Imagine a reality — not this one, sadly, not at the moment — in which defensive coordinators by the dozens are losing sleep over Brendon Lewis.
Will he pitch? Will he keep? Will he throw? Will the CU quarterback undress my safeties on national television? Will he fry my linebackers’ brains as if they were tiny pink pizza rolls?
“You know, when we played that offense,” longtime Buffs assistant coach and former CU QB Darian Hagan said of the triple option, eyes twinkling like a summer night on the Sawatch Range, “we knew, and teams knew when they played us, that it was going to be a bloodbath.”
Now Hagan’s Buffs (0-1) are the ones trying to keep things from getting messy this weekend. CU’s Saturday foe, Air Force (1-0), runs the triple option the way Count Basie ran an orchestra — it’s precise, tight and dynamic, with moments that’ll absolutely take your breath away.
Northern Iowa, no FCS mugs, knew darn well what was coming last Saturday at the Academy. The Falcons rushed for 582 yards and five touchdowns anyway.
“They do their system really well,” CU coach Karl Dorrell noted earlier this week, “and it’s challenging for a lot of teams.”
The triple option is to NCAA football what the Princeton offense is to college hoops: The great equalizer. A system that forces more talented teams — the Buffs have the better, faster, stronger players in Saturday’s tussle, that’s not open to debate — out of their respective comfort zones. Preparing for a system that almost no major college team runs is like spending a week, as Broncos fans may discover next month in London, figuring out how to drive on the wrong side of the road.
But here’s the thing: When used right, the wrong side of the road wins. Since 2007, AFA coach Troy Calhoun has won at least seven games 10 times. Not counting 2020’s pandemic mess, the Falcons have won at least nine games in a season five different times since 2010.
That said, Boise State isn’t USC. New Mexico isn’t Arizona State. Could Calhoun’s system work at a Power 5 level? More to the point, could it work at CU, where Hagan ran it seamlessly as the quarterback who steered his Buffs to a national title in 1990?
“The answer is, ‘Absolutely,’” former CU coach and CBS Sports analyst Rick Neuheisel told me recently. “And I say to anybody that will listen, (it’s especially helpful) when you have a deficit as an offense, whether that’s a speed deficit or a size deficit.”
Neuheisel even offers up a Power 5 example: Vanderbilt. As a first-year coach at a perennial SEC also-ran, Clark Lea last fall led the Commodores to just two wins — and one of them was in Fort Collins against Steve Addazio’s CSU Rams.
“I said (to him), ‘Clark, you cannot win at Vandy playing a traditional offense, not in the SEC, there are too many good players, you have to have a QB run game there,’” the former Buffs coach recalled.
“Eventually, they started to move toward this kid at quarterback named Mike Wright. Now, two weeks in, they’ve gone to some QB-run, and they’ve scored 105 points (on Hawaii and Elon). It took them eight games to score 106 points last year.”
With Wright leading the attack on the ground, Vandy ran for 404 yards against the Rainbow Warriors. The ‘Dores piled up 179 more on the Phoenix.
“My point is, the QB-run threat, option football,” Neuheisel stressed, “it forces defenses to behave.”
When coach Paul Johnson hopped from Navy to Georgia Tech for the 2008 season, he brought the Middies’ triple-option game with him to the ACC. Johnson’s approach landed the Ramblin’ Wreck a 19-7 record during his first two seasons at the helm.
Over 11 seasons in Atlanta, Johnson led the Yellow Jackets to eight bowl appearances, winning three of them. Tech won or shared four division titles over that span and averaged 7.5 wins per season.
“I think you’d have to be so committed to it,” Pac-12 Network analyst Yogi Roth said. “I call (the Pac-12) the conference of QBs. To not have one of those, on paper, would be really interesting. I’d be curious. We haven’t seen it.”
But what if that rarity became a good thing?
What if Pac-12 teams had to sweat and grind and groan to prepare for this schematic curveball the way the Buffs had to sweat and grind and groan to get ready for the Zoomies? What if it gave CU football an identity again, even if it turned off some elite football recruits in the process?
“Could it work? Sure,” Roth said. “Will it happen? I’d be shocked.”
Roth and Hagan make two very salient arguments against it: One, the NCAA rules that ban cut blocking outside the tackle box. Two, recruiting — high-school and grass-roots programs have largely replaced the veer with the spread, and NFL-hungry passers and catchers may not want to play it.
“I think (the triple option) could work anywhere,” Roth countered. “(But) pure passers, guys that want to go to a Power 5 school, they want to throw it 35 times a game and they want to go to the NFL.”
Although that last point was basically Nebraska’s argument for abandoning the option back in 2003, too. How’d that one work out for the Cornhuskers, given a generation’s hindsight?
