Why Michigan's in Trouble

When women and young children watch football on television they consistently ask the same question:  Why are they running the ball directly into the heart of the defense when there's all that open space to the outside?  For anyone who has ever played football at any level, the answer is relatively simple: By stacking the line of scrimmage, having some variation of two running backs, one or two tight ends, and modest spacing between offensive lineman, you can be relatively sure the defense on the other side of the ball will sport a similarly condensed formation.   This narrowing of the field favors whomever is bigger and stronger by decreasing the importance of speed.  The closer a defender is to a blocker when the ball is snapped, the easier it will be for the blocker to block, or to at least to get to his assignment and occupy his attention. As a defender, you cannot make a tackle when you're being blocked, and, more often than not, you cannot make a tackle soon enough even if simply occupied.    

At some point, having encountered bigger, stronger defenses with very little or no success, a coach somewhere reluctantly, and perhaps inadvertently, heeded the advice of football novices everywhere. If I recruit more speed on the offensive line and at each and every skill position, I can spread out our formations, utilizing one back sets, empty backfields, and numerous receivers.  So equipped, defenses will have to spread the field, taking defenders outside of the box and into open spaces.  Having created bigger gaps in the defense, I can get my faster players the ball in those open spaces before the defenders get there.   

This has proven boundlessly successful.  We needn't look very far for some prime examples. Urban Meyer has already won a national championship at Florida with the spread offense. West Virginia, under Rich Rodriquez, put on offensive showcases on the ground and through the air by utilizing this approach.  So much so, in fact, it got him the job in Ann Arbor. Big time college football is big business, however, and defensive coordinators don't make big bucks for hopelessly wringing their hands.  The more successful and prevalent an offensive scheme, the more attention it will get from defensive masterminds.  And the process has already begun. Larger defensive backs are being moved closer to the line of scrimmage at linebacker, larger linebackers moving to defensive end, and larger defensive ends sliding over into interior linemen.  

Michigan will undoubtedly struggle this year without the speed to adequately execute Rich Rodriguez' spread offense.  By the time his recruiting classes have graduated from high school and are enrolled at Michigan, defenses will have caught up.  Make no mistake, the spread is not better than other more traditional offenses.  It is superior, however, against bigger, stronger, slower defenses.  In terms of $ucce$$ off the field, Rodriguez made the right decision by fleeing West Virginia for Ann Arbor.  On the field, however, he'll be having an ideological crisis in the not too distant future.  Only then will we see what kind of coach he is; one who is able to fine tune his spread offense with some of the X's and O's it isn't known for, or a coach who will struggle to readjust in his quest to return Michigan's program to greatness.