The Spread Offense: “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.”

It’s no secret that in college football over the past decade the spread offense has gone from obscurity to obsession. ESPN.com is reporting that 46 48 of the 120 teams in the FBS ran a spread-based offense or variation last season (at least 75% of the time), or plan to in 2009. Among them are two recent National Champions, Florida and Texas, two traditional Big Ten powers that have recently gone spread happy, Michigan and Penn State, and mid-major upstarts such as Utah, Hawaii, BYU, and Tulsa.

Yep, he's down with the rise of the spread.

Of the major conferences the Big 12 has most openly embraced the spread, sporting seven spread-based offenses (how Oklahoma’s souped-up spread was omitted is beyond me), five of which have spent time in the top-10 in the previous two seasons. The conference tied for least teams operating the spread last season? The ACC, with two – Clemson and Georgia Tech, which runs a ground-based triple-option spread. Virginia, which is listed by ESPN, has not previously run a spread offense and is implementing it for the first time this fall under new OC Gregg Brandon.

Could the ACC’s apparent aversion to the spread help explain the league’s relative lack of out of conference success since it expanded to 12 teams in 2005? Neither of the league’s traditional powers – FSU and Miami – have made the jump to the spread and both have floundered since league expansion.

Al Groh, in an interview with Heather Dinich posted on July 21 on ESPN.com, had this to say about the scarcity of the spread amongst ACC schools:

It gets trendy within leagues. What you have to go against, whether it’s offense or defense, you have to prepare for those things. You kind of become influenced and spend more time looking at those things and become influenced by those things. And of course a lot of it has to do with the philosophical backgrounds and beliefs that coaches bring with them. And really your background, too. At a point, sometimes what you know how to teach best, what you know how to utilize during the course of a game is the best for a particular team as opposed to something that is intriguing, but when certain things happen during a game maybe you just don’t have the wherewithal to make those in-game decisions because you don’t have enough familiarity with the system. Therefore, a team would be better off with something they’re really fluent in.

Groh also noted that the additon of Brandon to the staff has increased the ability to scout defensively against the spread:

It’s helped us to establish a significant period of experimentation. We put some things out there and run them, and we really haven’t tried to defend our team so much as let’s just run our stuff and see what we like and what we don’t like. It has certainly been helpful to us in that degree.

Something worth exploring in the next few weeks as football season continues to approach.