn’t really care what anybody thought or what the record would be. I just wanted to build something and be competitive.
“I’m pretty realistic. I’ve seen a lot of things in college football, particularly during those years at ESPN. I can compare the haves and have-nots. I know who we are, I know what we are, and I just want to keep building this thing.”
As the Lobos prepare for Saturday’s New Mexico Bowl against Texas-San Antonio, the program’s slow yet steady growth into annual bowl participant was born from Davie’s decade off the sidelines: Aware that his next shot would likely come at a place with limited resources, he had mapped out his blueprint for drawing more from less, echoing what he’d seen at the academies by leaning on “the great equalizer” — the tripleoption offense.
“I had decided that I was going to be unique in that we were going to be a triple-option style pro- gram,” he said. “I knew that. I knew that five years before I coached again, that wherever I went that’s what we had to do.”
Winning games — and in particular, winning close games — has come to define New Mexico football. But since the day of Davie’s arrival, the Lobos’ identity has been the triple option, a 20thcentury offense revitalized with added tweaks, adjustments, bells and whistles.
“It’s a throwback. It’s not necessarily sexy,” offensive coordinator Bob DeBesse said. “But I believe it’s absolutely been the best thing for us at New Mexico, to develop an identity and give us an edge as we try to rebuild this.”
It’s part triple option, part Wishbone, part Veer — an offense popularized by former Houston coach Bill Yeoman in the 1970s — and part Pistol, the latter a new entry into college football’s offensive lexicon. Combined it’s the engine behind the nation’s top- ranked running game and the primary reason for New Mexico’s surge into back-to-back bowl games.
“We’re not always the biggest team. We’re not always the strongest,” senior quarterback Austin Apodaca said. “But just the way we practice, the way we play, we’re different than a lot of people. That definitely helps us in that we’re not running the exact same thing as anyone.”
The Lobos average 360.9 rushing yards per game, far ahead of second-place Navy, and have the nation’s top two per-carry rushers among backs with at least 100 carries in senior Teriyon Gipson and sophomore Tyrone Owens. The offense gained at least 350 yards on the ground in seven games during the regular season, highlighted by a 568-yard showing in the finale against Wyoming.
New Mexico has won 12 of its last 17 games in Mountain West Conference play; the program had won 11 of its previous 60 league games. This year’s shared Mountain Division title represents the Lobos’ first hardware of any kind since winning the Western Athletic Conference, a sincedefunct league, in 1997.
It’s just as Davie expected — or as he planned, at least. It’s an “outwork, outhit, outdiscipline identity,” he said. “We’re going to do things the way they need to be done, period.”
If winning off the grid in college football demands a unique approach, the Lobos’ outline for success, born during Davie’s time away from coaching, entails a deep embrace of this run-first, run-last offense.
“Hey, we’re the triple option,” senior tight end Cole Gautsche said. “We’re going to go out there and run the ball. We’re going to put points on the board, and we’re going to hold possession. We’re going to do what we do.”