Blackshirt
Team HuskerBoard
Thought this was a pretty interesting art from the kcstar that may appeal to quite a few of you.
Ahhh... the good old days..
Requiem for the option
One of college football's signature offenses is no more, overtaken by fancy passing games and a healthy fear of injury
By JOE POSNANSKI
The Kansas City Star
The option will be back someday. Heard a man say those very words at a family restaurant in Iowa. He was an older guy wearing a John Deere hat, and he was eating the catfish. When the waitress asked what two side items he wanted, he had said, “Corn and corn.” The man said the option will be back someday.
After all, he said, “the durned thing works.”
The option play was Midwestern football. For 50 years, autumn in the heartland was marked by falling leaves and quarterbacks running to the corner and then pitching to the trailer. The option was the driving force behind Barry Switzer's Oklahoma (and, OU faithful will tell you, Bud Wilkinson was running the thing in the 1950s). It was the power behind Tom Osborne's Nebraska and won Eric Crouch a Heisman. It was Missouri's play in the glory years — there are still people who credit Missouri's Don Faurot for inventing the option when he came up with the Split T formation. As you will see, though, the question of who invented the option is tricky.
But whoever invented it, everybody around here used it, all the Big Eight teams, all the high school teams, all the pee-wee teams. Throughout the Midwest, fathers taught their sons early about God, the American flag and how you have to wait until the linebacker commits before you pitch the football. The option has been as much a part of the heartland as slow-moving combines holding up traffic on two-lane roads.
And now? Well, now Oklahoma throws the football all over the field like it's bleepin' BYU. Nebraska just went out and hired an NFL coach — not just any NFL coach, either, an Oakland Raiders coach — and now they're planning to go to a West Coast offense, which is a little like Bob Dole releasing a rap album.
There are still a few Midwestern teams that have the option in their playbooks — Kansas State and Missouri come to mind — but it's just an accent piece now, a bit of nostalgia to keep the defense honest. Nobody builds their offense on the option.
“No one has the discipline or the disciples of the playbook to run it anymore,” says Switzer, the patron saint of the option. “It's a dinosaur. But if people wanted to win, they'd use it.”
***
Here is a simple rundown of the option. Of course, everybody runs a slightly different version. Some run it out of the wishbone, some out of the I-formation, some out of the T-formation and so on. Some call it the triple option, some call it the veer, some just call it the option.
Whatever it's called, it's pretty much the same play.
The quarterback takes the snap. He pivots. And he has three options.
Option 1: The handoff. If the quarterback sees that the middle linebacker has run upfield, he can give the ball to a fullback who would then smash right up the middle. The fullback dive is an often-overlooked part of the option, but it helped Osborne finally win his national title. In the 1995 Orange Bowl, Miami's linebackers were running all over the field, cutting off the outside. So in the fourth quarter, Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier started giving the ball to bruiser Cory Schlesinger. He bashed straight ahead for two touchdowns, and Nebraska finally won the big game.
Option 2: The run. If that middle linebacker is in position, the quarterback's job is to fake the handoff and start running down the line. He has to figure out whether the “pitch key” — the first defender — is to hit him or hit the running back behind him. The best option quarterbacks have a sixth sense about this. If they see the defender leaning even slightly toward the running back, their job is to cut inside and gain big yards.
Option 3: The pitch. If that first defender is on the quarterback, he has to pitch the ball. The key here, though, is he has to wait until the last possible second before pitching. Otherwise, the play won't work quite right. Most option quarterbacks pitch too early and leave their running back stranded out there. The quarterback has to draw as much of the defense to him in order to clear the outside for the running back.
In other words, the quarterback has to allow himself to get absolutely pounded.
This is why there aren't many good option quarterbacks left.
There is actually a fourth option: The quarterback fakes everything and then throws the ball. But throwing is not really part of the option. In fact, throwing the ball is what killed the option in the first place. But we'll get back to that later.
***
No one person invented the option. The basic concept of the option — run or pitch — goes back to rugby. Still, many believe that the modern option was born in 1941 when Missouri coach Don Faurot looked at the newly designed T formation and said “Split it.” That is, he moved his offensive linemen apart, giving his quarterback more of a chance to run sideways. And this opened up the opportunity to run or pitch.
“Most original and significant contribution to offensive football in the last 10 years,” Bud Wilkinson would say. And he should know. While Faurot had success with his new Split-T — his 1941 Missouri team led the nation in rushing — Wilkinson took it to a whole new level. His Sooners ran something very much like the option, and they won three national titles and, at one point, 47 games in a row.
After that, it gets pretty confusing. During the 1950s and through the 1960s, it seems like coaches all over America were busy inventing the option. Homer Rice was coaching high school in Kentucky when he came up with this idea of adding a fullback to the Split-T (creating what later would be called the wishbone). From there, he designed something awfully similar to what looked like the option.
“Kind of happened by accident,” Rice said many times.
Then, there's a story that Bill Yeoman while coaching at Houston got sick and tired of watching this linebacker blow up his offense. So he came up with this idea involving a fullback and the old Split-T and, voila, he invented the veer.
Then, there's the most famous option invention story, the story of Texas' Emory Bellard, who dreamed up the wishbone one day (the name “wishbone,” incidentally, was coined by Houston sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz) and spent the summer working out details of the triple option in the backyard with his sons. He then presented his idea to coach Darrell Royal, who said, “Son, you need to get some sleep.”
No, he didn't really say that. Royal, who had played for Wilkinson and understood the power of the option, took Bellard's offense, added a few wrinkles and, voila, his Texas team promptly tied Houston. But the very next week they, well, lost to Texas Tech.
Still, Texas stuck with it. And after that, they won 30 in a row.
And that's when Oklahoma, Nebraska and everybody else in the Midwest started using the option.
***
So where did the option go? Why did it die? It all depends on who you ask.
Theory No. 1: Quarterbacks are endangered species.
“The option could absolutely work on any level,” says Chiefs offensive coordinator Al Saunders. “I could run it in the NFL and win with it. The only thing is, you'd have to give me 15 quarterbacks because that's how many I'd go through.”
Yes, we are living in a time when it's hard enough to find one good quarterback to lead the team. The option undeniably puts that quarterback in harm's way. He has to take big hits — whether he has the ball or not. And with defenders getting bigger and stronger and faster, option critics say it's football suicide to throw your quarterback into that firestorm.
“Let's see how a team feels about running the option when their guy gets knocked out by an earhole shot,” Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops said a few years ago, when he was still a defensive coordinator at Florida. In fact, if you want one man to blame for ending the option, Stoops might be a decent choice. His defense tends to destroy the option. And, of course, he has taken Oklahoma's offense as far away from the option as possible.
“I remember a game when Bob Stoops was coaching, and we weren't having much success running the ball,” says J.C. Watts, the option quarterback who led Oklahoma to back-to-back Orange Bowl victories. “I heard the Sooner fans say; ‘Quit trying to run it and just throw the damn ball.' How times have changed.”
For what it's worth, not everybody believes that quarterbacks are too brittle to run the option. “I don't think that's fair,” Osborne has said numerous times. “To me, it's much more dangerous when a quarterback gets blindsided. He can't adjust. In the option, he can see the hit coming most of the time.”
Theory No. 2: Defenses are too fast now.
There are those who say that defensive linemen and linebackers get to the corner too quickly now for teams to run the option against them. To them, the option is outdated. This idea infuriates Switzer.
“Defenses have gotten faster?” he asks. “Shoot, I can assure you that Miami and Nebraska had defenses that could run. The talent on defense has nothing to do with it.”
Theory No. 3: Nobody wants to dedicate the time to the option.
Everything in today's game is “diversity.” You've got to be diverse. You have to keep the defense off-balance. You can't be predictable. And so on. It's a new era.
Vince Lombardi earned his place as the greatest coach of all-time while essentially running one play over and over, the Packer sweep. In recent years, coaches such as Bobby Bowden and Steve Spurrier — with their complicated offensive schemes — have become the standard.
Yes, now offensive coaches want choices. They want different formations. They want an array of pass patterns. They want to be, as coachspeak goes, “multiple.” The consensus is that to run the option effectively, you have to practice the option pretty much non-stop. Coaches are not willing to make that kind of commitment.
“I think any offense can be successful,” says Turner Gill, one of the original option quarterbacks at Nebraska. “It's not true that winning football teams can't run the option. It's just a matter of getting the right people, putting them in the right situation and making plays.”
Theory No. 4: Everybody loves the pass.
This is the big one. Many coaches say they simply could not recruit the best quarterbacks and best receivers if they used the option. Those players have their eye on the NFL, and nobody plays option football in the NFL.
“Kids want to be in passing offenses,” Switzer says. “They want to catch passes. They see it every week in the NFL.”
And it isn't just the kids. Big-money boosters like the pass, too. Fans in the stadium like the pass. Sportswriters and talk radio show hosts and television commentators like the pass. You run the option, you risk being called obsolete. You risk getting canned.
“It's the excitement of throwing the football,” Gill says.
***
OK, so you know the reasons why the option has died.
Will it come back? Maybe. The man in the John Deere hat does have one thing right: The option still works. Even today, with all the reasons against the option, it works quite well for some of the military academies. It is still an effective play for schools that run it.
“You couldn't defend it today,” Switzer says. “Because all of a sudden, a defense that has been seeing spread offenses and that (stuff) every week has to get ready for an offense they haven't seen all year. I'd take my chances against that.”
Says Saunders: “In my mind, nothing has changed except the injury factor. The option, to me, is as sound an offense as it has ever been. If teams committed to it, there's no doubt in my mind that it can still be a dominating offense.”
For now, though, the option — like the mom-and-pop stores on Main Street — has disappeared in the Midwest. Where once, Saturday afternoons in the heartland meant Steve Davis and Turner Gill and Jamelle Holieway and Tommie Frazier and Darien Hagen and Corby Jones running to the corner and pitching, today's Midwestern football doesn't look a whole lot different from anywhere else.
Quarterbacks drop back. And they throw. Same as Miami.
“It's just a real shame,” Switzer says. And it is a shame. But time marches on, and nobody pitches to the trailer anymore.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/s.../9497867.htm?1c
Ahhh... the good old days..
Requiem for the option
One of college football's signature offenses is no more, overtaken by fancy passing games and a healthy fear of injury
By JOE POSNANSKI
The Kansas City Star
The option will be back someday. Heard a man say those very words at a family restaurant in Iowa. He was an older guy wearing a John Deere hat, and he was eating the catfish. When the waitress asked what two side items he wanted, he had said, “Corn and corn.” The man said the option will be back someday.
After all, he said, “the durned thing works.”
The option play was Midwestern football. For 50 years, autumn in the heartland was marked by falling leaves and quarterbacks running to the corner and then pitching to the trailer. The option was the driving force behind Barry Switzer's Oklahoma (and, OU faithful will tell you, Bud Wilkinson was running the thing in the 1950s). It was the power behind Tom Osborne's Nebraska and won Eric Crouch a Heisman. It was Missouri's play in the glory years — there are still people who credit Missouri's Don Faurot for inventing the option when he came up with the Split T formation. As you will see, though, the question of who invented the option is tricky.
But whoever invented it, everybody around here used it, all the Big Eight teams, all the high school teams, all the pee-wee teams. Throughout the Midwest, fathers taught their sons early about God, the American flag and how you have to wait until the linebacker commits before you pitch the football. The option has been as much a part of the heartland as slow-moving combines holding up traffic on two-lane roads.
And now? Well, now Oklahoma throws the football all over the field like it's bleepin' BYU. Nebraska just went out and hired an NFL coach — not just any NFL coach, either, an Oakland Raiders coach — and now they're planning to go to a West Coast offense, which is a little like Bob Dole releasing a rap album.
There are still a few Midwestern teams that have the option in their playbooks — Kansas State and Missouri come to mind — but it's just an accent piece now, a bit of nostalgia to keep the defense honest. Nobody builds their offense on the option.
“No one has the discipline or the disciples of the playbook to run it anymore,” says Switzer, the patron saint of the option. “It's a dinosaur. But if people wanted to win, they'd use it.”
***
Here is a simple rundown of the option. Of course, everybody runs a slightly different version. Some run it out of the wishbone, some out of the I-formation, some out of the T-formation and so on. Some call it the triple option, some call it the veer, some just call it the option.
Whatever it's called, it's pretty much the same play.
The quarterback takes the snap. He pivots. And he has three options.
Option 1: The handoff. If the quarterback sees that the middle linebacker has run upfield, he can give the ball to a fullback who would then smash right up the middle. The fullback dive is an often-overlooked part of the option, but it helped Osborne finally win his national title. In the 1995 Orange Bowl, Miami's linebackers were running all over the field, cutting off the outside. So in the fourth quarter, Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier started giving the ball to bruiser Cory Schlesinger. He bashed straight ahead for two touchdowns, and Nebraska finally won the big game.
Option 2: The run. If that middle linebacker is in position, the quarterback's job is to fake the handoff and start running down the line. He has to figure out whether the “pitch key” — the first defender — is to hit him or hit the running back behind him. The best option quarterbacks have a sixth sense about this. If they see the defender leaning even slightly toward the running back, their job is to cut inside and gain big yards.
Option 3: The pitch. If that first defender is on the quarterback, he has to pitch the ball. The key here, though, is he has to wait until the last possible second before pitching. Otherwise, the play won't work quite right. Most option quarterbacks pitch too early and leave their running back stranded out there. The quarterback has to draw as much of the defense to him in order to clear the outside for the running back.
In other words, the quarterback has to allow himself to get absolutely pounded.
This is why there aren't many good option quarterbacks left.
There is actually a fourth option: The quarterback fakes everything and then throws the ball. But throwing is not really part of the option. In fact, throwing the ball is what killed the option in the first place. But we'll get back to that later.
***
No one person invented the option. The basic concept of the option — run or pitch — goes back to rugby. Still, many believe that the modern option was born in 1941 when Missouri coach Don Faurot looked at the newly designed T formation and said “Split it.” That is, he moved his offensive linemen apart, giving his quarterback more of a chance to run sideways. And this opened up the opportunity to run or pitch.
“Most original and significant contribution to offensive football in the last 10 years,” Bud Wilkinson would say. And he should know. While Faurot had success with his new Split-T — his 1941 Missouri team led the nation in rushing — Wilkinson took it to a whole new level. His Sooners ran something very much like the option, and they won three national titles and, at one point, 47 games in a row.
After that, it gets pretty confusing. During the 1950s and through the 1960s, it seems like coaches all over America were busy inventing the option. Homer Rice was coaching high school in Kentucky when he came up with this idea of adding a fullback to the Split-T (creating what later would be called the wishbone). From there, he designed something awfully similar to what looked like the option.
“Kind of happened by accident,” Rice said many times.
Then, there's a story that Bill Yeoman while coaching at Houston got sick and tired of watching this linebacker blow up his offense. So he came up with this idea involving a fullback and the old Split-T and, voila, he invented the veer.
Then, there's the most famous option invention story, the story of Texas' Emory Bellard, who dreamed up the wishbone one day (the name “wishbone,” incidentally, was coined by Houston sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz) and spent the summer working out details of the triple option in the backyard with his sons. He then presented his idea to coach Darrell Royal, who said, “Son, you need to get some sleep.”
No, he didn't really say that. Royal, who had played for Wilkinson and understood the power of the option, took Bellard's offense, added a few wrinkles and, voila, his Texas team promptly tied Houston. But the very next week they, well, lost to Texas Tech.
Still, Texas stuck with it. And after that, they won 30 in a row.
And that's when Oklahoma, Nebraska and everybody else in the Midwest started using the option.
***
So where did the option go? Why did it die? It all depends on who you ask.
Theory No. 1: Quarterbacks are endangered species.
“The option could absolutely work on any level,” says Chiefs offensive coordinator Al Saunders. “I could run it in the NFL and win with it. The only thing is, you'd have to give me 15 quarterbacks because that's how many I'd go through.”
Yes, we are living in a time when it's hard enough to find one good quarterback to lead the team. The option undeniably puts that quarterback in harm's way. He has to take big hits — whether he has the ball or not. And with defenders getting bigger and stronger and faster, option critics say it's football suicide to throw your quarterback into that firestorm.
“Let's see how a team feels about running the option when their guy gets knocked out by an earhole shot,” Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops said a few years ago, when he was still a defensive coordinator at Florida. In fact, if you want one man to blame for ending the option, Stoops might be a decent choice. His defense tends to destroy the option. And, of course, he has taken Oklahoma's offense as far away from the option as possible.
“I remember a game when Bob Stoops was coaching, and we weren't having much success running the ball,” says J.C. Watts, the option quarterback who led Oklahoma to back-to-back Orange Bowl victories. “I heard the Sooner fans say; ‘Quit trying to run it and just throw the damn ball.' How times have changed.”
For what it's worth, not everybody believes that quarterbacks are too brittle to run the option. “I don't think that's fair,” Osborne has said numerous times. “To me, it's much more dangerous when a quarterback gets blindsided. He can't adjust. In the option, he can see the hit coming most of the time.”
Theory No. 2: Defenses are too fast now.
There are those who say that defensive linemen and linebackers get to the corner too quickly now for teams to run the option against them. To them, the option is outdated. This idea infuriates Switzer.
“Defenses have gotten faster?” he asks. “Shoot, I can assure you that Miami and Nebraska had defenses that could run. The talent on defense has nothing to do with it.”
Theory No. 3: Nobody wants to dedicate the time to the option.
Everything in today's game is “diversity.” You've got to be diverse. You have to keep the defense off-balance. You can't be predictable. And so on. It's a new era.
Vince Lombardi earned his place as the greatest coach of all-time while essentially running one play over and over, the Packer sweep. In recent years, coaches such as Bobby Bowden and Steve Spurrier — with their complicated offensive schemes — have become the standard.
Yes, now offensive coaches want choices. They want different formations. They want an array of pass patterns. They want to be, as coachspeak goes, “multiple.” The consensus is that to run the option effectively, you have to practice the option pretty much non-stop. Coaches are not willing to make that kind of commitment.
“I think any offense can be successful,” says Turner Gill, one of the original option quarterbacks at Nebraska. “It's not true that winning football teams can't run the option. It's just a matter of getting the right people, putting them in the right situation and making plays.”
Theory No. 4: Everybody loves the pass.
This is the big one. Many coaches say they simply could not recruit the best quarterbacks and best receivers if they used the option. Those players have their eye on the NFL, and nobody plays option football in the NFL.
“Kids want to be in passing offenses,” Switzer says. “They want to catch passes. They see it every week in the NFL.”
And it isn't just the kids. Big-money boosters like the pass, too. Fans in the stadium like the pass. Sportswriters and talk radio show hosts and television commentators like the pass. You run the option, you risk being called obsolete. You risk getting canned.
“It's the excitement of throwing the football,” Gill says.
***
OK, so you know the reasons why the option has died.
Will it come back? Maybe. The man in the John Deere hat does have one thing right: The option still works. Even today, with all the reasons against the option, it works quite well for some of the military academies. It is still an effective play for schools that run it.
“You couldn't defend it today,” Switzer says. “Because all of a sudden, a defense that has been seeing spread offenses and that (stuff) every week has to get ready for an offense they haven't seen all year. I'd take my chances against that.”
Says Saunders: “In my mind, nothing has changed except the injury factor. The option, to me, is as sound an offense as it has ever been. If teams committed to it, there's no doubt in my mind that it can still be a dominating offense.”
For now, though, the option — like the mom-and-pop stores on Main Street — has disappeared in the Midwest. Where once, Saturday afternoons in the heartland meant Steve Davis and Turner Gill and Jamelle Holieway and Tommie Frazier and Darien Hagen and Corby Jones running to the corner and pitching, today's Midwestern football doesn't look a whole lot different from anywhere else.
Quarterbacks drop back. And they throw. Same as Miami.
“It's just a real shame,” Switzer says. And it is a shame. But time marches on, and nobody pitches to the trailer anymore.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/s.../9497867.htm?1c
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