THE GAME EVOLVES
Tigers-Tulsa matchup shows trend of more plays, more yards, more points.
Moments after a 53-46 victory over Cincinnati last month, University of Memphis football coach Justin Fuente was asked if he ever thought his team would give up 752 yards of offense and still win the game.
“Well, I guess times are changing,” Fuente said in his postgame press conference. “Football is different than it used to be.”
Like any sport, football is in a state of constant evolution. Coaches innovate, rules adjust and coaches innovate again. Some trends stick, others appear and disappear. In recent years, at the college level, that evolution has led to more plays, more yards and more points.
Perhaps no game this weekend will better exemplify that trend than when No. 18 Memphis travels to play Tulsa on Friday night on ESPN, a matchup featuring two of the top 10 offenses in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Tulsa’s Baylor-inspired offense is averaging 550.5 yards per game this season, sixth-most in the country, while Memphis’ offense ranks 10th at 532.8 yards per game.
Through the first seven weeks of this season, FBS teams are racking up 30.2 points and 414.1 yards per game, the most of any individual year in the past decade. Just five years ago, teams averaged 27.8 points and 382.6 yards per game. Five years before that: 26.73 points and 379 yards per game.
So what happened? Firstyear Tulsa coach Philip Montgomery said much of the trend can be traced to the highschool level.
“A lot of guys are putting their best athlete at quarterback and then building it from there,” Montgomery said. “You look back 15, 20 years ago, they’re putting their best athlete probably at running back and turning around, tossing it to him. So I think it’s a trend that’s working its way forward. I think it’s an exciting brand of football that people are trying to create.”
Memphis assistant head coach and co-offensive coordinator Darrell Dickey, who is in his 30th year as a college football coach, recalled the innovative nature of BYU’s West Coast offense in the early 1970s. Under coach LaVell Edwards, the Cougars used simple short passes on first and second downs to stretch the field horizontally and create more space in the middle of the field.
“When people faced it, it was kind of like when they faced the wishbone for the first time,” Dickey said after a practice late last month. “It was like, we hadn’t seen this before, so we didn’t know how to defend it. Then people started spreading people out more, and again, that increased how much of the field had to be defended.”
The West Coast offense made its way to the NFL, and spreading the field horizontally has since become a staple of the sport at every level. Perhaps the most recent iteration of the trend has occurred at Baylor, where Art Briles has popularized a hyper-athletic style of offense. Wide receivers in his scheme will line up outside the hashmarks and frequently run vertical routes, stretching the field in every direction.
Memphis, which has won 13 straight games spanning more than a calendar year, struggled against a Baylor-style offense earlier this season. Bowling Green scored 41 points against the Tigers’ defense, including three touchdown passes of 60 yards or more. Tulsa draws from the same schematic family tree, so to speak.
“They do some different things that Bowling Green didn’t do in terms of splits,” Fuente explained. “They’re kind of nontraditional in their use of splits, meaning they’re extra wide. Which is a lot more like Baylor’s. ... They’ve done a really good job trying to spread you out across the field and can cause some problems.”
Perhaps the more important change, for Tulsa, Memphis and most teams across college football, has been pace.
In 2005, the average FBS team ran 821 plays in a season. Last year, the average was 915 plays, which works out to about eight more plays per team, per game.
Memphis is among many teams that recently made the decision to operate at a faster tempo. Before the 2014 season, the Tigers simplified their playbook with the goal of running fewer total plays more efficiently. In 2013, they ran 67 plays per game and averaged 19.5 points. Last year, they ran 78 plays per game and averaged 36.2 points. They’ve run an average of 82 plays per game so far in 2015.
More plays equal more yards, and more yards lead to more scoring opportunities.
“The bottom line to remember, though, is the yards and the points don’t matter if they’re not enough to win,” Dickey said. “We want to achieve those things, but we don’t want to be careless and be somebody that’s known for piling up big numbers but turns the ball over a bunch and makes a ton of mistakes.”
Fuente also continues to be a believer in defense.
“You’ve got to have some regard for the other side of the ball,” Fuente said last month. “We want to be good on offense and we want to run the football and we want to try to score points to win the game, but ultimately it’s about winning the game, not racking up the numbers.”