Flat earth? Watch a game and you're lying to say I'm wrong. I love Wentz as much as the next guy but the offense he ran is a QB option run offense. That's why he tucked the ball over 25% of his plays. Cam Newton doesn't even run close to that much.
It's not a "pro style" offense
Yeah, flat earth. It's not a matter for debate. It's definitional. Every person with coaching experience who's dissected it, instantly recognizes it as a WCO.
It just happens to be a power running variant with some read option plays.
you can do that. Just like you can incorporate spread concepts into the Earhardt Perkins offense like Belicheck did a few years ago. Doesn't mean that Belicheck converted his New England offense TO the spread. Just means they incorporated other concepts into the base offense.
That's why there are VARIANTS. That's how in the Coryell offense you can have the two extremes, the Washington 'Hogs variant which was a power running, play action variant and the Air Coryell variant run in San Diego which was executed by Dan Fouts and put Dan Fouts and Kellen Winslow in the HoF.
As
@jrry32 can attest, there are SUBSTANTIAL differences between spreads like what Cam Newton ran at Auburn and the WCO variant (or system as
@jrry32 puts it... we use slightly different terminology for the same thing) that NDSU runs.
As it turns out, teams in the NFL tend to not run "pure" offenses, too. Even as we look at prime examples... NO for a WCO, NE for Earhardt Perkins, Minny for Coryell (Norv Turner...), they incorporate other aspects from other offenses including spread, read option and others.
Effectively, they create language "dialects", sorta like the difference between talking to a New Yorker with a thick Brooklyn accent and all his local idioms and someone from Mississippi with his thick Southern drawl and all his local idioms. Sure, they still both speak American English, but they are also quite different in their modalities of expression even within the same language.
That's how you can have the 49ers WCO which just threw slant passes, screens, check downs and post patterns until it made you sick while you can STILL have an NDSU WCO that runs more than it passes with heavy OL and incorporates read option elements.
As for the "pro style" that's a misnomer. It's an offense used in the pros. Pro style just means as opposed to the triple option, or any spread variant. And because it was a pro offense, all of the NDSU QBs had to manage the huddle, call the play that was sent in, deal with pre-snap reads, call the mike, etc.. all elements of a QB in a pro offense.
So, yeah. Saying NDSU ran a QB run option offense is just factually wrong. It's okay if you don't know, but you can't just look at the video, see him run, say, "look, he runs alot. He must be in a QB option run offense."
If that was the case, by that logic, I could look at a brown sunset and say, "hey, look at that brown sunset. We must have an ammonia based atmosphere 'cuz we have brown clouds." Well, yeah, we do, but that's light refraction through our normal nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere with maybe a little pollution. They do look brown to us and there's traces of ammonia in the air, but it's not an ammonia based atmosphere.
Same difference.
