What is a pro-spread offense?
Pro-style offense doesn't mean what it used to mean.
There was a long time in college football where the term “pro-style offense” was wildly misused. It’s often been used for a traditional approach involving the utilization of a fullback and an inline tight end by the offense, long after the pro teams in the NFL would rely on those sets.
The observation you could do more damage in the run game by playing with three receivers to spread defenses out rather than trying to insert a fullback at the line of scrimmage every snap was made safely before the spread really took over in college football. Even as the NFL continued to play with bigger bodies they’d use two tight ends in order to make the most of their hybrid skill set rather than having a stocky blocking fullback sitting in the backfield who could really only threaten the defense as a blocker.
A lot of college teams were slow to adapt to what the NFL actually does and this has really been the case for a very long time.
The spread offense really took hold across college football when blue blood teams saw how it could bolster their attempts to win the game in the trenches. The advantage of being an Alabama or Ohio State is in having first dibs on the biggest, baddest football prospects in the country in recruiting. The nation’s supply of athletic, dangerous skill athletes is really quite high, smaller colleges can routinely find good receivers and even defensive backs.
But there are only so many athletic 300-pounders or even 250+ pounders in the world and the programs who can count on stockpiling them are at a major advantage. It’s an advantage they’d obviously prefer to lean on when possible, although blue blood programs now also try to leverage their ability to stockpile elite, true 4.4 speed as well.
For a few years back at Football Study Hall, I debated how to describe the offensive systems which still tried to win games by bludgeoning opponents with extra “mid-sized” players at tight end and fullback. My two favorite terms were “neanderball” and “the offense formerly known as pro-style” or TOFKAP for short.
A TOFKAP program, like Wisconsin or Les Miles’ LSU, would continue to have a fullback help try to bludgeon open pathways for the running back as a main component to the offensive strategy.
The NFL went in two or three different passing directions in the 80s and 90s, nearly all of which found better expressions using 11 personnel (one tight end, one running back) and a spread field over putting extra blockers on the field.
True pro-style offense nowadays relies on throwing the football to beat teams with the run game as a situational task. You run the ball when you need to pick up short-yardage or pound the ball home in the red zone, when the defense is overplaying the pass, or when you’re sitting on a big lead built with the passing game and want to run the clock out. Otherwise, you want to throw the ball around to favorable matchups in space, which is a more efficient way to get the ball across the field and into the end zone.
High level, championship football in college looks the same.
Defining features of the pro-spread offense
Pro-spread tactics generally work along these lines:
The goal is to break down defenses with dropback/progression passing.
The key to doing so is with receivers who can reliably get open in 1-on-1 matchups.
A deep threat is the most valuable piece, as in every offensive system, but then your “running back” or “run game” is often divided between the literal run game and then your possession receivers who do heavy work every week moving the chains.
Hybrid weapons, particularly at tight end, often do some of the heavy lifting by moving around to create distortions in the defense the quarterback can use to diagnose the structure and find the open man.
Dropback passing refers specifically to the sort of passing game where the quarterback isn’t necessarily getting the ball out quick but he isn’t using a run fake for play-action or taking a deeper drop either. Three-step passing in under center terms, in the shotgun he doesn’t have to execute a literal drop.
The best dropback passing puts five receivers into patterns but you can get by with four if the running back has to help protect. The quarterback has to be able to understand the coverages and potentially get from route to route until he finds a good throw to attempt.
Hybrids make it easier. Here’s an easy examples from the pros, Rob Gronkowski with the New England Patriots.
Gronk is on bottom with the other three receivers in 11 personnel lined up on the other side of the formation. Julian Edelman, their superstar (in the playoffs at least) slot, is the #3 receiver from the sideline to the trips side.
The Seahawks have hall of fame cornerback Richard Sherman on Edelman, their nickel defensive back is on the other slot, and the other cornerback is on the outside receiver. Who does that leave for Gronk? The Seahawks felt it best to put K.J. Wright on him, a 6-foot-4, 246 pound linebacker with an unbelievable knack for coverage. Doesn’t work though, obviously.
Tom Brady sees before the snap that Sherman is aligned to the field and it’s Wright going 1-on-1 with Gronk. He checks how the safety over Gronk responds after the snap and sees him dropping down to help on a slant by Gronk before being positioned to close on the running back, whom Brady and the Patriots were regularly hitting. Gronk executes a stutter step and runs by Wright, there’s no safety over the top to help, and it’s six points. Three seconds after the snap and the ball is already being delivered.
The key to the approach is Gronk’s ability to move around and not only vacillate between being a blocker and a receiver, although that certainly helped, but to be a matchup problem in coverage. How do you cover someone with his athleticism and size at 6-foot-6, 265 pounds? Wherever he moved defenses had to distort their structure to handle him (like lining a linebacker up as a cornerback) which created clearer reads for the quarterback.
How do you defend this? It gets pretty tough. Teams could play two-deep on both sides but the Patriots were certainly happy to throw underneath to Edelman and the running backs, or Gronk. Brady could sit back and make quick reads and accurate throws all day and there wasn’t much you could do about it but hope he missed some.
The 2019 LSU Tigers arrived at this level as well.
While Thaddeus Moss was the son of NFL HOF’er Randy Moss, he wasn’t actually the primary threat in the LSU offense. That’d have been Ja’Marr Chase and then Justin Jefferson, both of whom are lined up here to the trips side. The Clemson Tigers are in a sub-package with seven defensive backs on the field to try and match up but they still have both safeties shaded to the trips side, leaving Moss and star running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire in a 2-on-2 vs the Clemson running back and cornerback. They lose that battle and it’s touchdown LSU!
Pro-spread offense can mix run/pass conflicts with play-action but the main goal is to attack with the dropback passing game, everything else is an adjunct. A quarterback who knows how to spread the ball around in the dropback passing game paired with either elite receivers or dynamic hybrids is the most difficult thing to defend because of modern rules about hitting the quarterback, hitting receivers, and pass interference.
It’s no accident we now have Heisman winners like Alabama’s 6-foot-0, 170 pound receiver DeVonta Smith. Normally you wouldn’t expect a body which looks like it’s not designed for contact sports to physically dominate competition, but rules changes for player safety and his 4.49 40m dash speed (recorded in high school) and overall agility and skill are now major game changers.
With 117 catches in 2020 he produced 1,856 yards and 23 touchdowns. Compare that to Derrick Henry’s Heisman effort for Alabama in 2015, producing 2,219 yards and 28 touchdowns on 395 carries. Henry was more productive, but much less efficient and hitting the same marks as Smith required using three times as many possessions.
Alabama mixed those guys pretty heavily with a sort of “Air Coryell” approach to offense, mixing run/pass conflicts, but they still did so from 11 personnel with mobile tight ends.
Building a pro-spread offense in college
The more passing-oriented systems which have taken hold in the college game have been more “Air Coryell” in nature than West Coast. The West Coast offense is heavy on dropback passing where you beat teams with routes, sight adjustments and option routes (receivers running the optimal route to win a given snap), and the run game is what I described above, a situational feature.
The Air Coryell was historically an offense heavy on vertical passing, often enabled by play-action. With Ohio State’s breakthrough success in 2014 a lot of teams have oriented their offensive approach around pairing spread spacing and shotgun-option concepts with vertical passing.
The emergence of the RPO (run/pass option) has been key here. When you can pair a power run from 11 personnel with a fullback/tight end hybrid in the backfield and a vertical threat in the slot, you can really put safeties and defenses in a bind.
Defenses are getting wise to RPO football and run/pass conflicts though. What they don’t have great answers for is problems like “how do we cover Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney at the same time if the offense insists on throwing the ball to them regularly?”
As I argued in the last post, dropback passing from the spread is a higher form of offense with fewer answers from defenses. If you can get a skilled quarterback on the same page with NFL caliber receivers and multiple hybrid weapons at tight end and running back, you can solve most anything the defense tries to do.
The catch is that building these offenses is very difficult. You need a left tackle, for one, to build your protections around so your five-man crew can keep the quarterback upright long enough to get to his second or third read.
A deep threat wide receiver is extremely valuable as well. There’s no better way to clear out space underneath for your timing or option routes than to hold at least one safety deep on a hash to prevent a one-throw score.
The hybrid tight end who’s a matchup problem in space is sort of akin to a star running back in a power run game. You want a volume chain-mover who can pick up first downs regularly. Overall you want two really high level passing targets and then a few others who can do something when the defense focuses elsewhere.
Finally you need a quarterback who understands all the routes and adjustments, understands the protections in front of him, is capable of reading defenses and getting through progressions, and has the accuracy, toughness, and calm to handle a heavy load in terms of decision-making.
This last piece is probably one of the most poorly understood components of modern offense. We’ll break down the “field general” in a future post but modern quarterbacks are obviously very important, akin to having really good guards in the NCAA tournament. You can’t guide a high level, winning effort without great quarterback play.
Teams who want to win this way have to be all-in. You have to treat your quarterback like a pro quarterback, choosing him for his talent and then giving him the lion’s share of reps in practice so he can build the familiarity with protections, defense, and his receivers to handle a heavy load.
Alabama went all-in on sophomore Bryce Young last fall and were still pretty sporadic on offense until the end of the year when they started to put it together. Watching them in their close loss against Texas A&M I could seen signs they were close to breakthrough and made a note they might have the best team in the country by the playoffs. They did, obliterating Georgia in the SEC Championship game, but then they lost their NFL receivers and couldn’t get the ball across the finish line.
Texas had this formula right with Colt McCoy back in 2008 and 2009 but Mack Brown was OUT on keeping it up after his passer took a weird hit early in the National Championship Game and they had to plug in their freshman Garrett Gilbert who hadn’t yet received the benefit of getting major practice reps in deference to McCoy. The whole experience was clearly traumatic for the head coach.
In the wake of their defeat, Mack took Texas’ offense backwards, forcing Gilbert to operate more of a TOFKAP approach in 2010 (Texas went 5-7) and then hiring a new offensive coordinator with more of a power run game background (Boise State’s Bryan Harsin). His reasoning was, “if we rely on a power run game like Alabama did, we won’t be at the mercy of injury luck at quarterback…”
He successfully recruited 5-star running backs in consecutive classes (Malcom Brown and Jonathan Gray), did a lot of nothing with them, and was pushed out.
It is a risky approach, which is why many coaches have preferred not to pursue it, but again if you don’t then someone else will and you’ll be relying on THEIR lack of injury luck to beat them.
In short, the pro-spread offense is a very skill-intensive approach to offense which asks a lot of the players but has the most dangerous and complete answers for beating defenses. If you can build such an offense, you have a chance to win a Championship…if.
There are plenty of wide receivers with speed. Route running limits the universe, but not for a P5 team. The hybrid TE is tougher to find, mainly because of blocking temperament.
The QB doesn't have to have a cannon arm, but a deft touch long, and accuracy in the short and intermediate depths.
The real requirement is the back side Tackle, and a competent O line from there.
A RB with breakaway moves and YAC will make the offense virtually unstoppable.
I agree that tossing the ball around in space is the way to go. However, bc of the huge talent requirement for pro spreads, I don’t see it as a feasible system for all but maybe three to five schools. So where does that leave everyone else? Do you find the air raid systems next best? Particularly those that incorporate a TE? Kittley, for example, ran plenty of 10p drop back but he also used a TE / H back to run the ball and utilize hard play action. Same for Ross at Incarnate Word (now at Wazzou) who basically ran the same system. Then you have Dykes running the so called “power raid” which regularly uses a TE hybrid that will line up offset to the line or flexed out. Wouldn’t these type systems be better to emulate than a pro spread? Or better yet, what about the “super spreads” at Ole Miss, Arkansas, and Tennessee. I personally feel Kiffen is doing it right by mixing the “Briles raid” with some west coast concepts.