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By BEN MCCARTY
News staff writer
August 23, 2008
“Everything that can be invented has already been
invented”
– Reportedly said by U.S. Patent Commissioner
Charles Duell, 1899
When football first rose to national prominence in the late 19th
and early 20th century the forward pass was outlawed and the
sport resembled a less civilized version of rugby. And the
football powers that be liked it that way. The sport seemed
perfectly fine to them, so why would anyone try to change a
sport that was already great?
For all the flash and spectacle that are modern big-time
athletics, most sports have not changed that much at their core
since their official rules were first laid down.
Baseball? It now takes four pitches to earn a walk instead of
three. That’s about it. Oh, and the designated hitter rule, but
this baseball purist is not even going to go there.
Basketball? They decided it would be much more practical to cut
out the bottoms of the peach baskets and allow three-pointers.
Otherwise the biggest changes have been in the athletes becoming
bigger, faster, and stronger.
Then you come to football. The difference between the modern
game and the original could not be starker.
When Pop Warner revolutionized the passing game with his
Carlisle Indian squad and showed that football offenses could be
more than just a bunch of big brutes trying to push around
smaller brutes, most of the football mainstream had a collective
heart attack.
Look at it today: Not only is the forward pass encouraged, teams
cannot survive without an effective quarterback to pass the
ball.
But still, one would think that five receiver sets, the spread
offense, or the run and shoot would have stretched the football
game as far as it could go. Just as the original footballers
thought before Pop Warner got a hold of the sport, there can’t
be anything left to change, can there?
Enter the A-11 offense. American football’s founding fathers
would be rolling over in there graves. The system features not
one, but two quarterbacks. Every player on the field checks in
as an eligible receiver, meaning any five of them could be
heading down field. The offense, created by a pair of high
school coaches in California, takes advantage of technicalities
in the rule book unique to the high school game.
The offense can be used to create a virtually unlimited numbers
of plays from the line of scrimmage, including options, option
passes, reverse passes, double passes and more.
The A-11 is just the latest evolution in a long line of attempts
to out-game the opposition.
Warner invented the double-wing, a power-based running offense
to outwit popular defenses of the time; Red Hickey designed the
Shotgun offense to give the quarterback more time to throw; Bill
Walsh designed the West Coast offense, a short passing attack to
move down the field chunks at a time; and Mike Martz developed
“The Greatest Show on Turf,” a record-setting, pass-happy attack
that the St. Louis Rams used to win a Super Bowl.
By and large, high school football will likely always been a
running-dominated game, but that doesn’t mean coaches are not
willing to try new and different things.
In Cascade Locks this week, I listened to coach Ryan Nolin
ponder how best to use his personnel. For the Pirates last year
the most successful elements of the offense consisted of trick
plays, which Nolin said his team seemed to grasp better than the
standard play book. So the Pirates may very well be following in
the footsteps of Boise State coach Chris Peterson and come ready
to play with a bag full of tricks.
In Hood River, the HRVHS football team has moved away from a
power running game to a spread option offense that emphasizes
the short passing game.
The change from the double (and single) wing offense for HRV was
a drastic one, after having run the system with success for
years. But in football, it seems like everyone eventually
switches to the next big thing.
With each evolution in football systems, it becomes increasingly
clear that everything that can be invented in football offense
definitely has not been invented yet.
What could be next?
How about a system with not one, not two, but three
quarterbacks? Why not four while we are at it?
I’m sure in a world of mad genius coaches who are willing to
push the boundaries the sport, somebody, somewhere, could find a
way to make it work.
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