I haven't seen in a decade? A real, honest-to-goodness option offense. The kind that makes linebackers look foolish and grinds a defense into dust over four quarters. everybody is out there running these gimmicky spread systems with a thousand transfers, and they call it innovation. It’s not. The real innovation was a coach like Dennis Erickson in the late 80s, with a quarterback who could make a read and a fullback who would lower his shoulder. That was football. Now it’s just a track meet with helmets.
I read that list of teams with post-spring questions, all these “CFP contenders” with their portal-heavy lines and quarterback competitions, and it’s the same story everywhere. They’ve traded identity for a collection of rented players. What was our identity in the glory years? Toughness. You knew when you played a Mike Price team, you were going to get hit in the mouth for sixty minutes. The option, when run right, is the ultimate expression of that. It’s a mentality. It says we are going to be more disciplined, more physical, and we are going to break your will. It’s not about having the five-star athlete at every spot, it’s about having eleven guys who know their job better than you know yours.
Look at the mess now. Oklahoma State brings in fifty transfers. Fifty! That’s not a team, that’s a convention. How do you install an offense with any complexity, any soul, when half the roster has been there for three months? The option required repetition, trust, timing that was built over years. Ryan Leaf didn’t learn his offense in a spring portal window. Drew Bledsoe didn’t master the playbook by watching clips on a tablet. They put in the work, with the same guys, season after season. That’s how you build something that lasts.
The beauty of it was its simplicitty and its brutality. It didn’t matter if the defense knew it was coming. Could they stop it? The dive, the quarterback keep, the pitch. Three simple choices that demanded perfect execution from everybody. It created legends out of hard-nosed kids who would never get a look today because they don’t have a flashy “NIL valuation.” It was the great equalizer. It’s why a program like ours could go into Autzen or Husky Stadium and come out with a win. We didn’t out-talent them. We out-schemed them and out-toughed them.
Now, the game is played in space by athletes who are basically professionals, and I get it, the world moves on. But something fundamental was lost. The chess match between the quarterback’s eyes and the defensive end’s leverage. The sound of a pulling guard and a fullback’s pads popping. The entire stadium holding its breath on third-and-two, knowing exactly what was coming, and being powerless to stop it. That was art. What we have now is just commerce. A soulless transaction of talent, where the system is secondary to the star rating. They’ve forgotten that the scheme, the true identity of a team, used to be the star.