Three and Out by John U. Bacon Read Free Book Online Page A

use the shotgun formation. Drenning didn’t know it, of course, but he was talking to the right guy. Rodriguez had been thinking about using the shotgun on every play since his conversation with Coach Weir on the high school sidelines. The Monday before the game against Wingate, Rodriguez surprised his quarterback by asking, “How often do you want to run out of the gun?”
    â€œCoach, I’ll run the clock out in the gun if you want.”
    Rodriguez nodded. Ideas that had been knocking around in his head for years started coming together. He thought back to his days as a defensive back and asked himself: What was the toughest thing to defend? The answer came to him in a snap: the two-minute drill.
    Rodriguez surprised Drenning when he took it to its logical extreme: “Let’s see if we can do that the whole game.” They would skip the huddle, go to a shotgun snap on every play, put four or five receivers on the field, spread them out as far as they could, and throw the ball all over the place—and keep it up for sixty minutes.
    Like Army in 1945, Wingate still won—but barely, escaping 17–15.
    Using their never-ending two-minute drill, the Pioneers won three of their last four games. Rodriguez was onto something.
    â€œWhatever incarnation of Rich’s offense exists today,” Drenning told Tim Layden, “it was born that day when we played Wingate. And he turned the place around pretty quickly after that.”
    During a routine practice the next season, in 1992, Drenning inadvertently provided another piece of the puzzle for his coach, who was smart enough to recognize it when he saw it.
    As Tim Layden recounts in his excellent book Blood, Sweat and Chalk , Drenning bobbled the snap and failed to hand the ball to the running back in time. Normally when this happens, the quarterback simply follows the running back to salvage what he can, but Drenning noticed that the backside defensive end had already started bolting down the line to tackle the running back, whom he thought had the ball. Drenning decided to go in the opposite direction, to the spot where the backside defensive end had started—which was now completely vacant.
    Rodriguez blew the whistle. But he wasn’t mad. He was curious. “Why did you do that?”
    â€œDo what?” asked Drenning.
    â€œWhy did you run that way?”
    â€œThe end pinched,” Drenning said, though he could have just as easily quoted Wee Willie Keeler: “I hit ’em where they ain’t.”
    Every football coach in the country has seen his quarterback bobble a snap and run the wrong way on a broken play. And thousands of those quarterbacks probably did so for the same reason Drenning did. But not every coach had the curiosity to ask why and the insight to recognize what he’d just seen and heard for what it could be.
    In fact, only one coach did: Rich Rodriguez.
    *   *   *
    Yost didn’t invent the forward pass, of course. But when he saw Benny Friedman toss pass after pass to the sure-handed Bennie Oosterbaan, he knew they were going to change the game.
    Likewise, Layden points out that Rodriguez was not the first coach to use the run and shoot with the shotgun, but he was almost certainly the first to come up with the zone read, in which the quarterback is a potential ball carrier, forcing the defensive end to cover him or chase the tailback. Spread them out, and the defender simply can’t cover both.
    Another secret was changing the way his quarterback gave out the ball. Instead of simply sticking it into the runner’s gut, or faking it by holding the ball while putting his empty hand against the runner’s stomach, in Rodriguez’s zone read, the quarterback holds the ball with two outstretched hands and places it against the runner’s belly—and lets it ride for a few feet, like a swinging gate, while he watches to see if the end is following the runner or