Football Revolution: The Rise of the Spread Offense and How It Transformed College Football - Softcover

Wright, Bart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803271913 ISBN 13: 9780803271913

Verlag: UNIV OF NEBRASKA PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

<div><p>For the last twenty-five years, the most dominant offensive strategy in college football has been the spread offense, which relies on empty backfields, lots of receivers and passing, and no huddles between plays. Where the spread offense started, why it took so long to take hold, and the evolution of its many variations are the much-debated mysteries that Bart Wright sets about solving in this book.</p><p><i>Football Revolution</i> recovers a key, overlooked, part of the story. The book reveals how Jack Neumeier, a high school football coach in California in the 1970s, built an offensive strategy around a young player named John Elway, whose father was a coach at nearby California State University, Northridge. One of the elder Elway&#8217;s assistant coaches, Dennis Erickson, then borrowed Neumeier&#8217;s innovations and built on them, bringing what we now know as the spread offense onto the national stage at the University of Miami in the 1980s. With Erickson&#8217;s career as a lens, this book shows how the inspiration of a high school coach became the dominant offense in college football, prepping a whole generation of quarterbacks for the NFL and forever changing the way the game is played.<br>&#160;</p></div>

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Bart Wright is the sports editor for the <i>Greenville News</i> in South Carolina. <div></div>

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Football Revolution: The Rise of the Spread Offense and How it Transformed College Football

By Bart Wright

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Bart Wright
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-7191-3

CHAPTER 1

Home of the Chokers (Late 1940s)

Following his military service Jack Swarthout could not havelanded in a place more in need of what he had to offer thanthe community around the public high school in Hoquiamon the east end of Grays Harbor, Washington.

He was book smart and military tough, a believer in rules,punctuality, all in a place that had a historic dearth of intellectualpursuits and more than it needed of booze, broads,and quick money, usually in that approximate order. Thiswasn't postwar middle America from a Chamber of Commercecampaign. It was part timber boom town after everythingwent quiet and part poor man's Reno, all of it stillliving off blue-collar jobs in the mills or at the docks. Nobodywould have confused Hoquiam with Mayberry. Herethe deputies needed more than one bullet and had betterknow how to use a gun.

Swarthout was something of an odd bird, a mix of an egg-headed,voracious reader and a by-the-rules-boys war-hardenedveteran and eccentric fitness freak. He was a reader ofscience fiction and history as a kid, firing his imaginationwith dreamy possibilities through books and periodicalsthat lifted his thoughts beyond the difficult realities of dailyrural life in 1930s America. He was told, and believed withevery fiber of his being, that he could be whatever he wantedto be and that a good education was the passport to gethim there.

What they had in common, Swarthout the individualand Hoquiam the community, was a lack of pretense. Intowns like Hoquiam and nearby Aberdeen, your smarts,sweat, and reliability took you a long way. It was a littlemore involved than that for Swarthout, who was enoughto let his imposing presence work for him while his mentalagility kept him a few steps ahead of the football playershe coached and his staff. Swarthout may have asked fora little more than the community in which he got his startas an unconventional high school coach with an ability tomotivate his players, but he was never a bully. It never gotpersonal with him.

As a coach Swarthout used a compelling mix of the tangibletechniques of precision blocking and tackling, packagedwith concepts that were abstract for his time. He wasone of the early postwar pioneers who wanted to exploit defenseswith a surgical passing game instead of relying on afew simply executed pass plays designed to make an overlyaggressive defense pay for stacking up to stop the run.Swarthout wanted more than a generic passing game. Howmuch of a difference can you make when you try to do everythingbetter than your opponent?

His military background and football experience taughthim to give vigorous attention to physical discipline whilehis vivid imagination filled his head with abstract concepts.To Swarthout, anything was possible if you worked hardenough. The real question was, what exactly is it that youwant to do?

All coaches need a key player at the right time to make theirideas relevant, and the relationship Swarthout had with hishigh school quarterback in Hoquiam turned out to be determinativein the development of the spread offense yearslater. Swarthout had no way of knowing how the passinggame concepts he installed at his first coaching job wouldeventually evolve, but his spirit of adventure and sound techniquewere the seeds from which it all sprouted.

Swarthout had attended the University of Montana on athleticscholarship and played football for the Grizzlies untilgraduation in 1942, when the Reserve Officer TrainingCorps sent him off to Officer Training School and deploymentaround the world. By then football played a starringrole in the character development and morale of the Americanmilitary, which was, effectively, the greenhouse for generationsof football coaching ideology.

Having emerged from elite schools in the Northeast, footballspread quickly across the United States in the twentiethcentury and was considered to be compatible on several levelswith the goals and aspirations of the armed services. Football'sfocus on physical fitness, attention to detail, knowingyour role as part of the team—all of it reinforced and enhancedmilitary life. Navy preflight schools established atthe universities of North Carolina, Iowa, and Georgia andat Saint Mary's College in Northern California assembledfootball teams to compete against the top college squads inthe country. The navy teams more than held their own.

How much has the world changed? In the twenty-first centurytroops come home from overseas in anonymity, lookingfor jobs, struggling to keep their families afloat. DuringWorld War II they came home to local acclaim and took positionsof respect and authority, often in football.

The list of preflight football coaching veterans includesAlabama legend Paul "Bear" Bryant, Missouri's Don Faurot,and Maryland's Jim Tatum, all football coaches before,during, and after their service. Bud Wilkinson came out ofan assistant coaching position at Iowa preflight and later ledOklahoma to a still-standing record of forty-seven consecutivevictories.

The Army team at West Point was a national power duringthe war years, with talent backed up by more talent, allof it led by running backs Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis.They dominated Heisman Trophy voting for three years,winning the prize in 1945 and '46, respectively.

Football sold the military and the military sold football toAmericans, each invigorating feelings of patriotism, effort,and honor. When victorious men came back from World WarII and the Korean War and got involved in college football,they married two institutions that still worked toward mutualbenefit.

Many of the returning vets were former players—likeSwarthout—who became coaches at small colleges or highschools after their tours of duty. They weren't just lookingfor jobs; many of these war veterans believed football was aninstrument, maybe the best one at the time, to move youngmen, and the country, in a new direction. It offered the kindof pull-together teamwork talk that still occurs today, butthe rewards seemed so much closer after World War II tothat particular group of coaches.

Seldom have post-military opportunities had as much influenceas they did at the time those enlisted men returned toclassrooms and football fields after the war. They left DesolationRow and returned to the Avenue of the Americas,believing they could do anything and football was the carriagethat would take them where they wanted to go.

People around the bay of Grays Harbor, Washington, ringedby the workingman's town of Hoquiam and just to the eastthe more "upscale" Aberdeen, were more than ready forwhat Swarthout had to sell. The two towns relied on a burgeoningtimber industry that had frantically deconstructedthe surrounding forests for profit and turned the region,in less than a century, from a pristine emerald dreamlandinto a smoldering pile of careless economics and witless personalvices. It was as though the region had gone on a longdrunk and was finally realizing it needed to sober up andmake something of itself.

If it were possible to view a time-lapse motion picture ofGrays Harbor from the 1790s through the arrival of the firstwhite settlers in the mid-1800s, the appearance of the railroadin 1895, and Swarthout's arrival roughly fifty years later,it would be a chilling piece of film to behold. The areahad been inhabited by the Chehalis, Quinault, Wynoochee,and Humptulips tribes for hundreds of years prior to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF NEBRASKA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0803271913
• ISBN 13: 9780803271913
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 242
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland