How Paul Johnson's Offense, The Flexbone Spread, Is Supposed To Look

If you want to see what our offense looks like when it is executed well, tune into the Navy – Maryland game tomorrow. Navy has been recruiting players for this scheme for years, and everyone in the program has been learning how to run it since they arrived on campus. They are well coached. Additionally, they are smart, and they all go to a military academy, which means that they spend their entire lives learning how to do what their superiors tell them, every single time, no matter what happens. Every. Single. Time.

Given that, Navy will probably always have an advantage over us in terms of executing the offense. But we have a pretty big advantage in that we can recruit better athletes than Navy can. If those were the only factors, I would say overall GT has the advantage, and we should have a better offense than Navy. However, Navy happens to have a tremendous quarterback this year. A QB who is much better than usual for Navy. Ricky Dobbs is getting serious looks from NFL teams to play QB, at least I think, because he is that good of a passer. (I have only heard this, it may not be true, but I have seen him play, he is a really good passer.) Additionally, he is a very good runner, and he really knows what he is doing in terms of execution. He may in fact be a better QB for this offense than we ever get at GT. However, Nesbitt is close, and we have not seen how well Coach Johnson can recruit and develop QB’s at Tech.

With that said, I think we can expect to improve our execution for the next 1 to 2 years because we still have some players who were not recruited to this offense and who spent at least a year learning under Gailey. When we have nothing but players who were recruited by Johnson and who have spent their entire college careers being coached by Johnson, we should be better. (this is assuming our talent level stays the same, or gets better, but previous blogs have shown why we can probably safely assume this to be true).

If you want to see how much better we might be able to get, watch Navy tomorrow. They work very well together, they are well coached, and they execute the blocks and the reads very well. Then imagine a team running the offense as well, or close to as well, as Navy, with guys who are bigger faster and stronger.

I hope we can get to their level of execution one day, but since we have better talent than they are able to recruit, we should be able to run this offense better than they can even if we never learn to execute it quite as well as they do. Either way, watching them run our scheme should be fun and encouraging, because they are really good at it.

As always, Go Jackets!