The premise has always been this: To win football games, you have to have a bruising defense, a power running game, and an ability to control the ball and the clock. You win by out-muscling and out-manning the other team. Three yards and a cloud of dust.
Two coaches have turned that idea completely on its head.
Auburn’s offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn and Oregon head coach Chip Kelly have taken their teams to undefeated regular seasons and a berth in the Bowl Championship Series national championship game in Glendale in January.
Only in football’s unflinching meritocracy would these two coaches be where they are. Malzahn was a high school coach in Arkansas in 2005. Kelly was the offensive coordinator at New Hampshire in 2007. Now they are the architects of two of the most advanced and potent offenses in college football history.
Oregon’s football team has been the subject of breathless media coverage all year. Its “Blur Offense” is a garishly clad, ostentatiously fast, spectacularly explosive unit that gains strength as the game progresses. Oregon’s modus operandi this season has been to trade blows with opponents for two and even three quarters, and then zoom past them with seeming ease in the fourth. Oregon doesn’t even worry about time of possession; what matters instead is number of plays run. This gives the team a phlegmatic ability to ignore the good and bad of the early game, knowing that their system and conditioning will win in the end.
Oregon’s practices, too, are unconventional. Kelly blares popular music, never runs traditional sprints for conditioning, and even practices hard on the day before a game, when most teams practice at a sedate “walk-through” pace.
Auburn’s follows many of the same philosophies. Malzahn aims to run 80 plays per game at a similar breakneck pace. While a high school coach, he wrote the book — it’s called The Hurry-Up No Huddle: An Offensive Philosophy — on fast-paced football. His goal is to reach and win what he calls “the fifth quarter,” a part of the game that most teams never face (and so never condition for) because slower tempo offenses allow more rest time.
Malzahn uses motion and formations to mask what is actually a fairly simple power-running and play action passing offense. While Auburn’s fast pace is mostly original, he also takes proven concepts and adjusts them to make them more relevant to the modern game, and to fit his players’ skills.
Both coaches are the kind of innovators that draw support and attention. But while Malzahn is a guru—a first-generation thinker—Kelly has been described as “a sponge,” learning from and adapting the best ideas from around the country. This, too, is part of innovation.
One of the best things about football is the way the game changes to reflect the times. If baseball’s great charm is its continuity with the past, football’s charisma comes from its relentless embrace of the new. From the Air Raid offense to the Tampa 2 defense to the Pistol to the fast-break offense, there’s always a new foray into unexplored ground. There’s always a coach willing to do what’s never been done.
The national championship game may look like chaos. It will be fast-paced, loud and frenetic. Commentators may struggle to describe what they’re seeing. The old school may scoff.
But Malzahn and Kelly are innovators. They thrive amidst chaos and change. And there are plenty of American institutions — from government to business to education — that could learn from them. What America may need most is more Gus Malzahns and Chip Kellys.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
