AERose;500809 said:
I would more readily attribute the success of more simple offenses to time management. College football has vastly more limited practice time than either NFL or even high school football; the most successful offenses often are those that know how to milk every minute of practice time. Coaches from the Hal Mumme/Mike Leach coaching tree are successful nearly everywhere they go, why? Because their practice techniques are geared perfectly to the time constraints of the college game. (With the drawback of sacrificing multiplicity for a singleminded emphasis on the single back shotgun set.*) As Lombardi said, only perfect practice makes perfect.
*I'll make this explicit: I don't want to hear about how Spread Is The Answer, the reductionist school of thought that we should jump on the bandwagon of whatever offense is en vogue. End of the day there's more than one way to skin a cat no matter how big my crush on Mike Leach is.
The constant player turnover inherent in the college game also means that you can't invest everything in developing a QB and an offense the way a pro team can. You need something simple enough that if you land a once in a lifetime gifted QB as a freshman, he can quickly learn the offense and play and you can get a few years out of him before he goes pro.
It is not really Tedford's job to develop QBs for the pro game. Moreover, despite the fact that we run a pro-style offense, we have not actually developed a lot of quarterbacks for the pro game. Boller played one year under Tedford, and Rodgers, two. Furthermore, playing in spread offenses has not stopped quarterbacks from getting drafted, getting drafted highly and making tons of money (a lot more than our pro-style tutored QBs).
I think there is value in running a pro style offense in recruiting players who want to play (and be successful) in the pros, but it should be a simplified version than can be made more complex as the QB spends more time in the system (which is what Harbaugh did with Luck at Stanford).
