The thing is, I don't believe we'll actually see a balanced offense that can do everything until we commit to the passing game. We just won't. Coaches will default to the running game. Leach is the only exception here. Without that commitment to throwing the ball all over the damn place we'll skew run, and the balance will never come.
The purpose of verbally committing to passing is to differentiate the program in the mind of QB recruits. The Dome gets us halfway there, or should in theory. Talking about establishing a passing identity is the other half. We've had really bad QB play for a staggering amount of time while the rest of college football seems to have QBs that are just better than ours. We can fix that by being more appealing to them. We become more appealing by talking about being more appealing (enough of this crap about "multiple" offenses) and stating that the plan is to put the ball in the air. Here's the thing - we don't even have to commit to it that much! 2012 is a perfect case study. Season begins with Nassib throwing for like 400 yards a game, Pugh gets healthy, and we default back to being more of a running team, but it all works because the threat of the pass hangs over everything, and when we needed to go back to it on the road against Mizzou, we could, and lo and behold, we snag a highly rated QB out of Texas. Nobody really remembers how much we were running at the end of that season, we just remember it was our best offense in forever and Nassib destroyed all the season passing records. Short of rewriting the record book, we could have an offense like that every season, but it's not going to happen if the default mindset is balance. Doesn't differentiate us enough, we wouldn't get the talent we all think we're deficient in now, and I'm tired of trying to buy the line that our staff is both a) better at identifying under the radar talent as everyone else and b) better at developing that talent. Enough. We've lied to ourselves about that for 15 years.
You know what lie I think actually works? A coach that comes out of the gate loudly and widely saying "Hey, does everyone realize we're the only P5 school that plays in a Dome? This is the perfect place for a passing offense. Here's what we're going to do - we're going to spread it out, run a lot of 3 and 4 wide, and our QBs are going to get used to icing their arms after the game. Hey kid, want to be a part of that?" And then you actually do that for a few games, because you know eventually that you're going to end up running the ball a lot more than what you said sounds like, because 1) meatheads are gonna meathead and 2) nobody wants to get burned by your passing game, so your running game has opened up a whole lot.
The way we do it now, everything is too hard and there are just slim margins for error. We do nothing to help ourselves to score. It can be fixed, but it's not going to be fixed by someone with balance in mind. Balance ends up being the result of committing to the pass for us, crap offense is the result of aiming for balance. We've seen it for 15 years. There's a trend here.
