It looks like the idea that the NFL is not the be-all and end-all of offensive football innovation is finally starting to take root.  To wit, see this story in the New York Times on the efficacy of the league eventually running the Spread.

And it comes with a stinging quote by Urban Meyer:

“I think (the Spread) would have worked years ago,” Meyer said. “No one has had enough — I don’t want to say courage — no one has wanted to step across that line. Everyone runs the same offense in the N.F.L. A lot of those coaches are retreads. They get fired in Minnesota, they go to St. Louis. They get fired in St. Louis and go to San Diego. I guess what gets lost in the shuffle is your objective is to go win the game. If it’s going to help you win the game, then you should run the spread.”

I’ve been preaching this for years, it seems.  I’m too lazy to go back right now and find all the examples (I’m sure my regular readers will vouch), but a while back, I linked this column from John T. Reed, who preaches an intriguing, contrarian approach to offensive football.  The following passage sounds a lot like what Meyer said in the Time piece:

Offensive coaches do not run the offense their opposing defensive coordinators most want them to run to help the other team. Rather, they run it because everyone else runs it and therefore it protects them from being criticized for choosing the wrong offense.

Some run it because it’s all they know and they are afraid to try something new or would not know how to do it if they did.

If you run the same offense as everyone else, and you lose, you can deflect blame onto the players. How? By using subtle phrases like, “Someone needed to make a play and no one did” or “The best team won.”

If you do something—anything—that is different from the other coaches in the area, and you lose, people might blame you for doing the thing that’s different—claim that was the reason you lost. If, on the other hand, you run the same offense as everyone else, you can say, “It couldn’t have been the offense I chose. That’s the same one the league champion used.”

As for the oft-cited worry for the safety of expensive quarterbacks in the NFL using the spread, Reed writes:

Could an NFL team run the option? They all say no because the QBs make too much and could not be allowed to get tackled that many times over a 16- to 20-game season. Well, I am not an expert on the NFL team structure and contract rules, but it seems like you could plan on more quarterbacks than the usual three, pay them less, and have others in the wings on the taxi squad or some such. If you were the only option team in the NFL, you would not have to compete for the services of the quarterbacks in question. You’d be the only game in town for them.

And more:

The ’ol ball coach Steve Spurrier now coaches South Carolina. He was previously very successful at Florida prior to an unsuccessful stint at the Redskins. When he was winning the national championship at Florida, he was asked why he ran a different offense than other teams (contrarian). His answer was something along the lines of,

I don’t think I can win by coaching the off-tackle play better than the other coaches.

But that’s exactly what the current structure and group norm of the NFL does. It forces everyone to compete in only two dimensions: draft/free agent maneuvers and outcoaching a standard set of plays. There appears to be no other way to compete, no chance of a T formation, split-T, or wishbone type innovation taking the league by storm.

Evolution? Permitted. Revolution? No way!

If you were a tactical or strategic football genius, you would not want to coach in the NFL. You would be better off in college, high school, or youth or European semi-pro leagues where greater deviations from a group norm are permitted, albeit only in a relative sense. Innovation takes rare quantities moral courage throughout all levels of football. Indeed, many of the greatest football innovations were invented by high school coaches like Emory Ballard’s option and Glen Ellison’s run-and-shoot, which lives on in the form of sight adjustment passing routes.

I’ve written before that my ideal offense would feature a backfield of Tim Tebow, Vince Young and Pat White.  All three can run or pass on any given play.  Can that kind of configuration be far off?

The NFL is made up of a bunch of dinosaurs trying to protect their comfy careers.  But eventually even the dinosaurs die out.

It will be interesting to see which NFL team takes the plunge first.