pistol offense

Chris Ault, the creator of the Pistol offense, is reportedly stepping down at Nevada. I was going to post this article here earlier this week and it seems even more relevant now:

http://www.sbnation.com/longform/2012/12/27/3792740/pistol-offense-nfl-redskins-rg3

I hope Hoke and Borges reevaluate their philosophy long-term on dual threat QBs as I still feel having a dual threat QB who can run the read option will give teams the best chance of winning in the future. Running it out of the Pistol allows you to run it as a power attack.

Hey MGoBlog,

I’d actually been working on writing a diary about the pistol offense so as to break it down and show its various advantages and disadvantages and then ask the community’s thoughts on this. But I see that Chris from Smart Football (http://smartfootball.blogspot.com/) has just posted something about the pistol on Doc. Saturday’s site (http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Deconstructi...).

It’s a little bit more overview than what I was working on so I might still finish the diary just to learn some more about the offense. My question is what do you guys think of this in general?

I was working less on the pistol FORMATION and more on a complete pistol OFFENSE. I think that the idea of being married to having the HB behind the QB is limiting. I think it’s an excellent basic package, but I’d really like to see some plays where you have the man in motion and time the snap so that the snap goes off, gets to the QB, and then the QB can read the defense and hand the ball off to the man in motion (who is running parallel to the line and is very close to the linemen) or keep it and do something else (whether that be run himself or pass it) with the HB providing pass protection. That way you can have a TE on one side of the line and the HB providing pass protection on the other side. The QB should then have adequate time to make a deep throw if necessary. Then you can start really messing with the defenses head by changing up the wide receivers. You can see where this could turn into a long diary since there are so many little adjustments that could be great.

The summary of my diary thus far is appropriate for this part.

1. The pistol allows a run play more easily than the shotgun and almost as easily and effectively as taking snaps under center
2. Misdirection/being hard to read can allow you to just plain embarrass the defense
3. Can pretty easily pass out of the pistol formation
4. Gain most of the advantages of the shotgun formation without all of the disadvantages (although you don’t gain the full advantages and there are definitely some disadvantages of the ‘gun present in the pistol)

There was obviously more but that's the gist of what I actually wrote so far.

So, thoughts on any of this? Will we see this start to spread out into the upper echelons of college football? Or will is just be used by the Wolfpack and occasionally by other teams as a trick play/weird formation that you don’t show too often?

And would anybody still be interested in me finishing that diary? If not, then I’ll put it on the back burner.