Some brush-up on Wofford

Some folks have been asking about Wofford and what exactly the Terriers do on offense, so now's a good time to rehash some of the interview we had with coach Mike Ayers earlier this summer.

Ayers is a nice guy, and he gives some good insight here:

TI: People who don’t follow Wofford very closely, can you give them an idea of your offense? Is it basically the same flexbone style that Paul Johnson uses? What’s your background in it, and where did you learn it? And also, what’s your defensive philosophy?
AYERS: “We started with the option football concept back when I was in college. After I got out of college and started coaching, I used it. You’re looking at probably a span of 40-some years. Probably the biggest mentor that we’ve had with this triple option would probably be Coach (Fisher) DeBerry as far as our three-back concept. And then we also have an option package out of the gun, and that’s just something we’ve kind of developed on our own and tried to apply our option principles with that different style of blocking at the line of scrimmage and the different sets that we incorporate with the gun-option stuff.

“It’s one of those philosophical things where you know a lot of times you may not be as blessed to have the size that you need or the speed that you need. But by option football, we feel it gives you an opportunity to be successful and to be competitive and to give yourself a chance to win. You look at our record over the past decade, we’ve been pretty fortunate to have some good teams.

“It’s an offense that really helps us. We feel it’s a little bit of an oddball style as far as preparation for it and trying to defend it. Trying to get ready for it in one week puts you behind the 8-ball sometimes.

“On defense, we’ve been 50 defense forever. We feel that the 50 allows you to play with guys that aren’t as big as most people have and gives them a chance to win a battle up front against a guy who might be 50 to 60 pounds heavier than they are.”

TI: Are there any key distinctions between what you’re running and what Paul Johnson is running at Georgia Tech?
AYERS: “Probably the biggest deviation would be with our gun package versus their spread look. Everything that they run, the quarterback is up under center and on the line of scrimmage. We’ll probably be off the line of scrimmage 60 percent of the time. Quite frankly, a lot depends on how people are playing us. We will go into a game with the mindset that we’re expecting a certain front, and we have plays that are designed to attack whatever front concepts we see. We do what we do, and we feel that there’s only so many things you can do from a defensive standpoint.

“Probably the biggest mistake that most people make is they try to revamp their defense in about a week to try to get ready for the option, trying to do different things. A lot of times that goes against them. We’re a multiple-formation team. I think we have 25-28 formations that we will use. Any one that affords us an opportunity to get the numbers on you, we will push yard to major in that formation and try to work our package out of that formation.”

TI: What are the differences between what you do and what Chad Morris does?
AYERS: "Most of the time their option is a double option. By that, it's going to be them handing it to the back or the quarterback is going to keep it. We run triple option, we run trap-trap option, we run belly-belly option. And we do pretty much the same package out of the gun as we do under center. The difference would be the blocking and where the backs and the quarterbacks are lined up.

"Some of the triple-option phase has been introduced at some of those places, where the quarterback will have the option to run it, hand it off or throw it into the flat depending on what the defensive back or linebacker does. But you've got to make sure someone is accounting for your end-run force guy on defense. So a lot of times, that may not be quite the play that you need depending on the formation that you have."

LW