I’ve been preaching for a while now that Urban Meyer’s hiring at Florida was going to have a profound effect on the SEC–and hence, college football–thanks in large part to the addition of his exotic spread scheme to what was, for the most part, a vanilla conference on the offensive side of the ball.
Well, it’s two years in and he has his national title already. Meanwhile, other schools in the league are being forced to play catch up. LSU has announced the hiring of Oregon’s Gary Crowton as the new Tiger offensive coordinator. Crowton installed Meyer’s offense at Oregon and will likely run a similar version at LSU.
So, while many critics look at stats–Florida only averaged 21 points per game in SEC play!–as a means to disparage the effectiveness of the spread, the issue has apparently been settled in Les Miles’ mind.
Naturally, I’ve been thinking about that stat, too. If the spread works, why did it only score 21 points against SEC teams? Well, I think the answer is clear: it didn’t need to score more. How long should a man’s legs be? Answer: Long enough to touch the ground.
If you are Urban Meyer and your quarterback doesn’t fit your scheme and your running back is consistently injury prone and overweight and hence useless for your purposes, you play things close to the vest against SEC teams. After all, 21 points per game is, apparently, more than enough points to outscore your typical SEC offense. It’s, apparently, at least good enough to go 8-1 in league play. Going into most conference games, Meyer knew that the other team couldn’t score against his defense, so why open things up? He played the percentages.
However, going into the game against Ohio State, Meyer clearly felt he was going to need to score to keep up with the vaunted Buckeye attack. The result? He opened the offense up, added more formations and wrinkles and it scored 41. Now that Meyer has the players to run his offense, he’ll probably open it up a little more in conference play, but not too much. Why gamble? If he averages 25 per game he’ll dominate the conference for years to come.
Unless, of course, more teams start to revamp their offenses the way LSU just did.
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