My point is this Milly, it takes a lot more than going 4 or 5 wide to make an offense successful. Sorry for tossing out the "arbitrage" word. Was in work mode. Some would think of it as simultaneous buying and selling of a stock, etc to take advantage of price discrepancies (ADR vs ordinary pricing for example). We toss it around at work to reference a lot of marketplace inefficiencies that have been "arbitraged" away or really no longer exist. Unfortunately for Syracuse football, I think the road back to the top 25 is much harder than it was 25-30 years ago. Look at our track record with African-American qb's in the 80's and 90's. Now everyone recruits those players. Tulane and RRod was 17 years ago. Yes they had a Dome, and at the time, very few schools, if any, were running a zone read offense out of a spread. Now, I would wager 90% of college offenses have a package with the play as the staple. We jokingly discuss northeastern meatheads, but I'm not sure than notion exists any longer. I would assume you are referring to PSU, Pitt, Rutgers, and BC. Of those schools, can you truly define their offensive systems. BC runs a lot of their stuff out of the gun with Murphy at QB. Even Rutgers runs a lot of single back sets. I've been to a few Pitt games and the run a ton of spread zone read stuff with Votyk. Don't assume that they are running 22 base sets because Conner's running numbers are high. Toss in the fact that almost every team in the ACC runs some version of the spread. The northeast meathead system doesn't really apply. Clemson, spread. FSU, spread. NCSt, hurry up spread. Duke, spread. Villanova, you guessed it, spread. I think you get the picture. With regards to northeastern recruiting, feasting off those recruits has been arbitraged away as well. Recruiting has gone from regional to national. The big powers can now cherry pick players from all over the country. In 1990, FSU had 2 players from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Today, they have 11. The access didn't exist then - there was no YouTube, Hudl, etc to post your video on back then. Now, every school in the country can see your highlights if they want to. I look at the bottom offensive schools in the NCAA, and I can't really find a "system" that is prevalent there. SMU is crap this year, and they still run the Jones/Mumme air raid. Heck, last year with both Jones and Mumme on staff they were bottom half (66th). Meanwhile, meathead Ga Tech has been 44th and 11th. I think we can all agree that Chip Kelly is a great offensive mind, yet even before his arrival at Oregon the offense was one of the best (12 and 19 the 2 years before). Why? Because the school had talent and solid coaching. I'm not so sure scheme maters as much as coaching and talent level. I think a good coach can get results, look at Marrone's offensive improvement here. Or Harbaugh's at Stanford. They went from 118 pre Harbaugh to 107, 81, 18, 14. Was it Harbaugh? Was it Andrew Luck? Was Harbaugh responsible for getting Luck and putting him in a position to succeed? Probably. We need solid coaching and better talent first, a system second. Would it be nice to chuck it all over the dome and put up 500 a game? Sure would. I bet it would be fun to watch. Does it correlate to wins, not so sure. Leach is 3-7 with a fun offense this year. Holgerson was on the hot seat, found himself a transfer QB, transfer RB, and a stud Juco WR and suddenly he's back in the circle of trust. I think it's irresponsible to look at the best offenses and say, look, they run a spread, we should too! There are sh!tty offenses that run spreads. We are one of them. Bonus points for doing this after about 4 manhattan's at Good Luck in your neck of the woods!
