ShareThisOK, maybe no one has ever described former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer as a wise man, but he is a funny man and he is one of only two coaches to win both a college national title ring and a Super Bowl ring (the other is Jimmy Johnson).
Switzer is a Fox television analyst these days and he is loving life. Why? Because, thanks to coach Paul Johnson and 12th-ranked Georgia Tech, the triple-option offense is back, baby.
"People think it's extinct because it hasn't been around the last 10 years or so, but it would still work today -- look at what Johnson has done," Switzer said. "It's all about having top-notch personnel. ... Dinosaurs would stomp people if they were still around, too."
Originally, there were three variations of the triple-option: the wishbone Switzer used; the veer; and the I-formation that Nebraska's Tom Osborne won a national title with in 1997.
Paul Johnson's is a hybrid of the three. The quarterback lines up with running backs on each side of him. He reads the defense, runs to a side and either runs it himself, pitches it to the outside back or ... takes a step back and throws it deep.
If you eliminate one defensive player with the read and one with the pitch, that's 11-on-9 for the offense. Plus, you're making defensive players run laterally instead of attacking.
Last week, in Georgia Tech's 28-23 win over Virginia Tech, quarterback Josh Nesbitt ran 23 times for 122 yards and three touchdowns. He only completed one pass in seven attempts, but it did go for 51 yards.
"It's the best rushing offense in football," Switzer said. "And if you have a guy who can throw the ball, it is a great passing offense too because the defense has to commit. You're going to have a receiver 15 yards behind the secondary a lot."
Between 1969 and 1990, 11 of the 22 national champions ran a triple option. Switzer and the Sooners hit the mountain top in 1971, setting the NCAA rushing record at 472 yards a game.
Johnson arrived at Navy in 2002, after winning two I-AA national titles at Georgia Southern, and turned around a team that had gone 1-20 the previous two years. The Midshipmen went 45-29 in Johnson's six years. Johnson went to Georgia Tech last year and went 9-4. This year, they're 6-1.
"There has been a misconception that the triple-option is a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense," Johnson said.
Nesbitt leads the Yellow Jackets with 624 yards and nine touchdowns. Running back Jonathan Dwyer, last year's ACC player of the year, has 593 yards and five touchdowns.
"Teams don't see it these days and then whammo, Georgia Tech comes out of nowhere," Switzer said. "It's beautiful stuff."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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Not One but Three
Osborne actually won 3 national championships using the Option and its variants as components of a larger, ground-based attack.
Children that never witnessed and can't comprehend this type of football will tell you that it can no longer work, as did the talking heads before Osborne began winning with it and then again after he retired. People must want this form of football to die, because everyone is always so quick to pronounce it dead--even in the face of continued success.
Hats off to Georgia Tech for proving that you don't have to have the nation's top personnel or the latest fashionable offense to be competitive on a national stage.