As the new millennium began, the Northwestern Wildcats were at the forefront of offensive schematics in national college football. The Cats were the 2000 Big Ten co-champions (with Michigan and Purdue), thanks in large part to the spread-option system that they were running on offense.
Head Coach Randy Walker, and offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson, installed a system built around spreading defenders out, and then creating individual mismatches to potentially exploit. It was the polar opposite of the cliched “playing in a phone booth,” and it provided a signature win on Nov. 4, 2000 that was a harbinger of the brave new world to come.
That win, a 54-51 win over #12 Michigan was on national television (ABC) and it included a segment that showed Walker and Wilson’s boys doing ab work, bicycle kicks to be exact, as a means of building up their core strength/conditioning to run “the spread.”
It’s an offense designed to provide running lanes and negate one-on-ones where your side is at a physical, size disadvantage. It wasn’t long until the system spread (pun intended) across the country, but it all started at a school where the fight song literally includes the words “spread far the fame.”
And looking at the whole history of all of this, it’s a tale filled with coincidence for sure, and maybe, potentially some irony.
Back in the day, a then obscure assistant coach at New Hampshire, named Chip Kelly, went and visited with the guys at NU. He brought the playbook for the current reigning national championship head coach Ryan Day, then a college quarterback, to utilize in their system.
“We used to watch all the films,” Day said.
“That was how the spread game started. We came back and called it everything that Kevin Wilson and Coach Walker and everybody called it at Northwestern.”
“That was like the way to run the spread offense. Chip went out and visited them and came back with all the different terminology, and I was like the guinea pig quarterback to try to figure it out, and some games and some plays were better than others, but that was the start of it.”
“Kevin Wilson was right on the front end of that, and so yeah, the offense that we were running there, a lot of it had to do with Northwestern.”
The spread then got trendy, from coast to coast, but Northwestern were truly cutting-edge trail blazers during the 2000s.
“There were other teams,” Day continued.
“Rich Rodriguez was at Clemson at the time, and Wake Forest had a part — there was different versions of it, but certainly Northwestern was right on the front end.”
Don’t think for a second that this style is soft though- it’s all about running the Day then articulated the philosophy behind the spread attack:
“The idea is that you’re trying to create space, especially in today’s day and age with the size of the different players that are out there, it’s become harder and harder to run between the tackles because they’re so big and strong, and the more you can get guys out in space, the better off it is.”
“You look at basketball, that’s the way they’re going.”
“It’s the same thing in football. But that doesn’t take away from the toughness and the edge that you play with and block and run with, and so having the two of those, being physical but also being able to spread teams out I think is a great combination.”
Day’s predecessor, Urban Meyer, also adopted the spread and won three national titles with it. Northwestern meanwhile kept putting exciting, high-scoring offenses on the field up until the mid 2010s. Walker’s life was tragically cut short in 2006, and his successor, Pat Fitzgerald brought a level of consistency to Evanston that they hadn’t previously seen.
NU kept the offensive machine rolling up until 2012, when it then plateaued, stagnated and declined.
That 2000 Northwestern football team was the program’s last conference champion, and it ran an offense based around Damien Anderson, who was the school’s all-time leading rusher until only a couple years ago. That standard setting 2000 team, and all that they accomplished just feels like ancient history right now.
College football schematics are just like most competitive marketplaces in business- if you’re standing still you are actually falling behind. Northwestern stood still for a long time, and now they’re falling further behind each season. It’s time to find a system that works again.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter
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