Howard Schnellenberger was asked about the Middle Tennessee spread offense that dominated his defense in Saturday’s 38-14 loss.
“They got us going, the speed of their offense and we knew it, that’s what they’ve beaten us with the last three years and it beats a lot of people,” he said.
Here is where his answer took a bizarre twist.
“You might want to say, why haven’t we used that kind of an offense? We have that kind of offense when we need it. I haven’t seen too many people win a national championship or win a very high prize with that kind of an offense.”
Huh?
First of all, FAU basically runs the same pro-style offense Schnellenberger ran when he was coaching at Miami 30 years ago. The legendary coach has stuck by his philosophy and mostly with positive results – including a few seasons at FAU – when he’s had the right quarterback.
But recently, FAU’s offense has been stuck in the stone ages and if the Owls have the capability of spreading it out on a consistent basis, and the spread “beats a lot of people” what is Schnellenberger waiting for?
FAU is 0-7, has lost 10 straight, is 119th out of 120 teams in the division formerly known as I-A in total and scoring offense, is 117th in rushing offense and 112th in passing offense.
Need I go further? OK.
First downs are a cause for celebration and if not for a late touchdown run by third team QB Stephen Curtis Saturday, FAU would have had more fumbles (8) than points and just as many punts (7). The Owls have scored two touchdowns in their new stadium. The opponents have scored eight.
Who needs to improve on that?
By the way, major college teams have been winning national championships with variations of the spread for more than 20 years. Dennis Erickson’s Miami teams spread the field on almost every play. And more recently, Florida and Auburn, to name a few, ran variations of the spread.
And the team that has shared or won the Sun Belt title outright for the last five seasons, Troy, runs the spread pass.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Football , Tom D'Angelo . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.
Leave a Reply We'd like your thoughts on this story. I appreciate your willingness to share them. At PalmBeachPost.com , we want to avoid comments that are obscene, hateful, racist or otherwise inappropriate. If you post offensive comments, we will delete them as soon as we can. If you see such comments, please report them to us by clicking this link .
Tim Burke, Executive Editor, The Palm Beach Post.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment