The forgotten history of spread offense at Florida

Urban Meyer is generally thought of as the guy who brought spread offense to Florida. I’m here to tell you today that he wasn’t. Spread offense was already on the rise in Gainesville before he arrived.

And, despite what you might be thinking after that opening, it wasn’t Steve Spurrier who started it.

Fun ‘n Gun ≠ Spread

Spread offense is an extremely generic term; anything from the flexbone to Air Raid can qualify. The only binding criteria is that a scheme must be predicated on, well, spreading the defense out and making it account for most or all of the horizontal space on the field.

Spurrier’s pass attack revolutionized offense in the SEC by using vertical, not horizontal space. Even by 2001 when he was mostly putting Rex Grossman in the shotgun and going four and five wide regularly, throwing the ball down the field was the goal.

Spurrier’s run attack was about as non-spread as it gets. He was a devotee of the I-formation. It doesn’t take long in the ‘01 Cocktail Party to find a drive where the Head Ball Coach pounds the ball mostly from the I with a tight end and only two receivers. One of his takeaways from watching Dan Mullen shred his defense in 2008 was to salivate at the idea of Percy Harvin being an I-formation tailback.

The I-form is the antithesis of spread offense. It puts extra players around the ball in the form of the fullback, tight end(s), and the defenders they block. The spread in all its forms usually seeks to minimize the number of players around the ball via spreading the field horizontally.

Enter Coach Z

Grossman attempted 36 passes per game in 2001 and 39 per game in 2002. The Gators threw 59% of the time in ’01 versus 53% of the time in ’02 (note: these figures count sacks as runs) so Ron Zook kept his promise to continue slinging the ball around the field. He hired Marshall offensive coordinator Ed Zaunbrecher, who’d been Chad Pennington’s QBs coach for a year and ran offenses with Byron Leftwich for two.

Despite the passing continuing, it was not the same as when Spurrier was around. There are two ways to see that. One is in Grossman’s yards per attempt, which fell from 9.9 in 2001 to 6.8 in 2002. The other is to remember one of the most common complaints out of Gator fans in the first couple of Zook years: they run too many bleepity bleeping bubble screens.

Florida threw downfield less without Spurrier around; basically every team in that era threw vertically less than S.O.S. did. The Meyer/Mullen schemes involved fewer intermediate and deep passes too. The Fun ‘n Gun remains distinctive because so few play callers are willing to pick those kinds of passes with that regularity.

At the time it was a huge deal for UF not to throw downfield as much, though, since Spurrier’s offense was synonymous with innovation and all of the major success the program had ever had. When the AP wrote up about why Grossman was probably leaving early for the draft after the 2002 season, it cited a lack of downfield passing as a reason why the new scheme was a poor fit for the quarterback. After Zook demoted Zaunbrecher in favor of Larry Fedora following the 2003 season, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel closed its story on the matter by saying Zaunbrecher’s offense “came under fire the past two seasons, with the main complaint being the Gators didn’t throw downfield often enough.”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The bubble screens were partly there because UF’s offensive line wasn’t particularly good in 2002 and 2003. Grossman’s effectiveness dropped in part because he spent a lot of time running for his life as defenses exploited either subpar blocking, iffy protection schemes, or both. Earnest Graham’s yards per carry rate fell more than half a yard from ’01 to ’02. The quick screens were safe throws for a true freshman Chris Leak in 2003 as well.

However, they were also the beginnings of making defenses account for the whole field sideline-to-sideline. UF’s rushing attack still used some I-form in 2002, perhaps as a concession to Grossman and Graham, but it faded considerably after that. From ’03 and on, the Gators did far more handoffs from the shotgun than they had previously.

One simplistic way to look at how “spread” a team was at the time is personnel groupings, provided a team had some spread-like tendencies to begin with. How often did a team use sets with three or more wide receivers versus two or fewer? Most college football teams have used three-wide as their base personnel set for years by now, but it was not commonly done in the early 2000s.

Thanks to a YouTube uploader, I watched the 2002 Tennessee game and counted plays in the first half when UF failed to go three-wide and when Tennessee did go three-wide. The Vols weren’t close to being a spread team, but they had been one of the more pass-friendly teams of the time ever since Peyton Manning was going 0-4 against the Gators.

There were only 12 plays all first half where UF had just two wideouts. For the normal offense, it was really just eight since four of the heavier-set plays were on goal line. Remember the ’01 Georgia game drive I mentioned above where Spurrier went I-form a lot? That series by itself had eight play calls with just two receivers if you include a pair of false starts.

Meanwhile UT only went three-wide nine times, one of them being the final play of the half to run out clock. Six of the nine plays had eight or more yards to go. Even for a team that wasn’t entirely pass-averse, going three-wide was mostly a long-yardage exercise.

Fast forward a year to the 2003 FSU game, which I also found on YouTube. The contrast is even starker. Florida only ran five plays in the first half of that contest with two or fewer receivers. Two were short yardage situations, and the other three were a pass, a play-action end around, and only one standard up-the-middle run play.

FSU only went three-wide twice in the entire half, and both times were I-formation halfback draws. While the Gators were taking their first steps towards spread football, the Seminoles were firmly rooted in the prevailing schemes of the time.

Zook replaced Zaunbrecher with Fedora in ’04, and the results did improve. UF went up to 31.8 points per game — 33.8 in the regular season before the team no-showed the Peach Bowl — which was more than Meyer’s first, second, and final teams managed. It was more than any Muschamp or McElwain team scored too. The 2019 team scored 33.0 in the regular season.

The 2004 season was Leak’s best overall performance. His senior campaign is a close second, but in ’04 he had more yards (3,197 vs. 2,942) and touchdowns (29 vs. 23) with one fewer interception (12 vs. 13). Ciatrick Fason also went for 1,267 yards, the last time a Gator back would eclipse the thousand-yard mark until Mike Gillislee in 2012.

The True Spread Era

If you watch the Ron Zook Field game, which is also on YouTube, Florida still runs too much I-formation for you to immediately think it’s a modern spread attack. If you watch it to specifically compare the two teams, the Gators look way more spread-y than the Seminoles do. It’s not quite as extreme as the 2003 comparison, but it’s still obvious that the two teams are starting from completely different places with their schemes.

Spread really became a buzzword in 2004 thanks to Meyer’s undefeated Utah team, and it was all over the coverage of Florida hiring him. Because Meyer and Rich Rodriguez were the most well-known spread offense guys at the time, insert huge asterisk here, most people colloquially used “spread” to mean “spread option”. The asterisk is the Air Raid, which rose to prominence with Hal Mumme’s Kentucky regime in the late ’90s. It’s a spread, but as no one used that term in 1997, “spread” became synonymous for a time with option-based attacks more than half a decade later.

So Meyer brought a proper “spread” system with him in 2005. He famously banned the fullback position and largely decided to ax the blocking-only tight end; the 2005 roster still lists Eric Rutledge and Billy Latsko as linebackers. That lasted all of half a season until LSU’s defense broke Meyer’s pure Utah spread option offense. The 2006 roster, for its part, has Rutledge and Latsko listed as halfbacks next to three walk on fullbacks.

It’s going too far to say that Florida was a true spread team before Meyer. You won’t find contemporaneous quotes from Zaunbrecher or Fedora talking about them running a spread in Gainesville.

However, Zook’s teams were a bridge from the Fun ‘n Gun to the true spread era. They increasingly went to one-back shotgun sets, and such formations were a major ingredient in the development of spread offense as we know it today. Those blasted bubble screens are now being attached to nearly everything as RPOs have risen to prominence. Fedora went on to gain a reputation as a spread offense leading light as offensive coordinator for Mike Gundy and head coach at Southern Miss and UNC.

Zook was on the right track in evolving offense in Gainesville, and who knows where things might’ve gone had Leak gotten another couple of years under Fedora’s tutelage. As with so much about Zook’s time, the plan wasn’t bad but the execution was never quite there. Florida’s first experiments with modern spread offense really began to bear fruit by 2004, but it wasn’t enough to overcome everything else.

David Wunderlich
David Wunderlich is a born-and-raised Gator and a proud Florida alum. He has been writing about Florida and SEC football since 2006. He currently lives in Naples Italy, at least until the Navy stations his wife elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @Year2