Let me do yall a favor.
ATLANTA -- Unmoved,
Paul Johnson sits cross-legged in a navy blue armchair with his arms folded and rattles off answers to incomplete questions. He cocks his head down and grins. Maybe it's because he has heard all these questions many times before. Maybe it's because pausing for reflection would acknowledge a gray area Johnson does not believe exists.
Whatever the reason,
Georgia Tech's first-year football coach readily dismisses any doubt over whether his triple-option offense can thrive in a Bowl Championship Series conference as it did at his previous locale. Much like Johnson, the triple option is old-school in its simplicity and unique in its approach.
And neither coach nor system has changed much since Johnson began running the triple option 23 years ago at a division I-AA program about 200 miles southeast of here.
The
Yellow Jackets are 2-0 this season, yet Johnson sees abundant deficiencies. The triple option has been impressive in the early going, yet Johnson sees missed reads in the backfield and poor blocking up front. From inside his office, an alcove that looks out into Bobby Dodd Stadium, Johnson's subdued voice relays simultaneously the confidence and dissatisfaction he feels toward his young team.
How is the offense progr . . ."Crawling," he said. "We're crawling."
Johnson and his coaching staff knew when they took over the Georgia Tech program last winter that the players they were inheriting would have serious apprehensions over the team's new style of play. Where do I fit? What do I do? And what, exactly, constitutes a triple-option offense?
"So many people had filled their heads full of different stuff instead of just waiting to see what it's about from the guys that were going to coach them," said quarterbacks coach Brian Bohannon, who has worked under Johnson since 1997. "I think if you ask a lot of them now, if they'd have just done that, they'd have saved themselves a lot of worry and stress over nothing."
Instead of a 15-inch playbook full of complex diagrams, coaches issued each player a pencil and a spiral notebook during the initial weeks of the Johnson era. During team and position meetings, players were to write down the plumbing of the new schemes in their own terms.
"If you give them a book of 100 pages, there's not many 18-, 19-year-olds who are going to sit there and read all that," Bohannon said. "The philosophy's been to let them create their own playbook."
According to sophomore quarterback
Josh Nesbitt, digesting plays in which he has three choices to make -- none of them throwing the ball beyond the line of scrimmage -- is a task much more easily accomplished when reviewing notes he compiled on his own.
Nesbitt said the offensive players have bought into Johnson's system completely, but Johnson believes the unit's development remains in its early stages. On Saturday at
Boston College, Georgia Tech totaled just 162 yards on the ground but averaged 4.1 yards per carry. The Yellow Jackets fumbled the ball three times but scored two rushing touchdowns. They lost the time-of-possession battle but won the game.
Have there been any frustra . . ."The biggest frustration level would be you can look at it and tell where the problem is," Johnson said. "So if you're the problem, they're ain't no maskin' it. It's right there in front of you."
Johnson tries to keep everything as simple as possible, just as his mentor, Erk Russell, did as the head coach at
Georgia Southern during the 1980s. When he first latched on to the
Eagles' staff in 1983, Johnson coached the defensive line. According to Johnson, Russell had one rule: do right. Russell would decide whether or not you had succeeded.
Russell, a defensive-minded coach, asked Johnson to switch to offensive coordinator in 1985. The Eagles proceeded to win back-to-back division I-AA national titles, and Johnson developed a reputation as a sharp offensive mind with no need for sideline scripts or spreadsheets.
"Probably his number one forte is play-calling," said Tim Stowers, who was an offensive assistant on Georgia Southern's staff from 1985 to '90 and most recently served as head coach at
Rhode Island before being fired after the 2007 season. "And it's all in his head."
Yes, Johnson said, there are a million factors he considers from play to play, but the result of the decision is fairly black and white. Either the play worked or it didn't. Either his players executed, blocked well, made the correct reads and operated at full speed, or they didn't. An offense can employ whatever system it wants, Johnson said, but if the defense performs better, the style of attack won't matter one bit.
These days, with a lot of teams running the spread . . ."They all run the same thing; they all run the same plays," Johnson said. "They just do it out of [the shotgun]; it's all the same. Now they're running the zone option; everybody runs it. And we could run the zone option; we'd just be under the center."
Back in the mid-1980s, the triple option was the "in" offense, and all other forms took a back seat. Stowers said high school and college coaches from all over the region would come to Georgia Southern's summer camps to glean offensive knowledge.
In recent seasons, coaches have flocked to the summer camps of
Urban Meyer at Florida and
Rich Rodriguez when he was at West Virginia to learn the intricacies of the spread-option offense. As popularity has shifted to a new system, the perception of the triple option has adjusted accordingly.
"It used to be that a lot of other offensive styles were considered physical and we were just finesse; now, the shotgun is finesse and our offense is physical," Stowers said. "These days, everyone's playing basketball on grass. Our offense has been basketball on grass since 1985."
And it has been effective since 1985; just ask Johnson. In six seasons, Johnson led Navy to a 45-29 record. In 2007, Navy earned a bowl bid for the fifth consecutive season while averaging 348.8 rushing yards per game and scoring 39.3 points per game. The
Midshipmen defeated Notre Dame for the first time since 1963 and claimed their fifth straight Commander-in-Chief's Trophy.
But, according to Johnson, the figurative ceiling had been reached in Annapolis. As much as he enjoyed his time at Navy, he yearned for an environment in which he could recruit the caliber of players necessary to contend for national titles.
So he took his triple-option offense, and much of his coaching staff, south to Georgia Tech, a member of the
Atlantic Coast Conference, where the development may be slow but the potential payoff -- and expectation level -- is significantly greater.
"He's set the ball out there and guys understand that you're either in or you're out," Bohannon said. "There's not a lot of gray area. He just doesn't accept anything but the best. He's not happy about anything, 'cause he has a standard up here that I don't know if we'll ever hit, but by God, we're gonna keep trying."
Johnson understands critics will continue to claim BCS conference defenses are too fast to be outmaneuvered by the triple option. He knows even a solid showing Saturday at
Virginia Tech won't do much to change that.
Just like Johnson's offense, the complaints against it have not changed over the past two decades. So his voice never rises. Johnson waits only long enough to interpret where he thinks the question is headed before assertively stating his case.
How do you respond to the . . ."You know, I was past that maybe five or 10 years ago," he said. "I don't feel like we have to prove anything to anybody. You know, I guess when you're younger you want to argue with 'em. But now I don't care. I'm not gonna argue with 'em. They can believe whatever they want."
