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Football Notebook
June 25, 2015 05:13 PM | Football
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Guess what West Virginia defensive coordinator Tony Gibson gets to do all summer?
Watch movies.
No, not the Avengers, Jurassic World, Mission Impossible or Trainwreck at the theater with the wife and kids, but rather lots and lots of Georgia Southern cutups.
Lots.
That’s because nobody in college football is doing what the Eagles are doing offensively. Second-year coach Willie Fritz operates a modernized version of the read-option out of a spread formation with quarterback Kevin Ellison lining up in the shotgun.
Talk about a mouthful!
“That’s such a different offense,” noted West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen earlier today. “Tony has got to start thinking about what our plan is going to be and he’s got to start teaching some different things specific to all of that.”
Running back Matt Breida ran for 1,485 yards last year and led the Sun Belt Conference with an 8.7 yards-per-carry average, but if you load up the box to try and stop him then Ellison is capable of chucking the football down the field to pretty good playmakers such as B.J. Johnson.
Because of this, Fritz believes his offense can generate 50 to 70 more yards per game over the top this year because defenses are going to cheat the box.
One other thing to keep in mind about these guys: Georgia Southern won nine football games last season.
“You start watching them and that’s not fun to watch,” Gibson admitted. “We’ve been watching them since the spring. We’ve talked to a lot of different staffs, studied a lot of different film so hopefully we will be prepared come September 5 because it’s a whole different animal.”
Gibson said the Eagles will run the split-zone, load option, lead option and then there are times when the quarterback will pull the ball at the last second and throw it down the field. In between, they do many other things as well.
Georgia Southern led the conference in scoring and total offense in 2014 with averages of 39.1 points and 488.2 yards per game, while also leading the country in rushing with an average of 388.1 yards per contest.
Furthermore, a good number of their key skill players are back for 2015. That’s certainly enough to keep a guy awake at night.
“I couldn’t imagine if we had to play them week two or week three,” said Gibson. “It would be absolutely miserable to try and prepare for that.”
Gibson said the defensive coaches have already watched all of the games Georgia Southern has played against odd-front defenses last year – Navy, Louisiana-Monroe and Appalachian State - and he’s even gone back into the archives to look at West Virginia’s game against Wofford in 2005 when he was on the defensive staff.
According to Gibson, the problem is none of what he is looking at is exactly what West Virginia is going to encounter when the Eagles arrive in Morgantown the first weekend in September.
“We don’t see anybody that does anything similar to this at all so there is really nothing to compare it to,” he explained. “You pull out Wofford from 10 years ago and then you look at it and we’re not the same (defense) and (Wofford) is different - it’s a double-wing look so you try and get Navy film or you try and get Army film and it’s just not the same either.”
Gibson said he also isn’t sure how Georgia Southern is going to block his second-level guys with how his 3-3 stack defense is structured in the back end.
“It’s a whole different deal. This team averaged 380-some-odd yards rushing a game last year and it’s not a fun deal,” he said. “It’s to the point where if we’re going to play them I want to play them first because I definitely wouldn’t want to play them game two, three or four.”
Stay tuned.
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