Texas is Home of the Spread Offense

ESPN began publishing a series of stories on Monday about the spread offense in football and the success it has had over the last few years, who’s using it at the Division-1 FBS level and its origins.

It’s a very interesting read and one that has enormous relevance to sports fans in Central Texas. Austin’s own Texas Longhorns are one of the main success stories of the spread offense.

Without the spread, Tebow wouldn’t have become the first sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy in 2007. Meyer wouldn’t have gone from Bowling Green to Utah to Florida in the blink of an eye, and [Vince] Young wouldn’t have produced perhaps the greatest one-man performance in college football history while leading Texas to the 2005 national championship in a 41-38 victory over USC in the Rose Bowl.

Lake Travis High School has used the spread offense for years and no one benefited from it more than Garrett Gilbert, who signed with Texas and last week won Gatorade’s National High School Athlete of the Year.

Chad Morris currently runs one of the best at Lake Travis (Austin). Last year’s senior quarterback, Garrett Gilbert, was the national player of the year and broke his own state record by throwing for 4,854 yards for a state career-record 12,537.

Morris is no farmer, but he appears to make an apt analogy between the spread offense and a crop that thrives thanks to proper planning and care.

“You’ve got to have a program set in place that develops quarterbacks from the sixth grade up,” said Morris, who arrived at Lake Travis a year ago after running a successful spread at Class 4A Stephenville. “It’s not a one-year offense because you’ve got a certain kid.”

While Gilbert has been Texas’ best in terms of passing yards, he wasn’t the first mega-passer at Lake Travis. His predecessor, Todd Reesing, piled up yards before heading off to Kansas to help the Jayhawks to their first BCS game.

The spread offense can be successful at the high school and college level because teams are able to build around the offense without worrying about a budget.

At the amateur levels, you can recruit players to fit your system (not that they recruit at the high school level or anything) without worry how much they’re worth. At most, college teams have to worry about the amount of scholarships they can give.

Teams in the NFL have to worry about building a team within the limits of the salary cap. And it’s much easier to build a strong defensive team than a spread offense team because defensive players come on the cheap. A spread offense requires talented quarterbacks, receivers and sometimes running backs. And last time I checked, those are three of the highest-paying positions in the NFL.

I like that the article goes into what effect the spread offense has on defenses.

Spread offenses also have changed the ways teams are playing defense. Bigger safeties have become linebackers, and linebackers have become defensive ends. Defensive coordinators are trying to get as much speed on the field to slow down spread attacks.

“They’re putting five or six athletes out in space, and it’s forcing you to put athletes out in space,” Foster said. “Back when they played two tailbacks, you could put eight or nine guys in the box. Now they’re making it tougher to do that because of where they place their people.”

Texas fans see this first-hand with Sergio Kindle. Kindle was an All-American linebacker in high school, but since coming to Texas he has transformed into a hybrid defensive end-linebacker.

This gives Texas the ability to play a faster pace on defense, matching up better with the Big 12 spread offense teams.

And even with the change in defenses, spread offenses are still a couple steps ahead of the defense.

Some critics of the spread offense claim it’s just a fad offense and will die out. Others don’t believe so.

“I think it’s here to stay,” Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Bud Foster said. “I don’t think it’s a fad. It’s just part of the evolution of offense.”

I look at it as a combination of both.

When it comes to sports, nothing is “here to stay.” But it’s not really a fad either.

Eventually, something new is going to come along. It may be because players change, rules change or something different. But football offense is going to evolve and develop into something different. Something that will give the winning edge to somebody willing to try an offense that nobody else is running.

And whatever that results is will have characteristics of the spread offense, but it will incorporate new things also. That’s just the way things are, nothing stays the same forever.