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Message: [QUOTE="StanCuse44, post: 1590664, member: 2933"] Found this nugget. Great background. -------- When did Art Briles create a fast-twitch offense that stretches the defense the entire width and length of the field? On Friday nights. Because he spent three years on Mike Leach's staff at Texas Tech, Briles is often lumped in with other acolytes of the hyperpaced Air Raid scheme. But the offense Baylor runs is based on the one Briles developed in 16 years as a Texas high school head coach. Briles, who took over in Waco in 2008 after five seasons at Houston, has built that system into a [B]spread offense that goes wider than Urban Meyer or Chip Kelly ever dared[/B]. It all began on a chilly December night in 1984, when one team took the ball from Briles and never gave it back. Briles is the flesh-and-blood incarnation of coach Eric Taylor from the TV version of Friday Night Lights. West Texas twang that drips off every word? Check. Skin tanned and creased by years of running practices under the unforgiving Texas sun? Check. After stints as a high school assistant in the tiny West Texas burgs of Sundown and Sweetwater, Briles finally got his chance to lead a team in 1984, when he took over at Hamlin High, another map dot about 40 miles northwest of Abilene. Briles had the Pied Pipers humming with a ground-based veer offense he learned playing receiver for Bill Yeoman at Houston.[B] [/B] Hamlin won its first 13 games, but in the Class 2A quarterfinals the Pied Pipers met the Panhandle High Panthers. At the time Texas rules did not allow for overtime in the playoffs: Ties went to the team that penetrated the opponent's 20-yard line more often. On the final play of the third quarter Hamlin and Panhandle were tied 7-7, and each team had been inside the other's 20 once. A Pied Pipers' punt pinned the Panthers on their own one. Then the fourth quarter from hell began. Panhandle ran 26 plays, throwing only once. It slogged ahead and watched the clock tick. When the Panthers crossed Hamlin's 20, they celebrated as if they had rung up six points. "We had the ball for the whole quarter and never scored," says Chris Koetting, the former Panhandle wingback who scored the Panthers' lone touchdown that night. When the 12 minutes expired, Panhandle had the ball at the Hamlin 11. The Panthers advanced. Briles immediately began searching for a way to ensure that his team would never be in that position again. Opponents wouldn't get to play keep-away; [B]they'd have to score to keep pace[/B]. "As you get deeper in the playoffs, [B]you're always going to come up against somebody that could be better than you, talentwise," Briles says. "So you need to have an advantage that gives you the opportunity to win that game[/B]." Briles didn't scrap the Veer entirely. He made it the basis for a spread-based running attack, a one-back scheme with the quarterback in the shotgun. Inside the tackle box Briles would be old school. Outside, he'd be space age. Through moves to Georgetown High and Stephenville High, he kept tweaking. Early in his tenure at Stephenville, where he would win four Class 4A state titles, Briles positioned his receivers all the way outside the yard numbers, mere feet from the sideline-a move that spit in the face of conventional football wisdom. A receiver lined up that wide has no room to run an out pattern and no time to come back inside to crack down on a linebacker on a run play. That suited Briles, who wanted to create a glamour position that would encourage the best athletes at the school to come out for football. How do you persuade the star basketball player to strap on pads? [B]Tell him all he has to do is run routes and catch the ball.[/B] [B]The formation forced the defense to declare its intentions before the snap, giving the offense a huge advantage. Cornerbacks had to be sent out wide to cover those receivers, or the D would get burned long. But with the corners marooned near the sideline, coverages and blitzes couldn't be disguised and the corners were too far afield to help on run plays.[/B] This season the Bears split speedy Tevin Reese and Antwan Goodley, a 5'10" 225-pounder who is as thick as a linebacker but can outrun most cornerbacks, to the far sides of the field. Unless an opponent has an All-America safety who can rotate quickly and pick up Reese or Goodley, a defense has limited options. "You give up a lot of conventional football," Briles says of the ultra-wide receivers. "You give up a lot of..." He searches for the correct word before settling on "idology." Much like his offense, the word is an original. But in combining ideology and idolatry, Briles finds the perfect term. When those Panhandle Panthers kept that ball for the entire fourth quarter, they had no idea what they had unleashed on the sport. Koetting, the tiny sophomore wingback who scored Panhandle's lone touchdown that night, has grown into a brilliant high school coach in his own right. In his four seasons as head coach at Canadian High, a school in the Texas Panhandle 100 miles from anywhere, Koetting has a 39-9 record. And what offense does he run? "We run the spread," he says. Just like Briles. -------- This is gonna be fun - and frustrating, and fun. Hop aboard y'all! Edit/Linkage: [URL]http://www.soonertimesbb.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=19742[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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