The program has taken a sharp turn from the Lloyd Carr era into the Rich Rodriguez era. Many things have coincidentally changed along with the obvious – the stadium construction brings change to one of college footballs most sacred temples, the Spring Game now is an event that should soon attract 80,000 – 100,000 fans, Rich Rod doesn’t mind talking details and being cordial with the media, and the offense is no longer the pro-style offense that utilizes your typical, tall, John Navarre-esque drop back quarterback. In light of such an offensive scheme change, it’s beneficial to holistically understand the basics of the scheme.

Generally speaking, the spread offense makes it hard for opposing teams to prepare by forcing them to have to defend everything – no cheating against the spread. The Michigan Wolverine spread offense attack will stretche defenses horizontally – effectively widening the field for the offense, forcing the defense to defend more space, and making it easier on the quarterback to read the defense. The defense naturally has to declare what they are doing because they spread out and get out of the box – also creating some undesirable mismatches for the defense. A well-oiled spread attack is very dangerous and can be a nightmare to defend, especially when the QB can do more than just.

So if the spread offense is so hard to defend, why doesn’t everybody run it? Oh right, there are some drawbacks that are worthy of mentioning. The QB is going to inevitably take some physical pounding and unless he has great natural passing ability – he may not get enough dedicated time in practice to polish passing skills. So it is a must to have multiple capable quarterbacks in case your starter gets dinged up and can’t play. In considering the 2010 recruiting class, Michigan will have at least 4 quarterbacks that have the athletic ability that fits into the infrastructure of the offense.

Versions of the spread offense around the Big 10
Pure zone read option teams: Michigan, Illinois, Penn State, Indiana
Run first spread: Northwestern
Pass happy dink and dunk spread: Purdue, Minnesota
Pro-style teams that adapt to the spread based on personnel: OSU, Wisconsin, Iowa, MSU

Here is a video of Rich Rod talking through the different options that the scheme allows for – enabling the quarterback to have as many as 4 different possible options and decisions to make on any given play. The zone read is relatively simple- the QB reads the end and makes a decision to hand-off or keep the ball if the end bites on the back. In any given option play, there are effectively four possible decisions or options that the QB chooses from in a split second: inside run, outside pitch, QB keep or throwing some type of bubble screen. Check out the vid to hear Rich Rod go through some of the options while he had Pat White at West Virginia.

Here are some numbers that Rich Rod’s spread offense piled up at West Virginia. Let’s hope we see similar results in the near future in the Big House – how about we start on let’s say…September 5th, 2009.

West Virginia ‘07: #3 in rush offense 297.23 ypg, #1 in rush ypc 6.15 ypc, #9 scoring offense 39.6 ppg
West Virginia ‘06: #2 in rush offense 303.00 ypg, #1 in rush ypc 6.68 ypc, #3 scoring offense 38.8 ppg
West Virginia ‘05: #4 in rush offense 272.42 ypg, #11 in rush ypc 5.23 ypc, #31 scoring offense 32.1 ppg
West Virginia ‘04: #7 in rush offense 252.83 ypg, #10 in rush ypc 5.14 ypc, #29 scoring offense 30.1 ppg

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