Rich Rod as being the creator of the zone read, provide some evidence for it. You could say he’s most commonly known for it’s creation, but if you go back to Tom Osborne’s ‘96 title game against Florida and see the spread option in action with Tommie Frazier running the offense.

talked about himself? Holy cow!

So, what’s the difference between running the spread option of today, and the triple option of yesterday? Seriously, not trying to be antagonistic, but I would like to know what you define as the difference.

Zone Read, Spread, Spread Optino, blah de blah, they are all terms used to describe slight differences in today’s offenses. If you are going use the terms to relate specific concepts, I would appreciate it if you would be a little more descriptive, i.e., a play diagram, because most of these terms are so bastardized as to mean nothing.

Then perhaps we could have a meaningful dialogue. Otherwise, no.

No. I can’t. Right now I am trying like hell to repair a severely damaged network environment, so to be honest right now my head is completely somewhere else.

And that’s actually relevant…. because I think we’re talking about two different levels of the same thing. For example, if I have a conversation with another tech guy about network encryption, we will have a completely different conversation than I will with someone who doesn’t work on the stuff. In fact, to the technical person, the same conversation will be completely wrong because the semantics will have changed, i.e., I’m not going to spend any time explaining AES vs 3DES vs DES encryption to someone who doesn’t care about it, or doesn’t need to understand it to that level.

That applies here….. because the terms about offensive schemes are loosely used by most writers, say 90% of them. Everything is a spread (because it’s fashionable), and zone read is a buzzword. 90% of readers don’t care either. However, to those who want to get to that technical level, it’s all incorrect. Neither conversation is necessarily wrong, but applies to the level of interest of the reader.

Does that make sense?

What I’m saying, basically is this – you seem to keep having a conversation with me, and I’m trying to get you to have a conversation with everyone. Who the hell cares about what I know about football, whether I’m a moron or not – if you have some good resources on providing a more technical explanation of the differences between offensive schemes then I would appreciate it if you would share them with us (not just me), maybe in the diaries section. Wait. Fanposts… that’s it.

Right now at this exact moment, I’m trying to figure out why DNS isn’t working, why adprep /forestprep is giving me an error, how I’m going to fix it, while simultaneously trying to figure out why an anti-spam server at another site is blowing up.

Does that make sense to you….?

Either way, I’m back to banging my head against a wall.

Rich Rod did invent a series and a scheme, the Dart series, which he bases his whole offense around. Dart Option is also known as Zone Read. Rodriguez developed a whole series of plays based around the Dart Option, to take advantage of what people would do to stop the zone read. These include Dart Trap, Outside Zone, and the Read-Read Option.
I give Rodriguez credit for inventing the spread option, b/c he invented the base series for that offensive scheme, and he is the best at running that particular offense. Many teams spread the field to run the ball (see Randy Walker’s Northwestern squads), Rodriguez combined the spread and the Dart series into a multifaceted attack that many teams are now copying (as I noted before, see A&M, Illinois, Indiana, Oregon).

June Jones was and still is a run-n-shoot coach. Tiller is and was a spread coach. There is a difference between the two. Run-n-shoot teams depend on reads by the WRs and QB as the play is developing; spread teams depend on the pre-snap read by the QB.

Texas is a spread team, if we take "spread" to refer to a particular pre-snap formation. If their "bread-and-butter play" is a running play out of that formation, how are they not a spread team?

Disagree. Just b/c you run zone read does not make you a spread team. It just makes you a team with a zone-based running game. texas has a zone-based running game and a WCO-based passing scheme.

If you really want to get into that argument, go here: Why texas isn’t a spread offense

Suffice it to say, texas run 11 personnel too often for me to consider them a spread offense. The emphasis on triangular stretches in their passing game also precludes this.

I also don’t agree with a spread team simply being someone who utilizes the formation, or even that spread is simply a formation. If you believe the spread is simply a formation by which you spread out the defense, then the split-T teams of Bud Wilkinson’s era at Oklahoma were all ‘spread’ teams.

I would say you at least need a superior front 7, or a great back 7 (or 8).

A DL alone isn’t enough to get it done. Yes, a pass rush helps, but you’ll be killed by teams running shallow crossing routes if you’re linebackers or secondary are mediocre.