Kansas has tried just about every tried and true approach to hiring a new head coach as a Power Five program since it lost Glen Mason - the last coach to win consistently in Lawrence - to Minnesota in 1996. It replaced Mason with Terry Allen, who fits firmly into the first category: rising star program builder.
Allen won big at his alma mater, Northern Iowa, from 1989-1996. It was his first head coaching job after spending eight years as an assistant with the Panthers after his playing career ended, and it was a job that he did very well. He racked up a 75-26 record, won seven conference titles and went to the D1-AA semifinals twice - including the one in his final year that got him the Kansas job.
The reasoning behind the hire was logical. Kansas was coming off of a successful era under Mason’s guidance, and Mason was a rising star program builder with ties to the Midwest when the Jayhawks hired him, just like Allen. If it had worked under Mason, why wouldn’t Allen be able to keep the ball rolling?
Well, because Kansas is a really hard job. Allen couldn’t scheme up wins in the way that Mason - a very good offensive mind - could, and didn’t have the recruiting production needed to keep up in the Big 12, which Kansas moved to when the Big 8 dissolved in 1995. It’s hard to recruit to Kansas, but it’s harder in a conference that features Baylor, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech, all of which recruit in the area that Kansas desperately needs to hit hard for it to win: Texas. Obviously those schools still recruited Texas before the move to the Big 12, but adding them into the same conference as Kansas made that playing field just a little trickier to operate on for the Jayhawks. Allen couldn’t get it done.
So, Kansas went another classic route to replace him, hiring Mark Mangino, who fit into another tried and true hiring strategy: the big-time coordinator. Mangino was Bob Stoops’ second offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, a direct product of the Mike Leach tree that was just starting to take hold in the region in 2001 and a recent national title-winning assistant.
Mangino found more success than most, running a variation of that Leach air raid and packing it up with junior college players to level the talent playing field, almost like what Kansas State did under Bill Snyder (albeit not with the air raid, obviously). He won big in 2007 and surrounded that with a number of pretty decent seasons before that JUCO approach caught up to him, decimating the roster and costing Mangino his job after 2009. There’s a reason that the vast majority of schools don’t take the JUCO approach.
With a suddenly undersized (literally did not have enough guys kind of undersized) roster, Kansas returned to the up-and-comer well and grabbed Turner Gill, who fit both of those first two archetypes as a former Nebraska assistant that took over at Buffalo and quickly built it up before accepting the job in Lawrence. He couldn’t replenish the roster, turned to JUCOs and flamed out in two years. This will become a trend.
Kansas replaced him with another brand of guy: the retread, with a touch of that play calling mastermind stink that Patriots assistants get on them. Also known as Charlie Weis. The idea was that Weis had the experience on a larger level and the name recognition to fix Kansas’ recruiting, tune up the roster and then hand off the reigns to a better coach once everything was fixed. As it turns out, recruits don’t like Charlie Weis, so he floundered for a year, turned to transfers, realized that it wasn’t sustainable and made it just four games into his third season.
Back to the up-and-comer, this time with an extra recruiting focus in the form of David Beatty, Texas A&M’s ace recruiter. Beatty was so bad that Kansas attempted to get out of paying his buyout, so that it could hire… Les Miles! Retread! Former big-shot assistant in the conference! Recruiter! He checks all of the boxes for the kind of coach that you hire when you’re a Power Five school looking for a new coach.
He also, of course, failed miserably. He went 3-9 in year one with Beatty’s players, 0-9 in year two, and was promptly fired on Monday for being some sort of pervert. Okay, no we’re up to speed. Kansas has hired every brand of guy that you can hire as a Power Five school while maintaining respectability as a major program or whatever dumb shit athletic director Jeff Long likes to tell boosters.
Kansas has tried it all, all of it has failed. It will go out this time and try it again, probably with an up-and-comer like Lance Leipold and it will fail again, just like it did with Gill and Allen. That’s not a slight on Leipold either, he’s a spectacular coach, this is just a program that isn’t ever going to win in the modern college football landscape unless it stops following the tried and true methods. This isn’t a tried and true program. Kansas has to flip the table and try something different.
You know where I’m going with this if you’ve read this newsletter before, or if you just read the headline: Kansas needs to run the triple and it needs to do it with Tulane head coach Willie Fritz.
Now, I should add a disclaimer here. The Fritz option is not the triple in the traditional sense. There isn’t a ton of under center flexbone stuff. It’s a spread triple and has been since he departed from Georgia Southern for Tulane after 2015. Kansas could go with a more standard triple and go with Jeff Monken or Ken Niumatalolo - both coaches would have success here - but Fritz is a bit more of a tweener. That may be more appealing to the kind of extremely stubborn people you see in a Power Five athletic department, and will make the move to the option both smoother and easier to swallow for fans and boosters.
That’s not to say that Fritz is a compromise choice - I just think he’s the best fit here of that bunch. He has those Midwest ties that Kansas seems to like so much, including four years as a player at Pittsburgh State (Kansas) and one as a coach; six with Sam Houston State (Texas) first as an assistant in the 80s and then as his first head coaching gig in the college ranks; four years with Coffeyville CC (Kansas) as a defensive coordinator; four years as the head coach at Blinn (Texas) and 13 with Central Missouri. The man has been in and around the kind of area that Kansas wants to recruit in for decades. That’s a plus, even if it isn’t the selling point here.
The selling point, of course, is Fritz’s offense. He’s an option disciple that helped revive the Georgia Southern program (staunchly option for years before Brian VanGorder) with the ground game before taking over at Tulane and immediately flipping it into a consistent bowl team. He hasn’t won big in New Orleans, but I think there’s a good reason for that: unique offenses don’t stand out as much in a conference full of unique offenses like the AAC unless you have elite talent, which Tulane is never going to have. The option loses some luster when five or six teams are doing something pretty similar.
That’s also why it can work at Kansas. The whole appeal of the option is that it’s different. It requires different styles of player, different ways to build your program and a different approach in game planning for opposing teams. With Fritz at the helm, Kansas no longer has to compete with the big boys for recruits to keep up, which it will never be able to do consistently. Hiring an option coach means playing a different game entirely, and very few know how to play that game better than Fritz.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Kansas hasn’t signed a blue-chip quarterback since the beginning of the modern recruiting era, right around 2000. It has nine four-star signees in its entire history on 247Sports. None are quarterbacks, none are offensive linemen. The highest ranked quarterback on the list is Brock Berglund, who came out of high school at No. 384, punched a guy, and never made it to his freshman season in Lawrence. They Jayhawks have three top-600 high school offensive linemen signees during that same timeframe.
I say all of this for a distinct reason: it’s really, really fucking hard to run a normal offense when that’s the kind of talent that you’re working with in a power conference. Unless you can develop your players better than just about anyone else, you aren’t going to win games by doing things the normal way. Hard jobs require unique solutions. Iowa State figured that out when it hired Matt Campbell and his all defensive backs defense. Kansas State figured that out when it hired Snyder and he built a chameleon program around whatever JUCOs he could get ahold of that offseason. You can win at a bad job, but you can’t win how Oklahoma or Texas or other regular schools do. This is not a regular program, so why should it hire like one?
That’s the Fritz appeal. His offense doesn’t require elite quarterback play, great linemen, or top-tier talent of any sort. It’s a whole lot of this. This is zone read with a bubble attached to the play side. Line is zone blocking to the boundary with help from a tight end, Tulane puts twins to the field to add a blocker for that bubble route, while leaving the read edge defender unblocked to create a numbers advantage. Option to create an edge in numbers.
Here’s a designed quarterback run, with the swing route to the field serving as the fake to pick off box defenders. Six men on the line, back side tight end and guard pull to the play side, with the guard taking on the unblocked edge defender while the tight end gets into the second-level as a lead blocker. Using the tight end, swing fake and the quarterback in the running game gives Tulane much better numbers than a handoff to the running back would here. It’s all about maximizing your advantage as the offense (knowing the play) while minimizing talent discrepancies by giving the defense more to account for, creating fewer one-on-one opportunities that a more talented defense will likely win. The Fritz system is all about power in numbers.
He does it in his standard rushing attack too. Quarterback isn’t a factor as a runner here, but Tulane still creates a numbers edge by recognizing the parts of the play that it really doesn’t need to assign resources (players, in this case) to. Twins to the back side pulls three defenders (two corners and a safety), which leaves both teams with eight players involved in the rest of this play, given that the quarterback isn’t a factor. Because the running back is one of those eight players, Tulane still has work to do to create an advantage.
So, it looks again at what really isn’t worth worrying about. Here, the answer the outside cornerback. He isn’t pressing and he isn’t approaching the box. The run is headed his way, but he’s a cornerback. Ignore him, send that receiver inside and let him take on the box safety. That gets rid of two defenders with just one offensive player, leaving six blockers for four defensive linemen and two linebackers. You know you’re running to the boundary, so back side blocks only need one body each. The back side tackle and guard clear out the back side end and defensive tackle. Four-on-four.
Again, the offense knows where this play is going and the defense doesn’t. There’s your edge. If Tulane can set up its blocks before revealing the intended gap, those indvidual matchups aren’t likely to go Southern Mississippi’s way until after the halfback has already cut past them. So, Tulane looks to set up its second-level blocks as early as possible.
The center and tight end breeze right past the defensive line and onto those linebackers, sealing them off inside to create the inner half of a lane into the C gap for the halfback. Meanwhile, the tackle kicks down and take out the nose tackle, which is a much easier block for him than it would be for the guard or center, given the time he has to generate some speed before the block. The guard finishes off the play by kicking out the defensive end, creating the outside seal at the first level.
Four easier blocks, accomplished simply by thinking about football as a physics problem. If you block this straight, with the back side end accounting for the back side edge, the back side guard on the back side tackle, the center on the nose tackle, the play side guard helping on that nose tackle and rubbing into the second-level, the play side tackle on the play side edge and then the tight end rubbing off of him to the second-level, your halfback isn’t going to have as much space and your linemen are going to have to win on blocks that don’t offer them time to pick up speed. This way allows for all four of those play side blockers to get going before they set up their blocks, a luxury that the defense does not have.
He takes the same approach in the passing game. This is three-verticals, which simply means that you have three vertical routes and two underneath routes, hence the name. The theory behind it is that you’re pretty much always going to have someone open against zone defense, because cover 2 can’t account for three deep shots, cover 3 doesn’t dedicate enough to stop the route to the underneath stuff, nor does cover 4. High school programs absolutely love this concept and use it constantly, because it’s a really good way to get your tight end and halfback involved in the passing game without taking away the deep threat part of your offense. Like with the Fritz running game, it make sense physically. You’re stretching the defense deep and either snapping it for a huge play or using that space you’ve created to hit something easy underneath as an extension of the running game.
On this one, Tulane sends a pair of go routes to either outside deep third, splitting the secondary in half. Underneath, the outside receiver to the field runs a short crosser, while the halfback delays on a block and then flattens out around the line of scrimmage, both of which pull the underneath zone (Southern Miss is in cover 3) in and creates a gap between the front seven and the back four.
How do you attack that gap? Well, you send a halfback out of the backfield on a wheel into the seam, directly at the slowest linebacker on the field. Alabama did it to Tuf Borland, Tulane does it to this poor fool here. Fritz isn’t a play designer, he’s a problem solver. He thinks of football at its base form and uses that to put defenses in increasingly difficult spots.
That’s how you make up for a talent disadvantage. That’s how you win at Kansas.