Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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CHALK TALK BRYAN DRISKELL Y ou have heard the term. It has found its way into the main- stream of college football. Every conference has been affected, and de- fensive coaches around the country at every level of football are still trying to figure out how to stop it. It's the spread of- fense. Notre Dame fans have become very familiar with it since Brian Kelly was an- nounced as the head coach in December 2009. It has been around in different forms for quite some time, with programs like Pur- due under Joe Tiller and Clemson with Tommy Bowden us- ing it to build up once dormant programs. Bowden hired one of the godfathers of the modern spread, now Arizona head coach Rich Rodri- guez, to do for the Tigers what he had done at Tulane and prior to that Divi- sion II Glenville State. Fifteen years later, the spread of- fense has become what the West Coast offense was to the NFL in the 1990s — a popular offensive system that has seen offshoots emerge and its foun- dational principles adopted by other coaches who want to reap rewards from it but are unwilling to make a full commitment. It is to the point where saying a team runs a "spread offense" no longer tells you anything other than what the ba- sic phrase means. BASIC PRINCIPLES The primary objec- tive of a spread offense is just that, spread out the defense and use the entire width of the field. Whether it is to isolate defend- ers with a vertical or horizontal pass play or in the run game, the goal remains the same — stress the de- fense vertically and horizontally. In order to accom- plish this, spread of- fenses use a variety of formations, but all revolve around hav- ing at least three wide receivers on the field. In the pass game the goal is to get the ball to the receivers in space, while the run game objective is to cre- ate wider running lanes. Spread teams line up in either a shotgun or pistol formation, both of which require the quarterback to be behind the center. In the shotgun the quarterback is five yards off the ball with an offset running back. In the pis- tol the quarterback is about four yards The Spread Offense Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly brought his own version of the spread offense to South Bend. PHOTO BY BILL PANZICA