Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Outside of Cabot and its devotion to 1970s style, T-formation power football, the seven other teams in the First Security Kickoff Classic this week reflected the rapid change in offensive football that's reaching from the college game into the pro ranks with the likes of New England and Tom Brady as well as deep into the prep level now. Stuttgart, another of the eight teams in the classic, ran a handful of safe plays out of the T formation at times, but outside of that, every team had a quarterback at least 5 yards behind center and a variety of formations to spread the defense.

Arkadelphia was a play-by-play statistician's nightmare, running a geared-up, no-huddle offense in which the Badgers were already in place, ready to go, before the referee had signaled the ball in play and started the play clock.

Some teams ran the "Pistol," or what Bobby Petrino renamed as the "Shot" last year for Arkansas, and Benton had something that looked like the "Double-barrel." There were the "Shotgun" formations, and five-wide receiver sets, and receivers in motion for reverses, and reverse passes, and quick swing tosses right and left and the like. About all we didn't see, except for every snap Cabot ran and those few Stuttgart plays in the "T," was a quarterback under center.

I mean, when you have the ball on the opponent's 1-yard line and the quarterback is still in a "Pistol" or a "Shotgun" with a running back to his side, what's the football world coming to?

The quarterback sneak has gone the way of the dinosaur for most teams. We've traded it for what may someday simply be referred to as the "Tebow," where the quarterback — is the player actually in what old-timers would call the "quarterback" position? — takes the direct snap and runs up the middle as his line opens up a pathway.

As Walt Coleman, the NFL referee currently waiting out the league officials' strike, said to me Tuesday at lunch, the NFL can handle the spread offenses with the number of officials employed each game.

The onus in high school, however, is on a smaller crew of officials to now keep up with the field being stretched both horizontally and vertically.

A fascinating story surfaced on the Internet recently about the success of the newfangled offenses in college football at such outposts as Stillwater, Okla., and Morgantown, W.Va. The common thread in those places is, of course, Dana Holgorsen, who was offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State in 2010 after a stint with former Houston head coach Kevin Sumlin (now at Texas A&M) and then became head coach at West Virginia. Oklahoma State was even better last year, not missing a beat with 28-year-old Brandon Weeden at quarterback and wunderkind Justin Blackmon at receiver.

What the study pointed out was the effectiveness of Oklahoma State's offense depended, in simplest terms, on getting a defender to make the wrong decision in space. The idea is that an average defender against even an equally average receiver can't be two places at once. The defender (in the case shown by the study) chooses to stop the dive play to the running back and that opens up a receiving area for one of the inside receivers. Or, the defender stays home on the receiver and gives up the dive play. Off that same look, when the cornerback isn't looking or gives up even one step to a player like Blackmon the last two seasons at OSU, it usually resulted in a fade route for a touchdown.

Football has always been about matchups, but we've steadily seen these offensive gurus stretch those matchups either vertically (with the West Coast offense) and now horizontally. The days of lining up tight with a strong and superior 11 and running over an opponent with the option via the Wishbone is gone.

Football is also always about players, though, and the team with many more talented players will in most cases prevail. Even 20-plus years ago, when the Houston Cougars were steamrolling most of their regional opponents with the Run-and-Shoot, they were no match for the Miami Hurricane, which could literally man-to-man defend them and shut them down.

In the SEC, the land of the supermen, the likes of Alabama and LSU have talent on defense that can almost defy the principle of not being in two places at once. Players with uncanny reaction time and speed, not to mention tremendous strength in the trenches, can thwart and wide-open offense with lesser all around ability. That's why no one who understood football gave Oklahoma State much of a chance to compete on the same level as LSU and Alabama last year, even though OSU was just a rung behind them.