Copycats, and links

In the article on Brent Venables posted a little while ago, we talked about the daunting task of defensive coordinators who happen to be trying to make a living during the era of offensive innovation we've seen for the past decade or so.

Referenced an article by ESPN on the copycat nature of college football coaches, and it's pretty darn interesting. Particularly this passage:

By all accounts, Bill Walsh was an offensive genius, the Godfather of the West Coast system still in use throughout college and pro football today.

But there are no bounds to knowledge, or innovation in the game, not even for masterminds.

He placed a phone call. Tommy Bowden sat in his Tulane office at 6 a.m. in mid-November 1998, his team still undefeated after a 49-35 victory over Army. He was the only one in the building. He picked up the phone.

It was Walsh.

"He was at the Army game, and he said, 'I was amazed at what you all were doing, how you got plays in, how you communicated from the sideline to the quarterback,'" Bowden recalled in a recent phone interview. "For him to call -- it was a big deal. I had a feeling that we might have been on to something unique."

On that topic, Heather Dinich recently talked with Larry Fedora. He's implementing the hurry-hurry thing in Chapel Hill, and he draws strong influence from the RichRod school of offense.

When did you realize you wanted to run a hurry-up style offense?

Larry Fedora: I would say the earliest I can remember was being a kid and watching college and pro games, teams would get into the two-minute situation and they would spread it out throw the ball down the field. Usually they went up and down the field. That peaked my interest then, and I wondered, "Why not do that all the time?" And then I was able to play in an offense in college that we threw the ball quite a bit and that also went with that. When I started coaching, I started studying different people doing things like that. When I had an opportunity to be offensive coordinator, the year before the only other no-huddle team that I knew of was at Tulane. So I went and spent about three days with them in the spring. Rich Rodriguez was the offensive coordinator then. I knew it was possible to do and went from there.

How much of an influence did Rodriguez have on you?

LF: I'd say quite a bit because he affirmed what I believed in, that you could do that, you could be no huddle a whole game, and you could change the tempo of the game and create quite a bit of problems but at the same time I wanted to be able to run the football and be a physical football team. We were never what Tulane was. When we put the offense together from there, the running game was different than what they were doing and the passing game was different, but the system overall -- just being being able to get in and out of tempos to try and fatigue a defense was something they were doing at the time. So yes he definitely had an influence as well as every coach I've ever coached with.

Speaking of Venables, Matt Hayes of The Sporting News penned a column on his departure from Oklahoma and the reasons behind it.

I thought Hayes nailed it with this:

Would Mike Stoops have had final say; would he have been the one making critical play calls; would he be the man getting credit if the OU defense played even better than it has of late? Of course he would.

So if you're Venables, and the annual dance of schools calling and offering jobs started again last December—this time West Virginia, Tennessee and Clemson among them—it suddenly becomes more intriguing to listen.

Venables knew nothing about Swinney or the Tigers' personnel or the ACC. It's not like he was trying to get out of town. But one thing was clear: If he wanted to run his own show, he could no longer stay in Norman.

But Hayes completely missed it with this:

And he couldn't have found a more fitting landing point. Clemson's defense has been awful; the program relied too much on elite offensive skill players for years.

Actually, the more accurate assessment of Clemson over the last 5-7 years has been:

Haven't gotten enough out of elite offensive skill players, have been mostly carried by defense.

And in Athens, Todd Gurley is making some serious noise.

LW