Beyond the pregame visit they’ll share before the Georgia Tech-Wofford season opener Saturday, Paul Johnson and Mike Ayers have plenty that they could talk about.
The two men have been triple-option coaches since the 1980s. They faced each other as head coaches five times (1997-2001) when they were Southern Conference foes, Johnson at Georgia Southern and Ayers at Wofford, where he has been in charge for the past 26 years.
Circumstances have prevented much shop talk, however. After Johnson left Statesboro for Navy, for instance, he was succeeded by his assistant Mike Sewak, and Johnson wasn’t going to open his playbook to a league competitor of a former assistant. The conflict arose again when former Johnson assistant Jeff Monken took over at Georgia Southern in 2010.
With Monken having left for Army and no branches of the Johnson coaching tree in the Southern Conference, “this is probably the first time now that we could actually sit down and talk, and we find ourselves playing each other,” Johnson said.
The circumstances for Saturday’s opener are indeed a little unusual. Often, Tech opponents steal time in spring practice and the preseason to prepare for the Yellow Jackets’ unorthodox scheme. Opposing coaches bemoan the difficulty of acclimating players for Tech’s spread-option offense. By contrast, Ayers said this week he could eschew a scout-team offense and just have the defense practice against the first-string offense to prepare for Tech, so schematically similar are the Terriers to the Jackets.
“They do the same thing,” Johnson said.
Wofford plays out of both the shotgun and under center, as Tech did last season.
“In fact, they run a lot of the same plays we ran out of the gun, and then they try to run some of the very same plays we run under the center,” Johnson said.
The opportunity does not come often, as the circle of teams specializing in the triple option is more like a dot. Johnson has proteges at Army and Navy, Monken and Ken Niumatalolo, respectively, running similar offenses. The third FBS service-academy team, Air Force, uses the triple option, too. In FCS, Wofford and Southern Conference-rival Citadel use the triple option. At the Division I level, though, the fraternity isn’t much bigger than that.
“I think guys that are triple-option guys, they understand what each other goes through,” Ayers said. “They understand that, if you’re trying to single block a 3-technique (defensive tackle) with a 250-pound guard and that 3-technique happens to be 6-4, 310 (pounds), it’s something that’s really hard to do.”
As a result, when someone in the circle finds a solution, Ayers said, “it’s like five offensive linemen going to a bakery and everything’s free. You jump on it hard.”
In his quest for answers, ideas and, in his words, “nuances to help you get a first down,” Ayers looks at all the game video he can acquire from places like Tech and the service academies, even down to high school. Ayers said he has seen “a slew” of game videos from Johnson-coached teams.
Likewise, Ayers has Johnson’s respect. Despite having one of the smaller enrollments in Division I and competing in one of the toughest conferences in FCS, Wofford has made the FCS playoffs six times in the past 11 seasons. The Terriers put a scare into Clemson in 2011, losing 35-27.
“All you have to do is watch the tape to see that they do a good job,” Johnson said. “They know what they’re doing.”
Without conflicts, Johnson is happy to dispense his wisdom. Quarterbacks and B-backs coach Bryan Cook was a frequent summer visitor when he was co-offensive coordinator at Cal Poly, the job he left to come to Tech in 2013. When Ohio State coach Urban Meyer was at Utah installing option concepts, “they called us three times a week” to ask questions, Johnson said. This year, he finds himself in a quandary with two former coaches at archrivals Army and Navy.
“That makes that almost impossible,” he said.
At his Tuesday news conference, Johnson seemed open to spending time with his longtime colleague from Wofford. Later that day, Ayers was asked what he’d want to ask Johnson.
Said Ayers, “We’d probably start at Page 1 and go from there.”
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