How Oregon may be setting a new paradigm for collegiate football

Excerpts from an interesting article in the New York Times.

[Head coach Chip] Kelly has transformed football into an aerobic sport. This style is particularly of the moment because it is apparent that football, at least in the short term, will become less violent. Kelly’s teams have found a new way to intimidate, one that does not involve high-speed collisions and head injuries...

His teams usually gather steam as the game progresses and draw their confidence from knowing that the other team will wear down. Oregon’s second-to-last touchdown in what would become a 53-16 rout of Washington came on the fifth play of a 1 minute 8 second drive — meaning they ran plays off about every 13 seconds. (That included the time it took to run the plays.) Its final touchdown, a 30-yard sprint to the end zone by a reserve running back, came on the last of nine consecutive rushing plays. It commenced five seconds after the completion of the previous play...

In Kelly’s offense, the point of a play sometimes seems to be just to get it over with, line up and run another... “Obviously, all of our plays are designed to gain yards,” Gary Campbell, Oregon’s running-backs coach, explained. “But our guys understand the cumulative effect of running them really fast.”

College-football offenses have become more wide open in recent years, but the highest-scoring attacks tend to rely mainly on the forward pass. They are aerial circuses, like Texas Tech under former Coach Mike Leach, whose celebrated spread offense from 2000 to 2009 was so pass-first that his quarterback, in 2003, averaged about 60 pass attempts and 486 passing yards per game. By contrast, Oregon was leading the nation in scoring through 10 games this season with an attack almost evenly split between passing and rushing attempts. The run plays — because receivers are not spread all over the field at the end of a play — allow the Ducks to scramble back to the line of scrimmage and quickly snap the ball again. And Oregon sequences its plays and formations in such a way that it can push the tempo even after pass attempts. The running-backs coach, Gary Campbell, told me that if a receiver on the right side of a formation is sent on a crossing pattern to the other side of the field, Oregon coaches have already planned a formation for the next play that keeps him on the side of the field where he finished...

“What Oregon’s doing will take the evolution of football to a whole different level,” Brian Baldinger, a former player for several pro teams and now an analyst with the N.F.L. Network, told me. “Nobody in the whole history of football can snap off plays as quickly as this team does. Other teams can’t condition for it. It’s a great equalizer. If you’ve got a 350-pound guy, I don’t care how good he is, you’ve got to get him off the field. He can’t keep up...

The first challenge of Kelly’s offense, Bellotti told me, was to put in a communications system... When Oregon is on offense, coaches on the sideline give hand signals. The backup quarterback flips a series of cardboard signs, each of them with four pictures or words on them. Some of the pictures include a tiger, a jack-o’-lantern, a jet taking off and a shamrock... Coaches on the other sideline may be able to decode the signals. But the signs change weekly, and with Oregon running plays so quickly, they would have just seconds to communicate what’s coming to their players...

What Oregon’s innovative offense is really about is conditioning, repetitions in practice, precision and, most of all, agreement on the core mission — to go fast. Any team with a nimble, quick-thinking quarterback and an assortment of quick skill players could do it. And Baldinger believes many will. “It’s going to be copied, from high schools up through major colleges and all the way up to the N.F.L.,” he said. “If they manage to win the national championship, you’re really going to see a lot of it.”

Mark your calendar for January 10, when this Oregon team takes on Auburn for the national title.

The image (Egyptian Ka statue of Horawibra), found at The Ancient World, is obviously unrelated, but this time of the year, reminders of football seem to be everywhere.