I'm getting bored waiting for the bowl game. Yesterday I was watching Army dismantle Houston and started thinking about the practicality of the option offense.
With the exception of Georgia Tech up until now, the only teams that run the spread option are the service academies. They do this because they are at a talent disadvantage given their recruiting restrictions and player requirements. Despite this lack of talent, Army managed to go 11-2 this season, Navy has had considerable success in recent years, and Air Force had a three-year stretch pretty recently where they won 28 games.
This raises the question: what if a team like Alabama ran the spread option? Assume that no one else would follow suit, and their recruiting would be the exact same. Is there a cap to just how successful the spread offense can be, or would they just be absolutely unstoppable (i.e. better than they are on offense right now)?
Obviously this is purely hypothetical. Any team that switches to the spread option sacrifices the ability to recruit NFL caliber players at nearly every position on offense. It just seems like a fun talking point given what the service academies have been able to do with considerably less talent.
(DC, please don't hijack this). /s
Comments
I suppose I wrote about a similar topic!
I think you would see great results until recruiting dropped off.
But there is something else to consider. Spread offenses did so well when they were new because defenses weren't setup to stop them. Now they are so common that defenses are retooled to compensate for them.
Now defenses can struggle against pro-style because they are overly optimized for spread.
So it's probably a combination of two things.
Top talent running an offense few defenses are prepared for.
I was about to ask you to drink, but then your forum went in a different direction.
How easy is the option to adjust for, though? I feel like the last three seasons CPJ had a new wrinkle that even Bud Foster couldn't account for.
It just seems so versatile. Plenty of ways to run misdirection, three options for the quarterback, the deep ball when the defense starts cheating. I feel like with the right players, it would be absolutely unstoppable.
I guess we saw something similar out of WVU from 2005-2007 with the combination of Pat White, Steve Slaton, and Owen Schmidt, but they operated out of shotgun and threw a lot of bubble screens. If they had come out in the flexbone every down, I wonder if it would have been different. It also didn't help that Rich Rod had decided he was going to go to Michigan before that Pitt game. Thank God he did because I think WVU would have destroyed that Florida team in the National Championship, and I'd still be hearing about it to this day.
I think it's always a challenge to adjust to. Let's not forget that even our 2016 offense failed to score more than 20 points against GT at home! I never considered GT a great defensive football team and their stats kind of prove that. I don't know what's up with how we have played GT under Fuente.
The problem with the triple option or spread option or whatever its nom de guerre is lies with recruiting. It's really hard to recruit NFL worthy QBs and WRs into that system on a regular basis... Or maybe at all. You can get some damn good running backs. Lots of running backs. Like pretty much 3 running backs on every down. Sorry I guess I drifted off there.
I'm not entirely sure why Nebraska abandoned the triple option. It was still working well into the 2000s with a Heisman winner and a national championship appearance. It wasn't pure option and it was more I-formation than flexbone (from what I remember) but it was still working somewhat under Solich.
As the NFL transitioned from run heavy, to pass heavy, recruiting top players was no longer possible for a triple option offense. Oklahoma used to run a very powerful version too, but around the same time period they moved to more of what we now call "pro-style" then to what we see today.
Marcus Dupree is the reason Oklahoma moved to a prostyle offense from the wishbone. I highly recomend the 30 for 30 the best that never was.
What Nebraska ran was called the power option. Most plays only had 2 options. They didn't run the FB a lot like GT does. They abandon it when they fired Frank Solich for not being Tom Osbourne. They saw where things were going and wanted some one to bring in a pro style system to help recruiting. The biggest issue with Solich, in Nebraska's eyes, was his recruiting.
EDIT: Remember that Nebraska made the change a year after OU won the NC with Mike Leech as OC. Offenses were changing. Gotta keep up with the Jones.
I'm kind of disappointed we didn't run the triple option back in 2010. Tyrod, Williams, Evans, and Wilson all in the backfield would have been a nightmare and incredibly fun to watch.
We would have had to have established it in 2009 for it to garner any success in my opinion. Georgia Tech had the same players for the most part in 2008 that they had in 2009, but 2009 was the season they won the ACC and made it to the Orange Bowl. An option offense definitely would have helped our defense that season though.
We now live in a world where I am reading people wish that we ran the GT offense.
We're officially in the Upside Down
So I assume you mean the Flexbone and/or the triple option, not the spread option? I'm not an X's/O's guy, but my understanding is that the Flexbone is the offense that PJ ran at GT, and the triple option is one play where the QB can keep, handoff, or pitch. Whereas the 'spread option' refers to any offense that spreads the field horizontally, and asked the QB to make a read. If I'm not mistaken (and I may be) the spread option was the offense popularized first by RichRod, later by Chip Kelly, and has since been adopted and tweaked in a bunch of ways by a bunch of teams.
To answer your question (which I think is can the flexible/triple option be effective if ran by elite players), I think yes, as long as you have some passing threat. I don't think a team can go undefeated in 2018 running the ball 99% of the time.
As an aside, highly recommend this piece on the history of the option. It basically draws a line from pop warner to paul johnson to Rich Rod to the RPO (and everything in between).
More commonly called a read option. Was super popular for a while and is what we ran a lot of with Logan Thomas and David Wilson. You can also mix it up and run the veer
Paul Johnson named it the spread option because it followed the philosophy of putting players all over the field to spread the defense. They just happened to run the option on every down. Rich Rod was more of a spread offense although they ran option like 70% of the time some seasons. I'm actually a huge fan of the offense Rich Rod ran. If he was a halfway decent guy, he'd have it all going for him.
I've watched that video before. It fascinated me. My PS3 recently quit working. I'm about to get a new one, buy NCAA 14, and build a team around the flexbone offense. It might be a lot of fun.
The best teams did do this is the 70's with the Wishbone and other offensive structures to run triple option. I wasn't alive then but this is my understanding. Oklahoma was particularly famous for the Wishbone.
Georgia Southern also runs an option-run offense. And yes, Georgia Southern is FBS. They just beat Eastern Michigan (yes, another FBS team) last week in the Camellia Bowl (which, yes, is an FBS bowl game) to finish 10-3 on the season.
More to the point, if a true blue-blood switched to the triple-option, it may actually lead to a period of great success, assuming that they also have a good defensive coordinator. I mean, hell, if GT had been able to find even a decent defense during the last 7 years, they probably would have been dominating the Coastal the same way we did from 2005 through 2011. Translate that to a top-tier program who can afford to bring in an elite DC, and you probably have regular conference championships and CFP appearances, unless they happen to be in the SEC in which case they'd just have the CFP appearances.
Consider this: when running the practice squad scout team, we always had to have some weird tricks to "simulate" a triple option offense for our defense. Now imagine being a triple option team that doesn't recruit or develope QBs, WRs or offensive linemen who are overly proficient at passing plays common to every other team you play. It's hard to prepare for something you can't simulate well outside of actual games. I always suspected this was a big reason their defense always capped out at "decent, maybe"
That's... a good point that I'd never considered. Leg.
Ah yes. I knew GASO ran the option at one point or another. I wasn't aware that they were still doing it. They went 10-3? They can't be that talented either.
To be fair, they're in the Sun Belt, and last year they went 2-10, but 10-3 is still pretty good for a triple-option team.
They went 2-10 last year and 5-7 the year before because of a terrrrrible coaching hire. Mainly because of going away from away the option type of attack and installing a garbage type offense with option players. There were other factors in the coach getting fired, but that was the main one.