by youngterrier on Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:53 pm
The way I see it, the top 6 private school programs in the FCS are (in no particular order, though I would privilege the teams that won a national title over the ones that hadn't):
Villanova, Furman, Richmond, Wofford, Colgate and Lehigh.
The former two play in the Patriot League, which has their own issues with reduced scholarships, but on occasion they put together a good enough team that can win a game or two in the playoffs. Their recruiting is just as hard, if not harder than ours. They don't run the option and have proven they can win and compete without it.
I'll admit that I was not around when Furman won their championship in the 80s, but again a lot has changed since then. The FCS is deeper than it was. Still, Furman made it to the national title game in the early 2000s without an option game.
Villanova and Richmond are two of the teams to win a title and did so between App State's 3-peat and NDSU's 5-peat. Villanova is probably more different from Wofford and Richmond, but we're all nevertheless similar schools with small alumni-bases and tough academics. Again, they won their titles and have been competitive in the FCS *without* running the option.
When I call the option a gimick, I mean that it depends mainly on deception. The "whodunit" in terms of not knowing who has the ball. It's the the tradeoff of less strength-on-strength in the trenches for speed on the perimeter. The spread offense (Baylor, Western Carolina, etc) does the same trade off, but the difference is that they use a passing game as well (and for the highly effective offenses, it also makes defenses less good because of the sheer number of plays they run and possessions the games have). The best offenses are the balanced offenses, whether they be spread or through the pro set, because they give the ability to attack at any point in any way, so the defense can't afford to give the same look. You can slow down the game if need be with the run (air raids can't do that) or get quick yards on the pass in a two minute drill (Wofford and Furman's ability to do fast pace this year was the exception, not the rule of option offenses and arguably the reason why they were successful was because of not-the-option).
I didn't watch the film of what North Dakota State did to us, but I did watch both of ours against Furman. The same principle applies; we gave them the same look all game, playing smart enough to neutralize the deception part of the game. It's then strength on strength and that's not what an option team wants. If you're Furman, you couldn't do much else, much like we can't when a team figures us out, because in many offenses the option is just the same plays in different formations (so the fundamentals of defending it are the same) with the added bonus that you don't need to worry us much about the pass. What made Furman successful this year was their ability to pass. I'm skeptical that they'll be able to keep up their offensive success because they aren't going to have the same quality of passer as Blazejowski.
Bad defenses and inferior competition can't stop the option, but good defenses can be habituated to stop it if they're sound enough in their fundamentals. Though in every offense one person not doing their job can mean bad production, in an option offense everyone can do their job and still be a minimal gain. It's no coincidence that once we get into the playoffs, about ~50% we fail to score 20. Heck, in the last 7 playoff games we barely broke the 20 point mark and needed turnovers to do it.
So I can fully acknowledge that the option is part of the reason we've won the socon as many times as we have. The App State and Georgia Southern defenses we torched with it weren't good, but on many occasions they torched us.
Bottom line: there's a solid case to be made that option teams have a ceiling and evidence that private schools with academic standards don't need to run the option or air raid to be successful (Georgia Tech has seen some success, but so has Duke and Stanford recently for another datapoint)
Study hard, Work Hard, Party Hard, Go Terriers!