Rutgers head coach Chris Ash stated when he arrived on the banks of the Raritan that he wanted to bring an exciting, fast-paced spread offense with him to replace the pro-style offense that had been with the school for well over a decade. Fans were able to get their first glimpse of this new spread offense, led by offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Drew Mehringer, at this past weekend’s Scarlet-White spring game. While the jury is still out on how good this offense can actually be given the personnel at Rutgers, the numbers so far show that the Scarlet Knights’ offense will be several orders of magnitude faster than the previous pro-style offense.

To determine how much faster this new offense is, I decided to look back at a game from last season, when Rutgers took on Michigan State on Oct. 10, to see how the old pro-style offense ran and comparing it to the offense of the Scarlet Team at the spring game. To ensure that I could keep measurements equal, I decided to measure the time between the whistle that signaled the end of the previous play with the moment the ball was snapped for the next play as there was no play clock televised for this year’s spring game. The results were astonishing and will hopefully help illustrate the true speed of the new offense.

Against Michigan State, the average amount of time that it took to get off a play from when the last play was called dead was 34.7 seconds.

At this year’s spring game, it was 21.21 seconds. That is a difference of 13.49 seconds a play, and means that a play at Rutgers now takes about 61 percent of the time it did then when in the pro-style offense.

In the third quarter when the starting quarterback from 2015, Chris Laviano, had the offense humming along, the Scarlet Knights averaged 19.55 seconds a play. This was the lowest average of the night between him and quarterback Hayden Rettig. The Scarlet Knights’ offense was nearly twice as fast as the 2015 offense during this quarter with plays taking about 56 percent of the time it did last season.

Three plays that were outside of two-minute drill situations were under 15 seconds, two from Rettig and the fastest from Laviano at 11.13 seconds. No play from 2015 against the Spartans, outside of a two-minute drill situation, was under 29 seconds.

In real time it took the Scarlet offense about 5.22 minutes to score three touchdowns during the third quarter.

The first glimpse of the new high-speed offense of Rutgers so far seems to be living up to its name. Time will tell if this new direction will pay off, but for now it seems that at the very least fans of the Scarlet Knights will be treated to a style of play that they have never seen from their team before.