Power Five teams shun triple option
Army proves the rushing offense can be an equalizer, but schools won’t try it
Maybe you heard – we know most of you didn’t watch, since the game was on something called pay-per-view TV – about what Army came oh, so close to doing in late September. With their triple-option offense, the Knights almost took down Oklahoma.
All of this despite a talent gap so glaring, Army coach Jeff Monken’s pregame quote was more truth than hyper bole.“They’ve got several Parade AllAmericans ,” he said ,“and as( former Navy coach) Paul Johnson used to say, we have several guys who have marched in a parade.”
Actually, you figure all of Army’s guys have marched in parades. That Saturday, they marched up and down the field against the Sooners, controlling the football for almost 45 minutes with a steady diet of fullback dives, quarterback keepers or pitches to halfbacks. The triple option potential was in full effect in its postmodern role as an equalizer. And even though Army fell just short in overtime, the performance prompts up a question we’ve wondered for a while now:
Why doesn’t anyone else try it on for size?
Once the scourge of defensive coordinators all over football, the triple option has nearly faded from the scene. At the FBS level, Army runs it. And Navy. Air Force runs a spread-based variant, as do Tulane and New Mexico. Among Power Five schools, only Georgia Tech – coached by Johnson, the former Navy coach who announced his retirement – employs the scheme.
“People kind of see it as a dinosaur,” says Ivin Jasper, the longtime offensive coordinator for Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo.
But it’s not extinct. It remains very effective. And there’s no reason it couldn’t work at other schools. There was delicious irony in what Army did in September.
Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer was not terribly surprised. And although it’s been largely relegated to the service academies, who use it to compensate for differentials in size and speed, he believes it would work at Power Five schools. Army’s effectiveness against Oklahoma came in part because of its placement on the schedule; the Sooners had one week to prepare for a completely different attack.
“It’s not fooling the coaches in the press box,” Switzer says, “but truly when you don’t see it, you don’t work it. You think (Oklahoma’s) scout team simulated what Army was gonna give ’em? Hell no. There’s no way you could do it.”
Now consider its potential with bigger and faster players, falling smack in the middle of a conference schedule. Running the wishbone, Switzer’s Oklahoma teams did anything but plod. They raced past opponents. He believes they still would.
“If I was coaching today,” Switzer says, “I would line up in the spread and I would run three-back option plays out of the spread. I would have misdirection motion. I would have the passing game off of it, too – but I would make people defend the option game first.”
Why couldn’t a struggling Power Five program do the same? Why wouldn’t a struggling Power Five program at least try?
“There’s a stigma, I guess,” Niumatalolo says. “There are people that are leery of running it.”
Big Ten Network analyst Gerry DiNardo, who had success in the triple option as an assistant at Colorado and as a head coach at Vanderbilt, agrees with Niumatalolo.
“Would it work at a struggling program? I don’t think there’s any doubt,” DiNardo says. “But the perception is it will hurt you in recruiting and in ticket sales, because it’s considered antiquated and outdated and not exciting.”
In other words, a dinosaur. A football coaching hire can define the tenure of an athletic director, which only magnifies risk-averse tendencies. DiNardo says athletic directors don’t want to suggest that their schools are unable to compete with the best teams in their conferences in recruiting and on the field.
“Guys are concerned about the optics of it,” Niumatalolo says, “but the biggest optic (should be) they want to win. … I think you would sell tickets by winning.”
Niumatalolo also has this question: “What makes you think you’re gonna beat somebody doing the same things with lesser (talent)?”
“For the life of me, I don’t understand all these other schools, they go to the spread and they go uptempo like everybody else, and they add kerosene to the fire,” he says. “Wait – you’re not as good as them and you’re doing the same thing and expecting to beat them?”
Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard – and let’s state the obvious up front: Pollard is not looking for a coach; he’s very happy with Matt Campbell – acknowledges style of play is a factor in evaluating candidates.
“I’m not gonna say it’s the No. 1 factor,” he says. “(But) it’s a factor.”
And a practitioner of the triple option?
“It’s certainly an outlier option – no pun intended,” Pollard says. “But the spread was an outlier at one time, wasn’t it? Mike Leach was an outlier. We all thought he was crazy and then everybody started to adopt it. … I could see at the right institution at the right time and if you had the right individual.”
But that combination appears rare. Last winter, in searching for Rich Rodriguez’s replacement, Arizona considered Niumatalolo. But Khalil Tate, the Wildcats’ star dual-threat quarterback, tweeted that he “didn’t come to Arizona to run the” triple option – never mind that it might have been a perfect fit for his skill set.
Niumatalolo stayed at Navy. Arizona hired Kevin Sumlin. And we didn’t get the chance to see what might have been.
“If you’re at a different place, you obviously could tweak it more and throw the ball more,” Niumatalolo says. “We try to shorten the game and keep their offense off the field and limit their possessions. It’s about winning. I wouldn’t say we’d go to coach (Mike) Leach stuff, but you could run our stuff out the gun. You could throw the ball more. But I think the things we do – it’s not like defensive coordinators don’t know how to stop it, but your kids don’t see it. … You (prepare for) it for one week.”
What if rather than Army it were Kansas vs. Oklahoma? Conducted with bigger, faster, more talented players, the experiment would be fascinating. Maybe one day we’ll see it unfold.
It seems unlikely many Power Five athletic directors – any? – will try to ride a dinosaur to victories. But as Switzer suggests:
“Maybe they ought to.”