A football field has roughly 5,300 square yards, and Kansas University coach Mark Mangino wants his players to visit just about every patch during a game.
Sound familiar? Such an offensive approach – loosely defined as a “spread offense” – is becoming quite popular in college football, and Mangino is a big fan.
“You want to keep the defense off-balanced,” Mangino said. “You want to get the ball in as many people’s hands so they have to defend a lot of people in the pass game or the run game and not just four, or not three. It’s important that you’re getting the ball all around the field and forcing the defense to defend the entire field.”
It’s hard to define any sort of scheme like the spread offense, because examples of it vary so wildly. Kansas usually lines up three wide receivers, a tight end and one running back, and Mangino wants as many players as possible getting touches during the course of the game – short, long and on the ground.
Florida coach Urban Meyer, who’s revolutionized and popularized the spread offense, has his players line up in a shotgun set with four wide receivers and one back. But the Gators often run the option in such a formation, forcing defenses to be ready for either run or pass almost every play.
Top-25 teams Louisville and Texas Tech, meanwhile, run four- and five-wide sets and mix short, long and screen passes to baffle defenses and tally impressive numbers.
Variations of the spread offense are, no pun intended, spreading all over the country. Consequently, defensive coordinators all over the country are trying to find the magic solution to stopping it.
“Everybody seems to have a different answer,” Mangino said.
“Some people like to play a lot of zone and force them to find the holes in the zone. Other people feel like if you can put pressure on the quarterback and force them to throw early, that could be a way to do it.”
Kansas will face a doozy of an aerial attack in its next game Oct. 1. Texas Tech has passed for 1,168 yards in two games, frequently throwing deep balls to a number of able receivers like Jarrett Hicks and Robert Johnson, but also thriving with screen passes to running back Taurean Henderson, statistically one of Tech’s top receivers.
“For whatever reason, screens tend to gas a defense more than the offense,” Tech coach Mike Leach told Sports Illustrated. “And if they’re going to blitz, it helps keep them honest so you can run your other stuff.”
It’s just another example of a creative mind taking a basic idea and tinkering with it just enough to make it unique. And until defenses catch up, such an offensive attack will remain popular.
“Every defense has their answer to how they want to defend it,” Mangino said. “I don’t think there’s one way to defend an offense that has four wide receivers. It’s based on your personnel, and what your kids do well.
“You have to do what you do best and execute it.”
