Oklahoma's Wishbone Was Simple And Flawless

Offenses don't need to be complicated to be lethal.

Oklahoma’s version of the wishbone is an excellent lesson in the value of simplicity in football. The Sooners didn’t invent the formation - that distinction goes to their rivals to the south - but Barry Switzer perfected it, first as an offensive coordinator in 1971, and then again as a head coach starting in 1973.

Switzer’s wishbone is easy to explain, which made it all the more frustrating for defenses that were consistently gashed by it. It was an offense that drew its strength from the numbers advantage inherent in the formation. With a quarterback and three halfbacks in the backfield, the defense always had four rushing options to worry about.

Because of that, it was hard to sell out to stop just one thing. Most plays had two reads attached, as is expected in the triple option, and overloading to stop one of those reads would just open up another.

The Sooners had a few counters built into the offense to add some diversity to the playbook, but for the most part, the counters were built into the option itself. When run correctly, with a quarterback that can make the reads, the wishbone offense is designed to adapt to whatever the defense is doing on every single play.

With Switzer running the offense, that’s exactly how things operated. Oklahoma stuck to a few base plays and counters, kept the ball on the ground, and maintained one of the best offenses in America for more than a decade. The offense evolved a bit through Switzer’s tenure to keep up with defenses that were becoming more athletic, but for the most part, Oklahoma stayed Oklahoma.

In 1971, the standard triple option for Oklahoma looked like this. There were adjustments based on defensive fronts, obviously, but this is the standard issue Oklahoma, wishbone triple option.

Oklahoma’s was unique because in true blue blood fashion, it actually relied a lot more on talent up front than most other option attacks did. Rather than isolating a defensive end for the quarterback to read when deciding to hand off to the fullback, Oklahoma just blocked it straight.

The thinking behind this is that it forces the linebacker to play the quarterback, creating room for that fullback down the field. Oklahoma is still creating a numbers advantage in the box by forcing that linebacker outside, but it was doing so in a much more taxing way. Good linemen are required to make this work consistently, but if you have that personnel, it can make that fullback handoff much more dangerous than just the three-yard threat that it usually is in option attacks.

While the fullback dive worked well for the Sooners, the strength of the wishbone really doesn’t come through until the quarterback pulls on that first read and heads outside. With the back side halfback serving as the pitch man, quarterback Jack Mildren suddenly has two built-in lead blockers coming out of the backfield with him.

The fullback takes out the isolated end, freeing up the play side tight end and tackle to get downfield and take on linebackers. On the outside, that pitch option pulls in one linebacker and takes him out of the play, while the blocking back is able to take out a safety coming down to play the quarterback.

It doesn’t go for a huge gain, but teams with less athletic defenses had no answer for this much of an overload on one side of the field.

You can tell that it was well-designed, because it still worked in almost the exact same way, 15 years later. The tackle blocks the end this time, so the fullback gets to the second level to take on a tight end, but the responsibilities elsewhere are the same. The back side halfback draws an outside linebacker away as a pitch option, the blocking back gets into the second level and clears a path for the quarterback.

If that outside linebacker didn’t track the back side pitch man to the outside, the quarterback had another simple read to make, and just had to pull off a nice toss to then put his halfback into essentially the same situation. The outside linebacker is out of the play after going hard after the quarterback, the fullback has launched into the second level to take on a middle linebacker, and that other halfback is leading the way and looking for a block down the field.

It’s a masterclass in simple play design that both understands how defenses play and has a full grasp on the physics of football. No individual is being asked to do anything extraordinary, but when everyone does their task correctly, the offense almost seems to move as one piece. There’s a reason that Oklahoma was able to have so much success running essentially the same play for more than a decade: it was a really good play.

That’s also what made the few counters that Oklahoma had off of it so dangerous.

The counter it leaned on most was this, which just sees the play side halfback and the fullback switching responsibilities. The quarterback opens to the opposite side of the handoff to give his halfback an extra step so that the timing lines up, while the linemen away from the play side seal off, almost as they would on a pass block, to keep the quarterback from being tackled before he can start the play.

The rest of the play stays pretty much the same. Oklahoma is blocking the end here, so the halfback dive turns into a second level block assignment, and the fullback serves as the lead blocker with the back side halfback still in that pitch option role. The fullback has to block the outside linebacker, just as the lead blocking halfback usually would, while the pitch option draws in either another linebacker or a safety.

Switching up the timing and the gap assignments like this is a subtle change, but the goal is to keep the defense from getting too comfortable with a specific timing.

By 1986, Oklahoma was still working mostly with this same counter concept, though it changed up the way it worked a little bit to account for blocking innovations, and to keep up with those faster, stronger defenses.

With those defenses evolving, Oklahoma no longer had the time for the extended quarterback paired with the halfback and fullback swapping jobs. Instead, the counter came with the fullback hitting the A gap opposite of where the rest of the option was going.

The quarterback turns the opposite way, as he did in 1971, but the fake this time goes to the fullback, who rarely - if ever - actually took the ball on this sort of design (because there was little to no blocking provided for him). He’s taking on the opposite gap to fill in for the pulling backside guard (and to try to block a linebacker or safety down the field), who serves as yet another lead blocker for the quarterback to the outside.

The rest of the play is basically the same as it was, with the pulling lineman and a tight end serving as some extra help for the quarterback to run behind. The reads, however, remained the same. This was primarily an adjustment that came about as defenses learned more about stopping the option, mostly by loading up the box. To continue to run the wishbone with a numbers advantage, Oklahoma needed an easy way to get bigger bodies onto the play side, and this was just about the easiest way to do it. Pulling linemen kept the wishbone alive and dangerous in its later years under Switzer.

This is also a pretty good way to understand why the formation went out of style was college football entered the 90s and 2000s. Oklahoma was able to adjust pretty well, but as the 4-3 and 3-4 defenses became more popular, filling those defenses with elite athletes became more common. Instead of one or two teams that could keep up with the wishbone option, there were suddenly 20 or 30.

Facing larger and faster defenses that didn’t really have to worry about defending the pass became lower reward, and higher risk. It was no longer feasible to just rely on the inherent numbers advantage of having four possible ball carriers on any given play, because there was no longer a numbers advantage there. Running the ball successfully started to either require more dedicated blockers, hence the spread of massive tight ends in the 90s, or, a better passing attack.

Out of necessity, Oklahoma and quite a few more teams chose the latter. Still, the advantages that the wishbone presented, and the was in which it progressed the running game (creating a numbers advantage with misdirection, rather than by just throwing guys into the box) still plays a major role in college football. It isn’t a scheme that can apply today in its true form (unless you’re a service academy, but even they don’t run wishbone very frequently), but its influence can be seen in just about every successful rushing attack.