Mailbag: What if UVA Football went with an option-based offense?

Huge fan of your UVA Football articles. I recently stated on Facebook that I think UVA needs to think outside box for next football coach. Why don’t we hire a Paul Johnson-type coach from a military academy?

They run the option offense that I love to watch, and it would bring discipline and consistency and also give our opponents something to prepare for that they are not used to seeing.

I love watching teams run that offense. Controls the clock, field position, and when executed, is hard to stop. Also seems like you can recruit guys that would not be on anyone else’s radar that have played that system in high school and would develop and stay.

We are not recruiting top-level players or transfers to UVA. Think outside the box. Scott Abell just got hired to coach Rice. When I taught in Amherst County 20 years ago, he was winning state championships, got hired to coach Washington and Lee. Has moved on to numerous schools and been dominant running the triple option. Has won championships every level he has coached…

Army, Navy, Air Force all run that offense or different versions of it and win. I would be happy with 6-7-8 wins a season and a coach that could bring consistency to the football program.

Paul Johnson was 82-61 and had nine bowl appearances in 11 seasons at Georgia Tech. What is wrong with that at UVA? I am hoping people understand that UVA will never be a player on national scene with football, but we should be capable of seven wins or more and beating a crappy Virginia Tech program every other year.   

– Steve

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I was musing to myself about something like this recently, so the email from Steve came at a good time.

I’m thinking that hiring a coach who runs the option offense would be like when we hired Tony Bennett for basketball.

Option football is Bennett running mover/blocker and Pack Line defense in basketball.

Virginia isn’t going to be able to get enough of the top-tier athletes in school in either basketball or football to play straight up with the big boys.

Tony won a lot of games, hung a lot of banners, one of them for a national championship, with kids who chose UVA over the Ivy League, the MAAC, the Patriot League, because he could get them to play a style that opponents only saw once a year.

Imagine a guy like Jeff Monken (88-57 in 11 seasons at Army), who has a track record of being able to recruit in a tough place, being given the keys to the UVA Football program.

For every other coach that we could land here, having to recruit kids who can get through our admissions office is a handicap.

For a guy like a Jeff Monken, he’d feel like a kid in a candy store.

And as Steve alludes to here, we’d have the pick of the litter in terms of guys at the prep level who run the option.

Where I differ with Steve: I can’t imagine myself ever wanting to watch an option team, though I did come to, eventually, appreciate the Tony Bennett style that took … years … for me to appreciate, if not ever fully embrace.

What I came to appreciate with Tony is, if you can’t beat the other guys by just going out and getting more talent, you have to figure out another way, and Tony’s approach, hard as it has been to watch for the past 16 years, is another way that also wins.

As Steve makes the point, we’re never going to out-talent anybody in football.

Option might be the only way we can be consistently competitive in football.