green fire317, you mentioned the Ducks running up the score. I found an article this morning that deals with this issue. Has some funny quotes too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/magazine/05Football-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
<div ="timestamp">December 2, 2010</div>
<h1>Speed-Freak Football</h1>
<h6 ="byline">By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE</h6>
EARLY IN A GAME last month against Washington, a running back for the
University of Oregon's
powerhouse football team darted through a small opening on the right
side of the line, then cut smartly upfield for a seven-yard gain and a
first down. A typical-enough play, and good for the home team. But
seconds after it was over, the Oregon fans at Autzen Stadium in Eugene
let out an enormous boo. I turned to the man next to me in the press
box, who happened to be the associate director of Oregon's bands, for an
explanation.
"The officials aren't moving the chains fast enough,"Â he
explained. "It's slowing us down."Â Oregon made another first down, and
the crowd booed more loudly. I wondered:
What do these people want,
sprinters imported from Jamaica to move the chains? Next, a Washington
defensive player limped to the sideline with an apparent knee injury,
and the boos came cascading down again inside Oregon's concrete bowl of a
stadium.
"They think he's faking it so the defense can get rest,"Â my
friend from the bands explained. "That's been happening to us a lot."Â
On the Oregon sideline, Chip Kelly, the Oregon head coach, waited out
the delay with his hands on his knees in a sort of infielder's crouch.
Kelly, who is 47, grew up in New England, far from the nation's
traditional football bastions, where he played whatever sport was in
season. He even spent parts of his summers surfing in the chilly waters
off Maine. Square-jawed,
with a pasty complexion and an athletic but not
overly bulked-up build, he looks like a man meant to have a whistle
around his neck. As recently as 2006, Kelly was a coach â€" an assistant,
not the headman â€" at the
University of New Hampshire,
his alma mater. He had also served under head coaches at Columbia and
Johns Hopkins, not exactly résumé-building jobs in the contemporary
world of college football.
In 2007, Kelly was hired as offensive coordinator at Oregon by Coach
Mike Bellotti, who barely knew him but understood that Kelly was a
devotee of the wide-open "spread"Â offense that was becoming popular in
college football â€" and that Oregon had installed but not yet mastered.
Kelly stepped up to head coach in 2009, and this season has ascended to a
loftier and even more improbable status: reigning genius of offensive
football. (He does not like the word. "Jonas Salk was a genius"Â is his
stock answer when the G-word is invoked.)
Through 10 games this season, Kelly's team was unbeaten and top-ranked
in the nation while averaging 50.7 points and overwhelming opponents by
nearly five touchdowns a game. Already this season, Oregon has defeated
New Mexico by a score of 72-0, Stanford, 52-31, and
U.C.L.A., 60-13. With victories in its final two games of the season (Arizona and
Oregon State),
it would likely earn a berth in the national championship game in
January, either against a traditional power like Auburn or Louisiana
State, or perhaps an upstart like Boise State or
Texas Christian University.
An N.F.L.
head coach, Jeff Fisher of the Tennessee Titans, said he did not think
even professional teams could stop Kelly's fast-paced attack, which
positions speedy skill players from sideline to sideline and gives the
quarterback multiple options on each play, like a point guard in
basketball. Kelly did not invent the spread offense. The nature of his
innovation has to do with the speed with which he is able to communicate
signals to his players from the sidelines â€" and their ability to
quickly line up and run play after play at a pace that ultimately
debilitates the opposition.
In the city of the distance-running legend Steve Prefontaine â€" Eugene is
known as Tracktown, U.S.A., and is also where the sporting-goods
company Nike was started â€" Kelly has transformed football into an
aerobic sport. This style is particularly of the moment because it is
apparent that football, at least in the short term, will become less
violent. Kelly's teams have found a new way to intimidate, one that does
not involve high-speed collisions and head injuries. "Some people call
it a no-huddle offense, but I call it a no-breathing offense,"Â Mark
Asper, an Oregon offensive lineman, told me. "It's still football. We
hit people. But after a while, the guys on the other side of the line
are so gassed that you don't have to hit them very hard to make them
fall over."Â
Oregon actually had a sputtering start against Washington, which is not
unusual. Kelly disdains some traditional football concerns, among them
the need to jump out to an early lead. His teams usually gather steam as
the game progresses and draw their confidence from knowing that the
other team will wear down. Oregon's second-to-last touchdown in what
would become a 53-16 rout of Washington came on the fifth play of a 1
minute 8 second drive â€" meaning they ran plays off about every 13
seconds. (That included the time it took to run the plays.) Its final
touchdown, a 30-yard sprint to the end zone by a reserve running back,
came on the last of nine consecutive rushing plays. It commenced
five seconds after the completion of the previous play.
In Kelly's offense, the point of a play sometimes seems to be just to
get it over with, line up and run another. The play that preceded the
last touchdown was a one-yard loss â€" a setback in traditional offensive
schemes in which down and distance are paramount. But "third and long"Â
is not as difficult a proposition for the offense when the opposing
defense can barely stand up. "Obviously, all of our plays are designed
to gain yards,"Â Gary Campbell, Oregon's running-backs coach, explained.
"But our guys understand the cumulative effect of running them really
fast."Â
Asper, who is 25 and served a two-year Mormon mission before starting
college, is among several Oregon players who told me that opponents
sometimes beg them to slow down.
"A guy from Tennessee said to me, ‘If
you keep running plays that fast, I'm going to throw up.' I just said,
‘Sorry, but Coach will get mad at us if we slow down.' I mean, what else
are you going to say? But I admit that I've messed with guys' heads.
One defensive lineman started complaining to me in the first half, and I
said: ‘This ain't nothing yet. Wait till you see how fast we go in the
second half.' "Â
The Oregon players also believe that opposing teams do indeed fake
injuries, and television replays support their view. "You have to
respect when a guy goes down that he's hurt,"Â Jeff Maehl, an Oregon
receiver, told me. "But you see guys who look like they're dead, and
then like two plays later they come running back into the game."Â Asper
said he saw one opponent stay down on the ground after a play, gripping
his left knee in pain â€" then limp off favoring the right leg. "I thought
it was sort of funny,"Â he said.
Let's go! Pace! Tempo!"Â Kelly shouted as he walked amid
his 120 players at the beginning of an Oregon practice. "It's a
beautiful Monday morning!"Â he added, which was not technically true.
Sheets of cold rain were falling on Oregon's leafy campus, a typical
fall day in this part of the country. But Kelly's players â€" the Ducks,
as the university's athletic teams have been called since the 1920s â€"
were practicing indoors, in a facility that looks like a massive
airplane hangar carpeted with artificial turf. The team usually
practices inside even on sunny days, which allows Kelly more control of
the environment.
The first thing you notice at an Oregon practice is the music, which
blasts from two giant speakers affixed to the ceiling.
As his players
stretched, Kelly walked in step to the thumping rhythm of a cut from the
rapper Wiz Khalifa, something called "Black and Yellow,"Â with lyrics
that seemed to consist almost entirely of the words in its title. On
most days, the soundtrack at Oregon practices is a mix of hip-hop, heavy
metal and hard-driving rock, some of it selected for its topicality. No
one takes credit for programming the tunes, but the master D.J. is
widely suspected to be Kelly himself. One day when I was with him, a
local reporter mentioned that Adam Duritz, frontman for the Counting
Crows, is a big fan of
University of California, Berkeley
(which, as it turned out, was Oregon's next opponent), and was
frequently on the sidelines during games. "I didn't know that,"Â Kelly
said. He pulled a notebook from his back pocket and made a note. Sure
enough, the next day's practice included a Counting Crows set.
Oregon practices in the morning before its players attend class, and the
sessions are brief â€" usually an hour and 50 minutes, and sometimes
less. The music blares from start to finish, and you see players during
their short rest periods busting out dance moves. One day when I was at
practice, Kelly was the keeper of the air horn, which he sounded to move
his team from one drill to the next. Through much of the practice, he
switched the horn from hand to hand, in time with the music. It is
common for pro and college teams to occasionally pipe in crowd noise or
loud "white"Â noise before road games to simulate the distraction of
hostile crowds. "To me, that stuff is like fingernails on a chalkboard,"Â
Kelly told me. "I like the music because it puts some energy and rhythm
in our practice."Â
Oregon does no discrete conditioning during practice, no "gassers" Ã¢â‚¬" the
sideline-to-sideline sprints that are staples in many programs â€" and no
"110s" Ã¢â‚¬" sprints from the goal line to the back of the opposite end
zone. The practice itself serves as conditioning. Just as they do during
games, Oregon's players run play after play â€" offensive sets; punt and
kickoff returns and coverages; field goals; late-game two-minute drills â€"
but at a pace that exceeds what they can achieve on Saturdays. Nick
Aliotti, Oregon's defensive coordinator, explained that the team can go
even faster in practice because the "referees" Ã¢â‚¬" student managers
sprinting around in striped shirts â€" spot the ball faster than any real
game official would.
Trying to reach (or exceed) competition speed in training is a common
goal across a range of sports.
I once asked Bob Bowman, the longtime
coach of Michael Phelps,
why Phelps did not swim the languorous distance sets that were part of
some other competitors' regimens. "We don't want him to swim slow in
meets,"Â he said, "so why would we have him practice swimming
slow?"Â John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, was known
for fast-paced practices that reduced the need for aerobic training.
But in more traditional settings, what slows things down is the impulse
of coaches to stop the action and be heard. To instruct and correct.
CoachesÂÂÂ, after all, get into the business because they love a sport and
want to see it played right. They have limited control during a game.
Practice is when they can stop time and choreograph perfection.
Imagine the following, which you would see at a typical football
practice across nearly any level: An offensive-line coach wades in after
a play, puts his hands on the shoulder pads of his big left tackle and
tries to correct the angle on his block or some subtle aspect of his
footwork. Another play is run, and the coach says, "Better,"Â but he
wades back in to make another small adjustment. That's how a crisp
two-hour practice becomes a three-hour ordeal.
It doesn't happen at Oregon. Coaches sometimes pull players from the
field for quick talks, but first they send in substitutes, and the plays
keep on rolling. They look back at the films from each practice â€"
identify mistakes â€" and then point them out in early-evening players'
meetings, which are also short.
This style has been easier for Kelly's players to adjust to than for his
coaches, most of whom have spent many more years than he has at the
major college level. Aliotti, the defensive coordinator, is 56 and in
his third stint on the Oregon staff. He has also coached in the N.F.L.
"It's insanity for a coach,"Â he said when we talked one morning after
practice. "You've got the music blasting, you look around and your kids
are dancing and you don't want to stop the fun. But when you're an
old-school guy like me, it takes patience and change, because you want
to make yourself heard. I want to correct a guy, but we're already on to
the next play. Don't get me wrong. This has been good for us as a team.
But I have to be real with you. It's still hard for me."Â
ONE MORNING AFTER practice, Kelly started talking about
the need to contain Cal's best running back. "We've got to stop Ben
Vereen,"Â he said before catching himself. "I mean
Shane Vereen, but Ben Vereen, that would be interesting, wouldn't it?"Â
There's something a little goofy about Oregon's entire program. It is
not New Age in some Pacific Northwest kind of way, because Kelly is
distinctly a New Englander, but there's a lightness that sets it apart
from, say, the solemnity you associate with the Alabama Crimson Tide,
the
Ohio State Buckeyes or the
Oklahoma Sooners.
There's the matter of the nickname â€" the Ducks. And the uniforms.
Oregon's colors are green and yellow (the squad sometimes looks as if it
dressed from the bottom bin of an Army surplus store), but the numerous
possible uniform ensembles mix in so many grays, blacks and whites in
various shades that the Ducks rarely wear the exact scheme twice in the
same season. They broke out silver shoes for the first time in a game
earlier this season at U.S.C. (It helps that Oregon has the ultimate
benefactor and outfitter in Nike's founder, Phil Knight, a graduate of
the university who rarely misses a game, home or away.) "When you throw
in the different-colored socks and shoes, there's hundreds of color
combinations we can wear,"Â Andy McNamara, of Oregon's sports information
office, told me. "Somebody figured it out."Â
Oregon, though, is not so far out of the mainstream as to be immune to
the plagues of big-time college sports. Following a loss in the first
game of the 2009 season, Kelly's head coaching debut, one of Oregon's
running backs punched an opponent, and Kelly had to suspend him for the
season. The Ducks' would-be starting quarterback in 2010 was suspended
for Oregon's season after pleading guilty to a burglary charge. (He's
now starting for the University of Mississippi.) The team's graduation rate for football players, as measured by the N.C.A.A., is below average.
The players seem to like Kelly, and to some degree may see his life as
not that different from their own. He has never been married and is
unburdened by responsibilities other than coaching their team. When I
asked LaMichael James, a running back and a leading Heisman Trophy
candidate, if he ever talked to Kelly about anything other than
football, he said: "Sometimes, but he's more or less all about football.
Everybody on the team is all about football. I think that's why
everyone gets along with him so well."Â
James did have one complaint,
having to do with the music: "The other day he had like ‘Hakuna Matata'
or some [expletive] from ‘The Lion King' playing, which I don't think
nobody wants to hear. He needs to bump some Lil Wayne on there."Â
Bellotti, who hired Kelly in 2007, anointed him as his successor even
before stepping up to athletic director in 2009. (Bellotti is now a
college-football analyst for
ESPN.)
Bellotti had installed the spread offense with a previous offensive
coordinator. "When we started this offense, we could figure out after
the game what we should have done,"Â Bellotti said. "We progressed to the
point where we could figure it out during the game. When I interviewed
Chip, I realized he was the guy who would know, going in to the game,
what we should do. He took it to the level where we were not the ones
having to make adjustments; we were dictating to other teams."Â
College-football offenses have become more wide open in recent years,
but the highest-scoring attacks tend to rely mainly on the forward pass.
They are aerial circuses, like
Texas Tech
under former Coach Mike Leach, whose celebrated spread offense from
2000 to 2009 was so pass-first that his quarterback, in 2003, averaged
about 60 pass attempts and 486 passing yards per game. By contrast,
Oregon was leading the nation in scoring through 10 games this season
with an attack almost evenly split between passing and rushing attempts.
The run plays â€" because receivers are not spread all over the field at
the end of a play â€" allow the Ducks to scramble back to the line of
scrimmage and quickly snap the ball again. And Oregon sequences its
plays and formations in such a way that it can push the tempo even after
pass attempts. The running-backs coach, Gary Campbell, told me that if a
receiver on the right side of a formation is sent on a crossing pattern
to the other side of the field, Oregon coaches have already planned a
formation for the next play that keeps him on the side of the field
where he finished.
Bellotti never got to feel that he knew Kelly on a level beyond
football. "I don't know if I'd say anyone on staff truly knows him. He's
probably closer to the players than his fellow coaches. He's still got a
sort of East Coast posse; that's where his friends are."Â
Sean McDonnell, the head coach at the University of New Hampshire, is
part of Kelly's inner circle. In Kelly's first season as head coach,
Oregon had a 10-2 regular season and played in the Rose Bowl, where it
lost to Ohio State. McDonnell was among about 25 of Kelly's friends from
back East who flew to Pasadena for the game."Chipper's just a homegrown
Manchester kid,"Â he told me, using the name that Kelly is known by in
New Hampshire. "Everybody in the state knows who Chipper is. He was a
tremendous hockey player. A basketball player. A great high-school
quarterback. The people he knows best are back here."Â
One of the least attractive aspects of college sports is its naked
careerism. It is full of coaches who preach character, commitment and
team loyalty but can't wait to get the hell out of town and move on to
the next job and the bigger salary. McDonnell said Kelly turned down
numerous offers to become an offensive coordinator or quarterbacks coach
at major college programs. "The thing that held him back is that he had
no ego invested in it,"Â McDonnell said. "He would have been happy
staying here forever. Bellotti was the first guy who convinced Chipper
that he'd really give him the autonomy to coach football the way he
likes to coach it."Â
THE SUN WAS actually shining on the day I sat down with
Chip Kelly in his office, but he had the window shades drawn tight.
Football coaches watch a lot of game film and grow accustomed to dim
light. Trophies and commemorative helmets marking various milestones
were displayed around the room. "I didn't have goals or aspirations,"Â he
said when I asked him about his career path. "Too many people look too
far down the road and say, ‘In 10 years, I want to be a head coach, or I
want to be whatever.' But you might not have control of it. What if you
don't get to be a head coach? Are you not going to be happy?"Â
Kelly is compensated now like the star coach that he has become; in
September he signed a contract extension that runs through the 2015
season and is worth as much as $20.5 million. But he still talks like a
sportsman, someone in it for the pure love of the game, and because of
his unusual career trajectory it is not hard to believe him. "I'll watch
any kind of sporting event,"Â he told me. "I'll watch a Division III
women's soccer game and really enjoy it. Those girls playing, they're
just as passionate about their sport as our guys are playing U.S.C. in
the Coliseum. There may be fewer people watching them play, but that
doesn't diminish their work ethic or their passion."Â
A couple of times during our conversation, Kelly said that he did not
believe his job is terribly important or that he's worthy of the
attention that comes his way. His father is a lawyer, his mother an
educator. He has three brothers. They come to visit and attend some
games, but he does not introduce them around widely, and they do not do
interviews.
According to a local newspaper, he was engaged when he
started as head coach but postponed the wedding and is still unmarried.
"I'm just a football guy,"Â Kelly said when I asked what else occupies
his mind. "I love my job. I always get bothered when I hear other
coaches say: ‘We're here 24/7. We really grind.' I mean, c'mon. We
choose to do this. We sit in air-conditioned rooms. We watch film. We
enjoy
watching film and coming up with game plans. Someone who has to grind
it out is a guy who's a laborer, or a guy in the military."Â
Kelly follows the news closely, and last off-season, he took a 10-day
trip with other college coaches to visit U.S. military personnel in
Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain. He has been having his players write e-mails
to veterans and active-duty soldiers he invited to their spring game. He
has also been known to attend funerals for Oregon soldiers killed in
action.
The way he trains his players is drawn, in part, from documentaries he
has watched of military training. "You see how they train the Navy Seals.
They squirt them with water, play loud music and do all these other
things when they have to perform a task. That's how we practice. We want
to bombard our kids."Â
Defense can seem like an afterthought at Oregon, with the practices
running at Kelly's preferred pace â€" meaning the speed he wants his
offense to go â€" and most of the press attention going to the Ducks'
offensive stars. The Oregon defensive players (like the offense) are not
particularly big by major college standards. Because Oregon often
scores quickly â€" or quickly turns the ball back to the opponent's
offense â€" Aliotti substitutes freely to keep his players fresh, and 25
or more of them get on the field during a typical game. But it was the
defense that saved the Ducks' national title hopes in a rare offensive
letdown, a 15-13 victory in mid-November over Cal. And what may
determine whether Oregon wins a national title is how its defense
performs against a bigger, stronger ball-control offense that keeps them
on the field for long stretches.
Kelly has long been attracted to fast-paced play, but his offense goes
even faster now than it did at New Hampshire largely because he is fully
in charge. (McDonnell, the head coach at U.N.H., sometimes feared that
his own defense would become fatigued if Kelly's offense ran plays
quickly but didn't get first downs.)
"When we play fast, it gets us in
our rhythm and takes the other team out of its comfort zone,"Â Kelly told
me. "Our goal is not to intimidate an opponent with our tempo, but it
may be a byproduct of what we do."Â
Kelly's overarching philosophy owes to business texts, most directly,
the writings of Jim Collins ("Good to Great"Â and "Built to Last,"Â among
others), who argues that successful organizations coalesce around a
concise, easily communicated core mission. Kelly said: "If someone says
to me, ‘What do you stand for?' I should be able to invite them to
practice and in five minutes, they'd say: ‘I see it. I get it.' They
stand for playing hard and playing fast."Â
KELLY WOULD BE the last to argue that he is in the
vanguard or that his methods are pointing toward the future of the game.
But others are watching Oregon football closely for those very reasons.
"What Oregon's doing will take the evolution of football to a whole
different level,"Â Brian Baldinger, a former player for several pro teams
and now an analyst with the N.F.L. Network, told me. "Nobody in the
whole history of football can snap off plays as quickly as this team
does. Other teams can't condition for it. It's a great equalizer. If
you've got a 350-pound guy, I don't care how good he is, you've got to
get him off the field. He can't keep up. I think what everyone wants to
know is, What's the trick? How do they do it?"Â
As with many innovations, the trick is almost certainly less complicated
than it appears. The first challenge of Kelly's offense, Bellotti told
me, was to put in a communications system. "When you go without a
huddle, you have to do your signaling and nomenclature in a way that
your team understands it and the other team doesn't."Â
When Oregon is on offense, coaches on the sideline give hand signals.
The backup quarterback flips a series of cardboard signs, each of them
with four pictures or words on them. Some of the pictures include a
tiger, a jack-o'-lantern, a jet taking off and a shamrock. Several
photos are of ESPN personalities.
Oregon never puts 11 geniuses on the field, and neither do any of the
teams they play. The communications system can be only so complicated.
Not all of the signals are "live,"Â and players know which ones to pay
attention to. Many of the pictures, Bellotti said, are of things the
players can relate to. "For example, say the ESPN guy is someone who
comes on at 6 p.m.,"Â he explained. "Then maybe the play has something to
do with the number 6."Â
Coaches on the other sideline may be able to decode the signals. But the
signs change weekly, and with Oregon running plays so quickly, they
would have just seconds to communicate what's coming to
their
players. (And because Oregon's spread offense contains numerous options
on each call, depending on what the quarterback sees, stealing signals
would only give the defense a hint.)
What Oregon's innovative offense is really about is conditioning,
repetitions in practice, precision and, most of all, agreement on the
core mission â€" to go fast. Any team with a nimble, quick-thinking
quarterback and an assortment of quick skill players could do it. And
Baldinger believes many will. "It's going to be copied, from high
schools up through major colleges and all the way up to the N.F.L.,"Â he
said. "If they manage to win the national championship, you're really
going to see a lot of it."Â 
