Has Harbaugh Invented a New College Offense?

Granted, I don’t watch nearly the college football I did in the 90’s, when I was a young man. Back then I had a much better understanding of the offenses of the day.  I understood I-formation Big 10 football from watching Michigan, et al.  Living in Colorado at the time, I got to watch true triple option at Air Force.  Nebraska’s unique power option, some very good Colorado teams running wishbone and I-formation option games.  Houston and the Run-and-Shoot, and there were many West-Coast passing games from BYU and California teams.  The pioneering spread passing game that Mike Bellotti was quietly creating at Oregon, and which eventually cut us apart in 2007 and showed me that CFB had really passed Lloyd Carr by. 

Then I got married, had kids, finished residency, got a vasectomy, etc.- i.e. started real adulting- and the best I could often do for the following 10 years was DVR a Michigan game and try and watch it before I inadvertently learned the score. I feel like I missed about 10 years of in-depth attention to football, and they were a good 10 years to roughly miss, with RichRod and Hokie at the helm for 7 of them, and the SEC taking over.  Now my kids are middle/high-school ages, and follow Michigan football themselves, and it seems we’re watching more games from around the nation and watching UM games with great analysis and concern.  What I’ve seen in the last few years, and appearing to finally culminate now with JJ McCarthy’s talents, is an offensive concept that exists nowhere else in college football and, to my knowledge, never has before.  It may even be that it’s an offense that could only exist with Harbaugh at the helm, because the offense seems to be a doppelganger of his personality. You have to give Harbaugh a lot of credit for having core beliefs (run the ball, win physically over 60 minutes) while at the same time being willing to dramatically evolve in the way he delivers this on the field.    

In the early years of Harbaugh at UM, he seemed to be essentially attempting to run a pro-set Stanford offense, only a bit whimperingly for the lack of dominant OL and lights-out RBs.  All his QB’s also had serious limitations.  Then Gattis came and we moved into something like a spread-to-run power (which seemed to be a detente between Gattis' "speed in space" and Harbaugh's desire to run power) in which the QB didn’t actually run or threaten much. The endeavor generally got by, passing when we needed to. But it didn’t look particularly in synch until late last year (and even then we didn’t do much until the Maryland/OSU finale in which OSU showed, more than anything, IMO, that they didn’t really like the contact part of the sport).  However, in that game, in addition to the ferocity of the OL/TE, I would guess that there were some clever subtleties in the offensive delivery (formations, blocking scheme, etc.) that actually left OSU holding their jocks more often than not and led to the paving as much as the physicality did. We saw intimations of this ability from time to time before, like when we absolutely paved Notre Dame in the driving rain. 

Bringing us now to 2022, Penn State, when I fully realized this silly, ignorant epiphany that I’ve chosen to create a thread about and you're foolishly reading. It was really all the 3 TE formations that finally made me understand that Harbaugh (and staff) have invented a brand new college offense, that is something of a hybrid of many eras of football- it’s read option, modern passing, downhill power running, and even a flying wedge of TE’s. Now, maybe someone will put me in my place and say “oh, the Ravens have run this for years”.  Fine.  I don’t watch professional football so wouldn’t have a clue.  But in college, I don’t believe there exists another team using 3 TE’s to run a spread offense, shifting those TE’s all over both pre and post-snap, like it’s some kind of Fielding Yost offense.  It imposes blocking schemes that no other team can really recreate and allows an overwhelming number of bodies to be thrown into the point of attack on power runs, and that point of attack to be very mobile. We also create constraints on this with a reasonably high-level passing game and other running schemes like zone blocking. When we’re not conducting this offense in the most vanilla way possible to beat the Indianas and Marylands of the world by 17, this seems to create incredible headaches for opposing defenses, which seem perplexed and helpless far beyond what their talent or previous games might indicate. 

Anyway, thanks for reading.  Michigan football remains among the most intellectual pursuits in sports. Who’s got it better than us?