Within a month of Texas’ humiliating defeat to Arkansas, Strong was clearly active making moves to re-shape the future of his Texas program. The quarterback the staff had selected in the summer de-committed to follow Harbaugh to Michigan citing changes in the UT offense as a reason he felt Ann Arbor was a better fit.

These proposed changes to the Longhorn offense have brought a great deal of excitement to the burnt orange faithful and have corresponded with a recruiting focus on dual threat QB’s, Kai Locksley and Kyler Murray, and repeated rumors that Texas will go “more spread” in the future.

So what’s going on? What kind of changes are the offensive staff making to the offense in 2015?

The obvious need for change

The 2014 Texas offense was designed to be wielded by David Ash, with Swoopes, Heard, and incoming freshman like Zach Gentry amongst the names of players who eventually take it over.

When it was thrust into Swoopes’ hands, there was little there to take advantage of his natural abilities but there was enough complexity in the offense to highlight his deficiencies. The zone read game was largely undeveloped and either not taught as a read, in order to protect Ash and the thin depth chart, or else taught poorly. Similarly, Swoopes did not make decisive scrambles suggesting he was being urged to avoid contact. The result was a quarterback that struggled to find a rhythm or make use of his athleticism to create badly needed, off-schedule plays for Texas.

Before the season begun, the roster featured two feature backs, multiple TEs including punishing blocker Geoff Swaim, and some veteran WRs. The Louisville-esque multiple pro-style blend made sense for Texas in ’14.

None of that makes sense for Texas in 2015. With Heard off his redshirt season and possibly as many as three more scholarship QBs joining the team, there’s no need to prevent any of the QBs from taking free yardage and stressing defenses with the scramble if their reads are cloudy.

What’s more, it now makes considerably more sense to feature option plays where QB can keep the ball since Swoopes, Heard, and the likely incoming QBs all have above average athleticism. If you aren’t making plays like zone read or power read an integral part of the offense with players like this, you are doing football wrong.

Then there’s the skill positions, where Texas has a much different looking cast of players to work with. Gone are Harris and Shipley, two of the more reliable passing game targets Texas has had since the Colt McCoy days. Gone is Geoff Swaim, one of the most underrated players in Texas football for the last decade.

Texas has some young TEs and WRs on the roster who may one day become the kinds of reliable targets or blockers that Swaim, Harris, and Shipley provided the 2014 Texas offense, but that day probably won’t be in 2015. What they do have is speed, and lots of it.

Speed in the slot positions with Armanti Foreman, Daje Johnson, and Roderick Bernard. Speed at running back with Johnathan Gray stepping into Malcolm Brown’s spot and Duke Catalon becoming No. 2. Speed at quarterback, either in Swoopes’ capable legs, with Heard’s dominant running, or potentially in the legs of newcomers depending on how things settle on NSD or with transfers.

When your team’s strengths are in the ability to bring the threat of blunt force trauma against your opponent, you want to play big personnel and use your inside receivers around as blockers. When your team’s strength is speed, you want to spread your opponent out so that he has trouble chasing it.

Texas was always going to feature a heavy dose of spread in 2015, and in no small part because Texas featured a heavy dose of spread formations in 2014! Evidently if a team spends any amount of time either under center or in the I-formation, they are not regarded as a spread team at all. Despite the “pro-style” label, Texas regularly put Swoopes in the ‘gun and deployed three or even four receivers on the field in 2014.

Watson even made heavy use of modern spread-option tactics like the play-option pass (POP) in the spread sets to create running room inside for the Texas tailbacks.

So if Texas is telling players that the Longhorns are going to move towards the spread, what exactly can that even mean?

A matter of emphasis and mistaken identity

There’s a lot of confusion out there about what it means to be “pro-style” or to be “spread.” At the heart of the problem is that it’s a false dichotomy, as pro-style teams regularly look to use spacing to “spread” out their opponents and create leverage and angles to attack. If using spacing is one of your primary tactics on offense, you are a spread team.

Texas wants to be “multiple,” which means having the personnel to spread you out or line up bigger bodies and just run you over. Given the limits of the 85-man scholarship limit, it’s very difficult for a team to truly be multiple unless they can recruit players with the versatility to both run people over and run around them.

Without those types of versatile players, your roster will probably only be really great either in the spread or in bigger sets. In that event you hope to just be solid in the set where you aren’t dominant. Last year, Texas was better with Swaim on the field, and in some instances at its best with Swaim plus a fullback or 2nd tight end.

In 2015, unless Blake Whiteley, Alex de la Torre, and Andrew Beck all make considerable leaps as football players, Texas will be much better with three or four receivers on the field.

That said, it’d be ridiculous to expect Texas to abandon formations that utilize tight ends, h-backs, and fullbacks. For one, all of the players listed above are solid young players that should be utilized in the program and will undoubtedly at least have some situational value. For another, Texas doesn’t want to abandon pro-style sets given that Strong is bringing in the best TE haul since perhaps before Mack even became the head coach.

You don’t think Strong has big plans for unleashing Devonaire Clarington and DeAndre McNeal on opponents in the future?

Instead, schematic changes in 2015 are more likely to be a matter of emphasis on elements of the Texas offense that best match the team’s strongest possible identity for the season, which is as a shotgun-heavy team that liberally uses spread-option tactics.

The one way in which Texas’ offense is likely to significantly change is in using more shotgun alignments rather than under center sets in order to run QB-read plays. Although these plays are now common in the pro ranks and can be run from big formations that have zero intention of spreading out their opponents…they are generally referred to as “spread” concepts.

So will this help….? Absolutely.

There’s no telling how much more confident Swoopes or Heard might be in an offense that puts them in the shotgun more often, allows them to regularly use their legs, and features a large amount of simple, quick reads, and throws off the threat of the run game.

Most importantly, if the offense sees greater emphasis on the spread, zone read, and POP elements of the playbook it’ll also become much easier for Swoopes and Heard to improve as they focus more and more practice time on nailing down those concepts.

The results from that success would likely include more running room for Gray and Catalon and perhaps a loaded box that opens up the perimeter for quick passes and receiver screens to athletes like Foreman and Daje. That’s easy money for a young team.

No doubt Texas will not abandon the under center formations or double TE sets, they’ll simply be de-emphasized until they actually match the identity of the roster.

WR coach Jay Norvell didn’t come to Texas to install the Air Raid or erase Watson’s concepts, he’s a strong DFW recruiter who knows how to run West Coast/pro-style tactics from spread formations, and with tempo.

Regarding tempo, Texas used the no-huddle some in 2014 and might utilize it more in 2015 but Texas fans probably shouldn’t expect that to become the identity of the team as it prevents the Horns from controlling the tempo and protecting Strong’s defense. If Texas uses the no-huddle heavily in 2015, that would indicate a serious shift in Strong’s thinking about how to win this league.

What will this look like?

There’s a lot that can be done if the offense can simply establish the zone read play as a serious threat on Saturdays.

If you aren’t yet familiar with the concept, or forgot about it in the long winter that was/is the post-Colt McCoy era of Texas football, here’s a quick primer. The idea of the play is to run zone blocking but leave the backside defensive end unblocked and have the quarterback choose to hand off or dart around the backside depending on whether that end chases the running back or “stays home” to stop the quarterback.

Assuming that the best lineup for Texas next year is Swoopes/Heard, a TE/H-back (either Whiteley or Beck), Johnathan Gray, Army Foreman, Marcus Johnson, and whoever wins Harris’ position, perhaps Lorenzo Joe.

Whiteley or Beck will play the TE/H-back position we’ll label as H, Marcus Johnson will stay as the Z receiver, Joe will be the X receiver, and Foreman will be the Y.

Here’s how the zone read play could look in a basic set:

Or alternatively:

The beauty of the play is the numbers and angles advantage the offense gets from running the quarterback as well as the overall flexibility of which skill player the scheme can emphasize.

In the first play, you get the H-back leading into the boundary for the quarterback while the running back has options to cut upfield behind the double team or bounce outside if his left tackle and wide receivers do their job well. That’s a nice assignment that slashers like Gray and Catalon should thrive in.

The quarterback gets a lead blocker to protect him from the weakside linebacker with the H-back executing an arc block around the defensive end to pick him off. If the H-back is a good blocker and the QB is a dangerous runner, there’s no good way for the defense to handle this except to have the DE contain the QB rather than chasing the running back or else drop that free safety down to even up the numbers.

In the second diagram, the H-back leads around the edge for the running back, again an assignment that’s in the wheelhouse of Gray and Catalon, while the quarterback has yards and yards of open grass to work with if he gets a keep read.

If you can execute these basic varieties of the zone read, then it becomes easy to add play-action or POP elements to attack aggressive defenses with the passing game.

Let’s say, for instance, that the QB is shredding the defense because the H-back is dominating their weak side linebacker and the safety can’t handle the quarterback in space. So they drop that safety down into the box to take away the QB’s leverage:

You simply have the X receiver run a skinny post behind the safety, if the quarterback sees the safety sneaking up, he can toss that and potentially get a touchdown. Texas ran this POP add-on to the zone running game in 2014 and had some success early, but later in the year, Swoopes started missing the throw. If the 2015 offense is built around the zone read, this is a throw and read that the quarterbacks will want to master.

Now the second diagram, let’s say that the nickel and strong safeties are too good in run support and the Y receiver isn’t a good enough blocker to protect the edge. The offense can use the slot receiver to attack the backside by having the quarterback read the nickel instead of the defensive end:

If the nickel attacks the edge, the quarterback keeps the ball and flips it out to the slot receiver in open spaces. If the nickelback stays home, the quarterback hands the ball off.

With a speedy receiver like Foreman, Bernard, or Daje Johnson in that spot it will be difficult for the defense to adjust on the backside without exposing themselves to getting shredded by the quick bubble screen. Once again, the quarterback has a simple read and throw while Texas’ best athletes are being put in positions where they can thrive. We saw against TCU what Foreman is capable of on simple plays like this.

With tactics like these, it simply becomes a matter of execution. If Texas can execute these concepts at a high level and inflict serious damage with explosive runs, there’s not a great deal the defense can do. On the other hand, if the defense has the athletes to match up with these types tactics and keep things under wraps, the offense will need considerably more complexity and diversity.

Even if they aren’t able to add much complexity in 2015, the offense should at least be considerably better than last year as these adjustments are a better match for the strengths of the Texas roster. Don’t expect Watson and Wickline to completely overhaul the offense, but there’s little doubt that they will re-tool it for the next generation of Texas quarterbacks.