Yes, this is the guy who's responsible for the latest innovations in football's offensive revolution.
He doesn't carry himself with the swagger of Chip Kelly. He doesn't wear a visor like Chad Morris. And he doesn't have the name recognition of this group of offensive movers and shakers that includes Urban Meyer and Rich Rodriguez. And heck, he's not even employed anymore after hanging it up at Nevada after the 2012 season.
The man's name is Chris Ault, and he's the hottest thing going right now in large part as a result of his Pistol innovation taking hold in the NFL.
To say the man is a total no-name would be a gross exaggeration, because he's very much an esteemed name in coaching circles. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2002, seven years after his first retirement.
Still, though, he's an obscurity in general. Or maybe was an obscurity. The success of San Francisco's Pistol-whipping offense, manned by former Nevada quarterback Colin Kaepernick, has made this guy a popular item in the interminable run-up to the Super Bowl.
Clemson fans might recall Morris and his offensive staff visiting Ault at Nevada last offseason to pick his brain on the Pistol. Looks like a bunch of other staffs did the same thing, according to this article.
Q: You do a lot of that, telling coaches about what you run and how you run it ?
Ault: You know what ... we've been very, very open about the pistol offense. Last year we had over 44 teams come to spring football. College, high school, JC, Canadian teams a couple of years ago. We've been very upfront in sharing some of the things we do with it and a lot of the coaches that come say, 'We can't run these particular things, but we run these and we'd like to see it.' There has been some nice exchanges, and it's grown so much, and at the collegiate level it's all over the country. And I enjoy watching all these other teams run it to see what they're doing. Everybody thinks the pistol is just a read, but the pistol is a formation. And from that formation, if you're a power offense, you can run the power. If you're a counter offense, you can run the counter. It's not just a read offense. I think the read offers another dimension to it, but it's really a versatile formation.
But he wasn't always that open, as revealed in this article by Kent Babb of The Washington Post.
Nearly eight years after its creation, the Pistol offense has swept through college football and become popular among NFL teams. The Washington Redskins won the NFC East using rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III as their primary bullet, and they’re not alone in adopting Ault’s invention. The Carolina Panthers have used it with Cam Newton, and even the Pittsburgh Steelers tinkered with it. Now, the San Francisco 49ers and second-year quarterback Colin Kaepernick — Ault’s former protege at Nevada — have ridden Ault’s creation to the Super Bowl.
In the early days, the coach kept it secret. He summoned his running backs coach into a room, putting white adhesive tape on the floor to represent positions and movements. Ault didn’t bother telling his offensive coordinator — or many others, for that matter.
“I never let anybody see us,” Ault said, “because I thought they’d have me committed.”
Slowly, his idea began to make sense. In the traditional shotgun, the running back lines up to the left or right of the quarterback, restricting the direction the back is likely to go — and giving the defense a hint. By “hiding” the back — moving him a few yards behind the quarterback — defenses were left to guess. Who could tell which direction a player would run or, to complicate things further, who would even have the ball?
Ault began introducing wrinkles, including pre-snap movement and the zone-read option. His other assistant coaches were let in on the secret, and after the skepticism faded, hope took its place.
“I just loved it,” Ault said, “because there are so many things you can do.”
In this article, Ault says even slow-footed quarterbacks like Eli Manning can run the Pistol.
"They could run the pistol formation," Ault said Tuesday on 'NFL AM.' "They don't need to run the read part of it. When we first put the pistol in, in 2005 and 2006 (at Nevada), that's all we ran. We ran the power, the gaps, the counters, the zones, the outside stuff. We did not run the read at that time. So, the pistol offense, the most important thing there, is you can run any offense you've been running. And this is how we created it, and then we advanced the pistol run game -- the read part of it -- two years later."
Ault stressed the benefits to a base run game. Images of Kaepernick and Robert Griffin III getting to the edge before turning upfield is limited to teams with those types of athletic players, but any NFL team hoping to create deception in the ground game has use for the pistol.
"When that back sits behind the quarterback, the backers do not have a clear view of what he's doing," Ault said. "And everybody's talking about the read-option, which is a big part of our offense, but you can run downhill power games, counters, gaps and all that from the pistol. And those counter steps and trap steps that backs take in this day and age -- sometimes those linebackers lose it. That's what we really enjoyed about it when we first put it in. The read didn't come in until two years later."
Fascinating stuff, for sure. And amazing how rapidly things have evolved. It wasn't long ago, remember, that the simple shotgun zone-read popularized by Rodriguez looked like something from outer space.
A few Thursday links:
-- Wait a minute. First the Blue Devils break out the Lennay Dukeua defense last night in a thrashing at Miami. And now it's revealed that Manti Te'o was talking on the phone eight hours a night to a man?
The soul-baring chats between the star linebacker and the man posing as his phantom girlfriend were the linchpin of their fake fairy-tale romance. But Te’o apparently never realized it was Tuiasosopo disguising his voice to assume the persona of stunning, sassy Stanford coed Kekua.
Grimes, best known for helping Rodney King win a multimillion-dollar judgment against the city of Los Angeles, compared the deception to an actor playing a role.
“Come on, Hollywood does it all the time,” Grimes said Wednesday. “People can do that.”
What's next, e-mail records that show Te'o responding to a rich Nigerian prince who left him a fortune?
And how about that headline: NOT A DAME! Classic.
-- This column says home court is the real advantage in the mediocre ACC.
The party was finally over in Coral Gables by the time North Carolina was wrapping up a comfortable win over Georgia Tech later Wednesday night. At the Smith Center, the pleasure in seeing the Tar Heels win was almost secondary to Duke getting blown out in Miami.
The two games, played two hours and 800 miles apart, had in common the defining principle of the ACC this season: It’s good to be home. That was true for Miami in its 90-63 win over the Blue Devils, true for North Carolina in its 79-63 win over the Yellow Jackets and true across the ACC. There just aren’t many teams in the league good enough to win on the road on a regular basis.
So it was Wednesday, as it was Tuesday when Wake Forest upset N.C. State in Winston-Salem, as it has been throughout the ACC this year. Home teams are 21-9 in the ACC. Among BCS conferences, only the SEC is close at 18-12. Home teams in the Big East and Big Ten are below .500 collectively.
-- And finally, regarding this jaw-dropping NCAA fiasco: Just speechless.
It was staggering how many times during Wednesday's conference call that Emmert gave qualifiers such as "I wasn't personally aware," or "You're probably asking the wrong guy." The Miami investigation was already going to be one of the most scrutinized endeavors of his tenure before these revelations. Don't tell us you were some helpless bureaucrat whose employees went rogue -- not after the hubris you demonstrated during last summer's Penn State p.r. stunt.
Ultimately, the NCAA is comprised of its members. How many black eyes are they willing to keep taking? Because the bleeding only seems to get worse the longer their current president keeps doing the fighting.
LW
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