To some spread teams, football really is a game of inches

Kevin Trahan | Special for USA TODAY Sports

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Through two weeks of the college football season, Baylor again has one of the best offenses in college football. Despite breaking in new quarterback Seth Russell, the Bears are second in the nation with 9.25 yards per play. And because they run so many plays per game, they lead the nation with 754 yards per game — 111.5 yards per game more than second-place Texas Tech.

This kind of offense has become commonplace for Baylor, which ranked as the seventh-most efficient offense in the country last year, according to Football Outsiders.

Baylor coach Art Briles wasn’t the first to bring a high-powered offense to major college football, but he has one simple tweak that has made a world of difference: He uses the entire field.

“I always felt like if they’re going to give you 53½ yards, you play with it, so that’s always been our philosophy,” Briles said.

But for some reason, many coaches choose to play in a tight space in the middle of the field. The evolution of the spread offense has changed that a bit, but in general, the grass edges of the field remain clean and unused.

Why?

“It’s been that way for a long time,” Montana coach Bob Stitt told USA TODAY Sports. “A lot of coaches do things because that’s the way you do it. With offense, when I was an assistant coach, I wanted to try things and I wasn’t allowed to because nobody else was doing it, and I had to find someone else who was doing it before I could run it.”

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Stitt became a cult hero in the college football world after West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen credited him for inventing a version of the fly sweep that the Mountaineers used successfully in the 2012 Orange Bowl.

But even though the fly sweep is what made Stitt famous, it’s a small part of what his offense does and why he’s been successful. This year, Montana has run that play only once or twice, he said. Instead, as an up-and-coming coach at Colorado School of Mines — a place where he almost always had a talent disadvantage — Stitt mastered the art of using the whole width of the field to his advantage.

“I was more of a West Coast guy,” Stitt said. “I was at Colorado School of Mines, where you just couldn’t line up and run the West Coast offense. It wasn’t going to be effective. We took the same concepts and just spread them out.”

Briles tried out his concepts at a lower level of football, too. And he found that what worked in high school works at the highest level of Division I college football.

“We starting doing it in 1990, when I was at Stephenville (Texas) High School,” Briles said. “It doesn’t fit into a lot of people’s passing trees, and we certainly understand that.”

The reason there is often a disconnect between the football world and innovation is that many new concepts are often seen as gimmicks — gimmicks that work at lower levels of the sport but don’t transfer to the big-time.

“A lot of people, they perceive our offense as a certain thing and they’ve never actually even watched us,” Stitt said.

But at the crux of it, the Stitt and Briles offenses are really just the offenses that have been around the sport for decades, but spread out as far as the rules will allow. Super-spread offenses, if you will.

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The super-spread relies on simple math. If a cornerback is defending a athletic wide receiver in a confined area, the receiver will struggle to get open. But the more of the field the cornerback has to defend, the more successful the receiver is going to be.

Let’s say a defense is in man coverage and a corner is trying to defend a receiver that’s lined up five yards wider than normal. If that receiver gets targeted on a crossing route 5 yards downfield, and he has covered 15 yards laterally, the area under the route is 37.5 square yards. But if the receiver is lined up 5 yards wider and gets to the same spot, the cornerback has to cover 50 square yards. Sometimes the receiver won’t get to that same point, but there is more space to work with underneath the route before things get crowded.

Similarly, if the defense is in zone — let’s say cover four quarters, with three linebackers covering across the middle and four defensive backs lined up roughly 7 yards off the line of scrimmage — and two receivers are lined up 5 yards wider than normal, each of the three linebackers have to account for 3.3 yards more, width-wise. If the zone is roughly 5 yards deep, that’s 16.5 more square yards per zone.

That works particularly well when teams need to neutralize talent discrepancies, as was the case in Montana’s first game of the season — Stitt’s first game with the Grizzlies and first at the FCS level — against top-ranked North Dakota State. Though as Briles has shown through Baylor’s rise, having more talented players is no detriment; it just makes the offense that much more effective. Despite having inferior players who were being introduced to a new system, Montana neutralized the Bison defense. After giving up just 280 yards per game last year, NDSU gave up 544 yards.

North Dakota State’s defenders play well against the run and well against the pass, but it is almost impossible for them to play well against both, simultaneously. With the field spread so wide, it is impossible for teams to play zone effectively against a super-spread offense, so teams often opt to play the pass, spreading their defenses out to match the opposing offense. That means many defenses will only put five players in the box to rush the passer and defend the middle of the field.

“It’s an offensive line coach’s dream to get a five-man box,” Stitt said. “If you do the right things in the spread, you’re going to (get a five-man box).”

That concept was particularly clear in Baylor’s 56-21 win against SMU to open the season. SMU saw Baylor’s running potential on the first drive, so rather than sell out to stop the pass, the Mustangs sold out to stop the run, knowing they really only had one option.

No problem for Russell — he just passed the the ball through a porous defense. This is what space does for offenses, in both the running and passing games.

Offenses such as Montana’s and Baylor’s are often misinterpreted as pass-only offenses, but really, they use the pass — or more accurately, the threat of the pass — to set up the run. Baylor might be known for the arms of Robert Griffin III and Bryce Petty, but the Bears have had a 1,000-yard rusher every year since 2010.

It is not difficult to understand why these concepts work. They are proven by a little bit of critical thinking and a little bit of math. But in a world where tradition is everything and innovation is slow, Briles and Stitt have been able to reach heights that others have not by simply going against the grain.

“We see other teams that are in three-by-one or two-by-two sets, their splits, their inside receiver really allows the defense to midpoint that receiver and allows them to play the run and the pass, and we don’t want them to do that,” Stitt said.

So Stitt instead uses every little bit of space available. It’s a new play on an old concept, but it changes the game dramatically.

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