Friday, April 24, 2009
Can spread offense affect recruiting?
Hokies entertain prize basketball recruit
Doug Doughty
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What is it about elite in-state quarterbacks and their seeming indifference for Virginia Tech and Virginia?
The Hokies and Cavaliers signed the top two quarterbacks in the state in 2006-2007, Tyrod Taylor and Peter Lalich, but have been snubbed the past two years.
Actually, they were snubbed twice last year, when Tajh Boyd and Kevin Newsome committed to West Virginia and Michigan originally, then decommitted and signed with Clemson and Penn State.
More recently, the state’s No. 1 prospect for 2009-2010, quarterback Phillip Sims from Oscar Smith High School in Chesapeake, committed to Alabama.
Oscar Smith coach Rich Morgan said that Sims found Alabama to be “the best fit.”
Since Virginia had signed a pair of players off Oscar Smith’s Group AAA Division 5 champions, wide receiver Tim Smith and linebacker-running back Perry Jones, I wondered if the Cavaliers were experiencing some sort of backlash from their move to a spread offense.
Morgan describes Alabama’s offense as a “multiple pro set.”
“Nick Saban, coming from the NFL, tries to prepare his guys for the next level,” Morgan said. “They’re very multiple and do a lot of things with the quarterback that needs to be done at the next level.
“It’s not always going to be the shotgun. It’s not always going to be the spread because nobody runs that at the next level. They’ll go anywhere from ‘I’ formation to an offset ‘I,’ and then they will do some three- and four-receiver stuff.
“And, they are adding some new packages. I was there for some spring practices and I’ve seen some of the packages they’ll add for the future. It’s all pretty similar to what we do here at Oscar Smith.”
I asked Morgan if Sims was turned off by the spread and if he thought other quarterbacks might feel the same.
“It didn’t really turn him off at all,” Morgan said, “but there is no such thing as a spread offense in the NFL. Never has been, other than the Houston Oilers running the run-and-shoot 20 years ago.
“I do think a lot of kids want to feel comfortable that it will translate to the next level. Colleges have to win with the athletes they’ve got. You’ve got to run a system that’s good for you.
“The spread offense is a way to get good athletes the ball early in space. If you don’t have the same athletes as the guy on the other side, it’s a way to level the playing field.
“A lot of those schools that pass every down, their quarterbacks go to the combines and they don’t have the best feet. They haven’t made a lot of the NFL-type throws and they kind of get lost in the shuffle.
“Mark Sanchez and the guy from Georgia [Matthew Stafford] come from the same offenses that Alabama runs. And, those are the top guys two being picked in the draft. But, the guy coming from a Texas Tech, you don’t hear about him.
“He’ll get a look later on but he’s not going to be there [in New York] because he doesn’t have the feet and the arm strength of some of these other guys.”
VIRGINIA COACH AL GROH has put a few guys in the NFL and may have as many as five or six players selected this weekend. Predictably, he doesn’t think that the spread would hinder a college quarterback’s chances in the pros.
“If they perform well, quarterbacks who exhibit the things that NFL teams are looking for – and it’s a different game – get drafted no matter what system they were in,” Groh said. “Why isn’t Chase Daniel, who was a highly productive quarterback in college, being drafted early? Because he’s a 5-foot-11 or 6-foot quarterback with average arm strength.
“What [Missouri’s] style of offense did is take a kid who might have had a much-lesser career in other circumstances and made him a college star. If you’d have put Mark Sanchez or the kid from Georgia into the Missouri offense, they would have been tremendously successful and been highly drafted. It’s [the stigma] a lot of nonsense.”
Groh said that the input he has been getting from returning assistant Ron Prince, who was the head coach at Kansas State for the past three seasons, is that as many as 50 percent of the high school teams in Texas and California are using spread offenses.
“I think that would make [the spread] attractive to an awful lot of quarterbacks, which is why Kansas had a real good team and Missouri had a real good team,” Groh said. “If your quarterback has a high-level year, you’re probably going to win a lot of games. These kids have been playing in these offenses since the eighth grade. They know the systems. They go to schools because of it.
“Frankly, for all of the talk about all our offensive linemen and tight ends who have gone to the NFL, the real high-water mark will be when we have a quarterback who’s rated the same way. We would fall all over ourselves to get the next Matt Schaub to run this offense. The No. 1 criterion to make this offense go is a player’s ability to pass the ball.”
GROH IS NOT PERMITTED to speak about an unsigned player like Sims but he feels that the exodus of in-state players like Sims, Boyd and Newsome is pretty easy to explain. They perceive programs like Alabama’s to be more big-time, which Morgan alluded to in one of his quotes.
“They needed a quarterback, one,” Morgan said. “Number two, [Sims] felt good about the coaching staff and the system they were running. And, number three, it’s Alabama [with] 12 national titles and one of the best programs in the country. It’s kind of hard to find anything that isn’t good about it.
What a Virginia Tech fan might ask is, “What have they done lately?”
Despite losing its last two games, the Crimson Tide was 12-2 last year. Saban first Alabama team went 7-6 in 2007.
Alabama is 41-23 over the past five years, compared to the Hokies’ 52-15. Over the past 10 years, the Tide is 75-50 and Tech is 100-30.
TECH IS EXPECTING as many as 60 prospects for today’s spring football game. And that’s just the football prospects.
Visitors will include basketball prospect DeShawn Painter, a 6-foot-9 post player from Hargrave Military Academy who will be on an official visit.
Painter, released from a letter-of-intent he signed with Florida this past fall, has two cousins on the Hokies’ football team (Vinston Painter and Marcus Davis). DeShawn Painter, originally from Booker T. Washington in Norfolk, also plans to visit Maryland and North Carolina State.
Visitors for football will include five of the state’s top six juniors as rated by The Roanoke Times. The top player on that list was Sims, followed by Brookville defensive end Zach McCray, Fork Union offensive lineman Mark Shuman, Lake Taylor linebacker Travis Williams, Ocean Lakes wide receiver Justin Hunter and King William defensive lineman Nick Acree.
Shuman and Acree have committed to the Hokies, and Shuman will be joined by his Fork Union offensive linemate Russell Bodine. If Bodine were to pick Tech, it would give Virginia one more reason to rue its short sighted decision not to offer Shuman’s older brother, Ryan, in 2003.
