You want to know what I miss most about the old days of college football? The option. I mean the real, triple-option football that made defensive coordinators pull their hair out and gave undersized programs a fighting chance. We ran it under Jim Wacker in the late 80s and early 90s and nobody knew how to stop it because they never saw it. You look at the game today and everything is spread, RPO, shotgun on every down, and I just think about how we used to line up with a fullback three yards deep and let the quarterback read the defensive end. It was pure chess, not this track meet nonsense.
I remember sitting in Amon Carter watching us run the veer against Texas A&M back in 1989 and the Aggies had no idea what hit them. That was beautiful football. The quarterback would put the ball on the fullbacks hip, the fullback would slam into the line, and if the defense crashed down you pulled it and pitched to the trailing back. Three guys could beat eleven if they executed. Now every offense looks the same. Every team runs the same four verticals and the same mesh concept. Where is the creativity? Where is the discipline?
Coach Patterson understood the value of that style when he first took over. We did not have the athletes to line up and beat people straight up in the early 2000s but we could run the option and control the clock and keep the ball away from better teams. That is how we built the foundation for the 2010 Rose Bowl team. You cannot tell me that watching LaDainian Tomlinson take a pitch and turn the corner was not better than watching some quarterback throw a screen pass for two yards.
The option offense taught toughness. It taught assignment football. You had to be disciplined on every single snap. If you missed your read the play was dead. If you made the wrong pitch the ball was on the ground. That is real football. Not this nonsense where you throw it 50 times a game and hope your quarterback scrambles for first downs. We lost something when the spread took over and I do not think we are ever getting it back.