Garin Higgins has split personalities as he describes his variation of the spread offense.
Higgins is trying to hold back, like any football coach would, apprehensive to share his secrets.
Sometimes before the snap your quarterback yells out “NASCAR.” What’s that mean?
“I could tell you,” Higgins says with a grin, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
As he delves deeper into the concepts and intricacies of his offense, Higgins’ apprehension to share his secrets turns into the vigor of a teenage science nerd unveiling his latest experiment.
Higgins has been experimenting with offensive sets and plays since he was in grade school. While his classmates were coloring or learning addition and subtraction, Higgins diagrammed plays in his notebook.
“I’m a play guy,” he says.
Higgins’ grade school scribbles most likely hold little resemblance to what he’s drawing up these days at Emporia State. Higgins is running an offense that has evolved from the Nebraska option, which he studied and ran in the late 1990s, to the wide-open, shotgun, no-huddle spread that Higgins and coaches across the country have adopted today.
“Football’s a funny game,” Higgins says. “It’s kind of a lot like the fashion industry. It’s what teams are having success with. It’s kind of what I say is the vogue style.”
Learning the spread
The origin of Higgins’ spread offense has an unlikely beginning. As the offensive coordinator at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, Higgins took a trip to Nebraska to study the Cornhuskers’ famous option offense out of the I-formation.
The I-formation doesn’t have much use in the spread. If the spread is new-age football, the I-formation option offense is stone age.
In the I-formation, almost everyone lines up between the hash marks and there are two tight ends and passing is almost taboo.
The spread has many variations, but they all share several basic principles: no huddle, the shotgun, at least three receivers if not more and a spread-out formation. The goal is to spread defenses out and get the ball to the fastest skill position players in space and make the defense defend sideline to sideline.
As Higgins began to make the option offense his own, he slowly began to run more and more plays out of the shotgun. It wasn’t as though what he was doing wasn’t working. In his first year as offensive coordinator at NWOSU in 1997, the team went 5-5. Two years later Higgins ran an offense that led the nation in rushing and went 13-0 and won the NAIA national title. In 2000, his first season as NWOSU’s head coach, Higgins’ offense led the nation in rushing again and his team lost its only game in the national championship.
But even with his success, as many college football programs adopted the spread offense, Higgins didn’t want to be left behind and started to do the same.
Texas Tech has gained most of the nation’s attention with its version of the spread. Tech coach Mike Leach has his quarterbacks throwing 60 passes a game and setting NCAA passing records year after year. Leach learned the offense from Hal Mumme, who Higgins visited while Mumme was the coach at Kentucky. Higgins started to have his teams pass more, but he still kept the option as the base of the offense.
“If you’re running a business, I think everybody is always looking how to improve your business,” Higgins says.
Higgins tried to improve his product — his offense — by going to clinics, watching film and visiting with other coaches. His offense has touches of Mumme, Air Force’s triple option and most resembles West Virginia out of all Division-1 schools.
This past spring Higgins took a trip up to Lawrence to see how the Jayhawks run their spread, which features a quarterback, Todd Reesing, in the same mold as ESU redshirt freshman Zach Rampy.
“You can do so many things out of the spread,” Rampy says. “I think there’s still things that are waiting to be discovered that you can do out of this offense, because it gives you so many possibilities of what you are able to do from an offensive standpoint.”
Abandoning his roots
Higgins’ version of the spread has undergone a tug of war in his head with his predecessors on one side and his assistant coaches on the other.
“I’m an old huddle guy. I’m an old I-formation guy,” Higgins says. “I played for Larry Kramer. We were lined up in the I-formation here and bloodied your nose. My dad’s a high school coach. That’s what I’ve been brought up around. It was very hard for me to break away from that.”
In 2003, Higgins adopted the no-huddle, which was a staple of the spread. The first year he would only go no-huddle 50 percent of the time. Then in 2004, it was 60 percent. In 2005 in his first and only year as offensive coordinator at Minnesota State, Higgins went back to 50-50. The next season, his first and only year as offensive coordinator at Northeastern State in Oklahoma, Higgins started to lean more on the no-huddle, but still could not abandon the huddle entirely.
“Coach (Sean) Clowers who was with me at Northeastern, he used to always tell me, ‘I don’t know why you huddle up, you’re just doing that for a security blanket. You feel more comfortable calling plays in the no-huddle. You get in a rhythm. The offense gets in a rhythm. The players like it. Just break away from it.’”
When Higgins got the job at Emporia State, he decided he would go exclusively to the no-huddle spread attack. He wanted to be different and most of the MIAA has failed to follow in the rest of the country’s footsteps. Emporia State’s offense is the only one of its kind in the conference with Truman State the only other school that runs a similar spread, but Truman has a more pass-heavy attack.
Higgins also has begun to ignore the plays in his playbook that have the quarterback under center. Again, Clowers is in his ear telling him he doesn’t need anything but the shotgun, contrary to what his dad believes.
“He’s always asking, ‘Hey, you got any plays you’re going to be running under center?’ You’ve got to make sure that you have some of those, where you’ve got your quarterback under center, got a fullback. You got any of those plays?’ He’ll ask me that all the time,” Higgins says. “He’ll even ask my assistants because he knows I get mad if he asks me.
“So he’ll call coach (Spence) Nowinski — because he’s kind of old school, I-formation — he’ll always call him and tell him, ‘Hey, you tell that little runt up there, my son, he needs some plays underneath center.’”
Recruiting to the spread
When Higgins got the job at ESU, he decided to abandon his roots and let the true experiment begin, but there was one big problem: He didn’t have the players.
Higgins first priority was to get a quarterback. He brought in Andre Sloan El who stared at Visalia College and was the prototypical spread-option quarterback. He also signed Rampy, who ran the spread in high school at Blue Valley. Rampy had passed for more than 2,000 yards in both his junior and senior seasons, threw for 53 career touchdowns, ran for 28 and had 1,461 yards rushing in his career. Those numbers would usually draw D-I offers, but Rampy is undersized, listed at a generous 5-foot-11. Higgins, who also was an undersized quarterback at ESU, saw a perfect fit for his offense.
“Our quarterbacks are the type who you might say, ‘You know what, he’s a good quarterback. He’s a good athlete, but I don’t think he’s a quarterback in college.’ Well, that’s the guy I want,” Higgins says.
The Hornets’ biggest need was speed. On both sides of the ball, the ESU coaching staff has tried to recruit speed, with the most critical areas of need at running back and receiver. Last season, Higgins had to revert back to the I-formation with the quarterback under center while he searched for something that would work.
“That was kind of the personnel we had when we got here,” he said. “It was an I-formation team. They had recruited to fit that system. That’s why I felt like we had to improve our speed. We were just so slow last year in certain positions.
“I know you’ve got to be big and you’ve got to be physical, but right now we’re not that, and it’s easy for us to go get fast guys.”
One of the first speedsters Higgins signed was Adrian Abner, a shifty running back out of Texas who ran the spread in high school. Abner and KU transfer Brian Murphy should give the Hornets the speed they need out of the backfield to stay in the spread this year.
Higgins has also added speed at receiver with true freshman Xavier Smith, redshirt freshman Matt Coursen and junior college transfer Danny McEvoy joining senior Sean Partridge. Smith moved from running back to receiver during training camp and Coursen was also a running back in high school at Waverly High School, who plays 8-man football and ran a spread-out attack.
“We’re still not where we need to be offensively,” Higgins says. “We’ve still got parts that we’ve got to find. We still need depth at receiver. That’s a question mark right now. We cannot afford to have any injuries at the receiver position or we’ll have to revert back to how some things were last year without having any speed. When you’re trying to do this offense without speed, it’s not real good.”
Always be ‘a play guy’
Higgins never throws away a play in his playbook. Every year it grows thicker and heavier and eventually he might just throw his back out.
“I try to keep everything,” Higgins says. “I’m like my grandma. If I was at my grandma’s house and I wanted, say, an army canteen, well, she’d have one. She would always have something you were looking for. I want to be the same way offensively. I keep everything so I can always go back or dig back and find out if that’s something that we wanna do now or not.”
This season is the first since 2003 that Higgins is not working a new quarterback into his system. Sloan El started five games last season and Rampy had a year to watch and learn as a redshirt freshman. Higgins says he’s only installed 20 percent of his offense, but if he had his way he’d have the thousands of plays he’s drawn up over the years at his disposal.
“We’ve been really slow about installing this year and it’s driving me nuts,” he says, “because I’m kind of a mad-scientist guy. I drive my assistants crazy. I’ve tried to back off a little bit and slow down.”
As the season approaches, Higgins is in full-football coaching mode. He tries to exude a tough exterior and business-like mentality, but get him talking about his offense and it’s easy for Higgins to get lost in his playbook.
His offense will evolve and new trends will take over college football, but Higgins will always be “a play guy.”
“I can’t remember where I put the keys to my car,” he says, “but I can always remember a play.”
The ESU Preview 2008 stories all appear in Friday's edition of The Emporia Gazette. Pick up your copy today!
Comments
We allow registered users to post comments on this Web site. To learn more about our posting policies please read our User Poster Agreement Policy.
Posted by uber_cj_fan (anonymous) on September 6, 2008 at 1:28 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Well done sir
Post a comment
We allow registered users to post comments on this Web site. Our goal with this feature is to encourage thoughtful discussions about the news stories. Using the comment feature to make random attacks on people is not acceptable. Emporiagazette.com neither endorses nor guarantees the accuracy of any user contribution. Responsibility for what is posted or contributed to this site is the sole responsibility of each user. To learn more about our posting policies please read our User Poster Agreement Policy.
(Requires free registration.)