The Veer and Shoot vs the SEC
Art Briles' offensive system is converging on the SEC from multiple directions, but will it work?
Art Briles is mostly famous across the broader world of football for the scandal which ended his career as a college coach. He was starting to get a lot of positive notoriety at Baylor after winning a Heisman with Robert Griffin III in 2011 and then winning the league in 2013 and 2014, but they hadn’t quite broken through.
Many people still looked at some of their stats and concluded it was another Air Raid offense, they hadn’t become very familiar to the every day fan and hadn't had success yet on the bigger stages. In 2013 they went to a BCS game and got smoked by Blake Bortles and a very good UCF team. In 2014 they faced the last Pat Narduzzi Michigan State Spartans team and threw for 600 yards, ran for -20, and lost 42-41 because of a blocked field goal.
The next year all of their quarterbacks were injured (literally all of them), Lincoln Riley came to Oklahoma and re-established the Sooners as the top dog, and then the following offseason Art Briles was fired.
Since then, his system slowly matriculated to a few different coaches who fled from the sinking of the Briles ship and hung on to wreckage until they drifted to new destinations. His son-in-law Jeff Lebby who worked for him at Baylor is now the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, which will be in the SEC at some point in the future.
Josh Heupel learned what he could about the offense from Joe Jon Finley (Oklahoma tight end who was an analyst at Baylor in 2015 and is now with Lebby at OU) and is running the show at Tennessee.
Kendall Briles was hired by Lane Kiffin at Florida Atlantic (and quickly demoted) but then caught on back at Houston and is now the offensive coordinator at Arkansas. Kiffin kept elements of the offense in his system he runs at Ole Miss.
This week we have a couple of marquee matchups for Veer and Shoot coaches with Arkansas playing their rivalry game with Texas A&M, OU opening Big 12 play against Kansas State, and 3-0 Tennessee hosting Florida as 10.5 point favorites. I’ve expressed some hesitancy about the Veer and Shoot on this blog and I thought I’d take this moment to explain why.
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