Keep Your Pants On

The newest fad sweeping college football these days is the dreaded “Spread” offense. It’s all you hear about now: this team plays the Spread! How can we defend against the Spread!

No, I am talking about The Spread offense and how it is causing coaches (all but one of them) and players and fans and the media and probably 8 of the Supreme Court justices to lose sleep and tear their hair out. (John Paul Stevens is probably not worried about it. He’s been around long enough to know that this, too, shall pass.)

And pass-heavy offenses aren’t anything new. Am I the only person who remembers the 2002 Oakland Raiders running the ball only 3 times—in a playoff game? That wasn’t anything new for the Raiders that season: Rich Gannon led the league in passing yards, but Oakland’s running back (Charlie Garner) was 22nd in rushing, and despite that they rolled through the season and made it to the Superbowl. Where they crashed into Tampa Bay and a defense that understood how to play against The Spread/Run&Shoot/Pass heavy offenses. And the Raiders lost.

Bret Bielema is in his second year as the Wisconsin Badgers’ coach. He was hand-picked by the great Barry Alvarez to take over Wisconsin’s proud football team; Bielema was the defensive coordinator under Alvarez when he was tapped to make $7.5 million dollars over five years as the head coach and was heralded as a defensive-minded coach who would take the Badgers to the top.

And Bielema, as you would expect of a defensive whiz, has an answer to The Spread offense. That answer is: fashion.

Bret Bielema has used fashion this year to attack the Dreaded Spread offense and take UW to a 6-2 record:

He changed Wisconsin’s uniforms - -but wisely did not tell the players until just before the first game. Why? He didn’t want them too distracted by the thought of the new uniforms. (Even then, the Coach looked at his plan in hindsight and saw it could be improved: “We had a guy model it for them and the players responded overwhelmingly in favor. They stood up and started yelling and screaming. I kind of wish I had saved it until right before kickoff because they were definitely jacked Thursday night.”) Lesson learned, Coach. But Wisconsin won, and that’s all that counts.

Bielema did not rest on his laurels, though. He knows the importance of fashion in the football world. Having done all he could with the players – he thought, more on that in a minute—Bielema brought the fans in on it, asking that they wear red and only red to the games. ``I'd love to walk into Camp Randall and see a sea of red", The Coach has said. `One of the things I began to see and experience in college football is people walk into an environment like that, with everybody all in one color, it's kind of an overwhelming thing for everybody to be a part of.'' (And you knew he was serious, because he dictated that in an e-mail.)

I don’t know at this point what might be up Coach Bielema’s sleeve, so to speak, in the future. Maybe no sleeves at all. Maybe he’ll change the uniforms again and emulate the Colorado Rockies’ “Cogswell Cogs” look. Maybe he’ll have all the fans wear Groucho glasses to confound opponents.

 

(And you can see this week's Incredibly Accurate Predictions!).