Saturday, October 15, 2011

Stopping the flexbone


Note: A lot of this information is from Blood Sweat and Chalk, an excellent book by Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated.

After 3 straight years of mediocrity, Legendary Texas Longhorn coach Daryl Royal  was on the hot seat and decided to shake up his staff. The most notable change was linebacker coach Emory Bellard put in charge of running the offense. Only one year removed from coaching high school ball, Bellard installed a T formation offense during spring ball practice, but as Layden explains after interviewing Bellard in 2008, the triple option wishbone offense was always kicking around in his mind. He tinkered with the wishbone as a high school coach, since he had an athletic QB and a powerful fullback. The speed option (as it’s known now a days) was common in football at the time. Royal even ran it in his playing days across the Red River at Oklahoma. But adjusting to his personnel, Belleard added a third component to the option, a full back dive. (Origins of offenses are always muddled, but it is believed that Houston head coach Bill Yeoman invented the triple option, but he ran it out of a split back set rather than the wishbone.)

In that summer of ’68 Bellard figured out the logistics of running the triple option out of the T formation, and he eventually had graduated Longhorns players walk through it. When he thought it was ready, he showed it to Royal who observed and then gave Bellard the O.K. to run it. Texas struggled with the new offense out of the gate, but they eventually found the right quarterback to run it, and as they say the rest is history. The Longhorns won 20 consecutive games on their way to the national championship in 1969, and Bellard eventually became a head coach in 1972.

The Wisbone spread like wild fire throughout the southwest in the ‘70’s (most notably across the Red River to Barry Switzer’s Sooners), and eventually the legendary Paul Bear Bryant was intrigued and wanted to run it himself. Royal’s Longhorns, Switzer’s Sooners and Bryant’s Crimson Tide won 5 championships over an 11 year period from 1969-79. The wishbone evolved throughout the 80’sand 90’s , eventually leading to the I-bone which was used by Nebraska, Colorado, and Norte Dame amongst others. Teams using the I-bone won 6 championships in the 80’s and 90’s.

Despite the success triple option bone teams had, it stopped growing, and teams who were already running it stopped. As Lou Holtz explains in Blood, Sweat, and Chalk, bone offenses died out because of negative recruiting, not because defenses figured out how to stop it. He says that boosters wanted top recruiting classes, and non-bone-offense schools were telling elite athletes that playing in a bone offense wouldn’t help you get to the next level. Earl Campbell, Irving Fryar and Billy Sims might disagree with that assertion, but I digress…..and it was a relic in the late 90’s and early 00’s.
(Although I do remember how much fun it was as a young kid watching Eric Crouch run the triple option at Nebraska  under Frank Solich. But Solich was fired after a 10-3 season and replaced by West Coast offense guru Bill Callahan and that was a disaster.)

The only teams that still run a triple option bone offense are the service academies and Georgia Tech, who is coached by former Navy coach Paul Johnson.   Hey don’t have to worry about recruiting as much for obvious reasons, and it allows them to compete with inferior talent. I do not think there is an offense more difficult to stop than this one. You have to assign defenders to tackle the fullback, defenders to tackle the quarterback, and defenders to tackle the pitch man, all while worrying about them catching you off guard with a counter or deep pass.        

Greg Schiano and his defensive staff are going to have their hands full stopping the Midshipmen on Saturday. In the past Schiano has said that he uses nickel personnel to stop it because of the speed, but he isn’t this time around thanks to Khaseem Greene. What it’s going to take to slow this attack down is discipline and patience from a defense that relies on attacking. Scott Vallone and Justin Francis have to dominate inside to take care of the fullback, who is usually the biggest weapon the bone team has. Manny Abreu, Ka’lil Glaud and the other defensive ends are going to have to attack the QB, and not stand there and look foolish like a lot of DE do against the option. But more than usual, the defensive backs are going to have to step up their run support. The corners need to make sure they don’t get fooled and have passes fly over their heads because they played the run. The safeties are going to have to quickly diagnose the play and either fly up the field to tackle the pitchman, or cover the deep half against a pass.

I think Rutgers can stop this out of  base 4-3 defense with one deep safety. They are going to have to stay disciplined, under control, fast,  and they’ll need make sure they tackle the guy they’re assigned to tackle. It could be a long day, but Rutgers defense is a whole hell of a lot more talented than Navy’s offense.