Air Raid quarterbacks in the smashmouth spread
USC and Miss State are entrusting their offenses to smaller passers in 2024. How will Lincoln Riley and Jeff Lebby manage their systems around their skill sets?
The Air Raid offense as it was practiced by Mike Leach is long dead.
The development of the RPO game, spread play-action, and shot plays were all too enticing. Many of Leach’s top proteges like Dana Holgorsen, Lincoln Riley, and Sonny Dykes all found that spread sets could be very efficient and explosive when the offense could run the ball and make it easy to isolate secondary defenders in 1-on-1 matchups. They gave up on Leach’s “all dropback passing all the time” methodology in exchange for a balanced approach.
Art Briles, who technically is listed as part of Leach’s coaching tree but really just used Texas Tech as a gateway to the college world where he could unleash his own offense, has proven to be the more influential figure. Briles embraced the mechanical extremes of spread spacing and run/pass conflict with his Veer and Shoot offense and everyone I mentioned above, along with Briles’ own tree, were heavily influenced.
You can really see the overlap and influence in guys like Sonny Dykes and Josh Heupel. Dykes was an assistant of Leach’s who worked alongside Briles at Tech who always ran more than Leach, often used a big blocking tight end to facilitate the offense, and recently hired Art’s son Kendal at TCU. Josh Heupel played quarterback for Leach at Oklahoma in 1999, won the National Championship with the offense in 2000 (under Mark Mangino, Leach had bailed for Tech), and later stole the Veer and Shoot from the Briles tree.
Whether a team is an Air Raid influenced squad or a pure Veer and Shoot team, I tend to label these RPO/play-action oriented versions of the spread as “smashmouth spread” squads. It’s still the spread with the heavy emphasis on passing and speed in space, but they want to have a smashmouth identity in the box.
For all the popularity, there are issues with this approach though and complications in how the Air Raid passing and power run game are married. Lincoln Riley is the top Leach Air Raid protege in the game right now. Jeff Lebby is the true heir to the Briles offense (he’s the son-in-law, the actual son Kendal is something of a disappointment). Both are facing some challenges in the season ahead in marrying the run and pass with their two, old school Air Raid quarterbacks.
I took a look at the USC and Miss State spring games at the request of my wonderful readers and we’re going to talk about some of the challenges for these programs.
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