In the Place He Belongs

WVU's Rodriguez Uses a Unique Spread Offense to Reignite Alma Mater

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Rich Rodriguez, the son of a West Virginia coal miner who had been laid off, started receiving the offers late in his high school career. Marshall University wanted him to play football and, even more so, basketball, and coaches there recruited him hard.

But Marshall was not enough for Rodriguez. He needed more.

"I wanted to play in the biggest arena possible," Rodriguez said.

To Rodriguez, that meant West Virginia football, so he decided to become a walk-on. He earned a scholarship as a defensive back by his sophomore year, graduated in 1986 and, after a circuitous journey, became head coach in 2001. Now, nearly 25 years after first arriving in Morgantown, Rodriguez is trying to make West Virginia football not just the biggest and best in his eyes, but in all of college football's as well.

Thanks to Rodriguez's unique offensive scheme and the two speed burners that make it go -- running back Steve Slaton and quarterback Pat White -- the Mountaineers shocked Georgia in the Sugar Bowl last season, raising expectations and attention here to unprecedented levels.

Since West Virginia won the Big East last season, 1,500 new athletic donors have arrived. Ticket sales are the best they've been in a decade. National title hopes and predictions have been thrown about locally and nationally.

"Do I notice it?" White said of the program's rising profile. "I don't have much choice but to notice it."

And it all starts with Rodriguez's offense, a unique spread-'em-out and run-'em-over, fast-paced attack that leaves defenses breathless. The spread offense has been the craze in college football, but no one's operates quite like Rodriguez's. It's smash-mouth football with a modern twist as opposed to typical, pass-happy spreads.

The Mountaineers ran the ball 625 times last season, second in the nation to Navy, and ran for 272.4 yards a game, fourth in the country. West Virginia passed for just 116.5 yards per game, tied with Navy for 115th in the country, and threw 193 passes the entire season.

"Just because you go four wide doesn't mean you're going to pass," WVU fullback Owen Schmitt said. "It's just spreading the field, spreading everyone out."

West Virginia's rushes come at defenses in a wave. The Mountaineers run their offense almost exclusively without a huddle, which does not allow a defense to change personnel or catch its breath.

They practice at a fast pace, "the fastest pace I've ever heard of," WVU guard Jeremy Sheffey said. They also can adjust tempo during a game. If they need a breather, they spend more time at the line of scrimmage. If they sense an opponent is tiring, they speed up time between snaps and bear down.

"That's where a lot of people get in trouble against us," Sheffey said. "They're not used to not being able to have the time in between, to have the time in the huddle and to get together and adjust. We just keep going. To a lot of teams, it seems like we're running a two-minute drill the whole time."

The Mountaineers are able to do so in part because of small, quick linemen who tend to be in better shape than the behemoths they block. At 315 pounds, Jeremy Isdaner is the heaviest West Virginia lineman who plays in their rotation, and most weigh less than 300. Center Dan Mozes, West Virginia's best lineman and perhaps the best in the nation, weighs 290.

The line uses a zone blocking scheme, meaning each lineman is responsible for an area -- not a player -- on run plays. Those blocks are the first step in the progression that occurs on every down for West Virginia. Depending on the play, as many as four or five outcomes could occur based on what the defense shows before the snap and how it reacts after.

On running plays, White reads the defensive end like an option. If he hands off, Slaton reads Schmitt, who is reading the offensive line's blocks. If White keeps it, he reads other blocks and defensive movements to know where to go. Some plays, White has the option to run or pass. Whatever the defense does in any circumstance, Rodriguez's offense has a response.

"There's a checklist going through your head a million miles an hour during the play," Schmitt said. "Different things happen, so you're thinking, you're having fun, you're flying around. It's fun."

The system was born out of desperation, and not as a running attack, but primarily a passing offense. In 1990, Rodriguez went 1-7-1 in his first year as head coach at Glenville State, an NAIA school in West Virginia. After that season, Rodriguez looked for something different, so he and his staff studied film of run-and-shoot offenses and thought they "could maybe get a quarterback and a couple receivers and find five guys up front to get run over slowly."

His Glenville teams threw the ball on about 65 percent of the plays, Rodriguez said, and they improved to 4-5-1 the next season and 10-3 two years later. By 1997, Rodriguez had established himself as an innovative offensive mind, and Tommy Bowden hired him to be his offensive coordinator at Tulane. His offense, which threw the ball about 60 percent of the time, helped Tulane finish 12-0 in 1998 with Shaun King at quarterback.

Bowden was hired at Clemson and Rodriguez followed. After two years of Woody Dantzler, the offense became about a 50-50 mix of run and pass, with more designed quarterback runs to accommodate Dantzler's running ability.

Rodriguez's offense has evolved from the Glenville days, but it's roughly the same. Though they're seldom utilized, the same passing plays that King ran at Tulane remain in the playbook.

Rodriguez has merely tailored the offense to his personnel, and he found a perfect match in White and Slaton, two unknown freshmen who didn't start until midway through the season but enter this year as Heisman hopefuls.

White is pure electricity at quarterback, a player who can dash from the pocket and, in an instant, race into the open field. Slaton, a lightly recruited track star in high school, runs a 4.3 40-yard dash.

"We have it down to a T," Slaton said. "We have a fit for it."

About 900 high school coaches and 30 Division I coaches have come to Morgantown to study Rodriguez's offense and share ideas in the offseason. He's had to add new wrinkles to the offense because of the way it's spreading, but there's no reason to overhaul it. That offense has made West Virginia one of the most hyped football teams in the country, just as Rodriguez envisioned.

"Let's embrace the expectations," Rodriguez said, "because if you aspire to be a top program, it's not big news to have high expectations. They talk about it at USC and Texas and Florida State and those places every year about competing nationally. That's what we want our program to be. The Sugar Bowl helped put us in that light, and hopefully we'll keep working to try to stay up there."