AJC > Sports > Tech > Blog > Archives > 2008 > August > 07
Thursday, August 7, 2008
A bit of history for ya
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ll be back with a few observations from practice later today. In the meantime, here’s Paul Johnson on the “invention” of his offense, as told at the ACC preseason meetings a few weeks ago (and re-told at Tech’s media day Saturday):
“I coached defense at Georgia Southern in ‘83 and ‘84 for coach [Erk] Russell. The offensive coordinator was a guy named Ben Griffith, and they had gone to some run-and-shoot stuff, ala June Jones. We had been an I-formation team. They ran a little bit of option with the run-and-shoot.
“At the end of the ‘84 season, the offensive coordinator left and coach Russell asked me to move over and be offensive coordinator, but he said he wanted to run the I-formation, which is what they had done at Georgia [when Russell was defensive coordinator there].
“We weren’t very successful. We didn’t have a tight end or a fullback, an I fullback, and I told him I want to get back in a double-slot. He said, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that.’ I said, ‘We’re going to get in it to run, our quarterback is Tracy Ham and we’ve got to utilize the guy.’
“He said, ‘Let me think about it,’ and came back down in 15 minutes and said, ‘Do what you got to do,’ and that’s what we did. We got in it, and through the years we evolved. If somebody gave us something that we thought was a problem, we just evolved.
“It was a run-and-shoot originally, play-action passing, a lot of option components. [The run-pass ratio] was a little out of whack at Georgia Southern because we averaged close to 40 or 50 points per game, and we’d get ahead at halftime and you don’t throw on people if you’re up 40-6. Up until June went back to Hawaii, our quarterbacks held a bunch of the passing records [from when Johnson was offensive coordinator there after leaving GSU and before returning to GSU].”
GSU won Division I-AA national titles in ‘85 and ‘86.
