Why the Veer and Shoot has taken hold in the SEC

The SEC's love of the "Mint front" and big, physical D-line play has encouraged offenses to find workarounds.

One of the more shocking developments of the 2022 season for me was observing the extent to which SEC defensive coaches tried to employ the “Mint front” defense against the Veer and Shoot.

Alabama and Kentucky alike both played their 3-3-5 Mint-based defenses against the Tennessee Volunteers and got absolutely smacked. This was after some other squads had already made similar attempts, the Mint is the most popular scheme in the league.

The Vols ran the ball 39 times for 182 yards at 4.7 ypc on Alabama while throwing it 31 times for 385 yards at 12.4 ypa with five touchdowns to one interception .

Then they ran it 40 times for 177 yards at 4.4 ypc on Kentucky while throwing it 25 times for 245 yards at 9.8 ypa with three touchdowns to zero interceptions.

Iowa State’s preferred fronts are the more popular method in the Big 12 for a reason, the tite/Mint fronts don’t work particularly well against RPO spread offenses and certainly not against the uber-RPO spread Veer and Shoot offense.

As I wrote earlier in this week, the Veer and Shoot has started to take over across the SEC with offensive coordinators from the scheme now installed at Tennessee, Auburn, arguably Ole Miss, and in future SEC school Oklahoma. It’s also now spreading back into Big 12 country at TCU, into the Pac-12 at Colorado, and potentially into the Big 10 at Minnesota.

The Mint front was designed to help SEC squads leverage the advantages of being well stocked with big people on the D-line in order to combat spread offenses. The Veer and Shoot is perfectly calibrated to blitzkrieg around that issue like the Wehrmact circling around the Maginot Line.