Return of the offense formerly known as pro-style?
Are modern trends in the game of football going to push more and more teams back into the traditional style of under center offense?
This last Saturday while watching Wyoming chew up 10 minutes of clock with a combination of under center, inside zone runs from bigger personnel mixed with occasional quick outs underneath quarters coverage, the ever-evolving nature of football and it’s current re-embrace of traditionalism stuck out to me.
The Wyoming Cowboys under Craig Bohl are probably the most traditionalist team in the game of college football today. Fitting for a school playing in the Mountain West as the sole mascot for a state with a smaller population than the city limits of Austin where they were playing Saturday night. In fact, the suburban county to the north of Austin (Williamson) has more people than the whole state of Wyoming.
I interviewed Bohl for an article a few years back at SB Nation and we talked about his very traditionalist approaches to the strategy of football. He had some terrific quotes in there such as…
“It's a challenge to find the old pro-back fullback or H-back. Those guys run counter-culture to what's going on in football. But you have a kid that grew up on a ranch, drives a pick-up, and has a belt buckle, he doesn't mind bashing his head into a DE 15 to 20 times a game.”
Bohl came up in football as a defensive player and eventually coach at Nebraska under Tom Osborne and Frank Solich before heading to North Dakota State where he helped build the dynasty there (breakthrough really came with the hire of Chris Klieman as a defensive assistant).
His Wyoming teams today are known for having tons of kids from rural America, some of whom prove to have NFL or portal-poaching worthy talent, developed in pretty traditional schemes. On offense they get under center quite a bit and run power football, on defense they’re still in the old Tampa 2 (currently adjusting to the Flyover).
It’s very simple, they’re going to take their time scoring and they’ll make sure you have to as well. Who wins in a lower scoring slog? Probably the team that’s built to win that way. For home games at least, it works pretty well for them.
It’s very difficult for them to sustain success because their model is so heavily geared toward development and the Draft or transfer portal will tend to lift their better talents out before the Cowboys can really make the most of them. Yet their style has proven durable through the years and for a few reasons may be one more teams emulate when trying to win in the modern game.
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