Bob Stitt's offense: A college football gold mine

• Some of college football's most potent offenses draw inspiration from Bob Stitt
• West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen credited Stitt after the Mountaineers' 2012 Orange Bowl win
• College football is becoming more welcoming to inventive minds from the game's lower levels

GOLDEN, Colo. – The best offensive mind you've never heard of was home Jan. 4, watching football way past his 7-year old son's bedtime. The Orange Bowl kept going later and later, the outcome long since decided, but Bob Stitt didn't want his family to miss a single snap. West Virginia just kept scoring and scoring, but even from 2,000 miles away in suburban Denver, Stitt couldn't help but feel a connection to one of the most important games of the season.

The Mountaineers eventually put up 70 points that night, running one play over and over that Clemson just couldn't stop. Stitt recognized the play immediately. He had invented it.

Back in 2008, Stitt made an impromptu stop at one of Houston's practices during a fundraising trip to see Dana Holgorsen, whom he had met at a coaches' clinic a few years earlier. By the time practice was over that day, he had helped Holgorsen, then Houston's offensive coordinator, install his version of the "fly sweep," a classic misdirection play that had been a staple of Stitt's NCAA Division II program at Colorado School of Mines.

Now, a few years later, the sense of pride watching Holgorsen shred Clemson with it was undeniable. Stitt's wife, Joan, just rolled her eyes. She had been used to her husband calling her into the living room whenever a big-time college coach borrowed one of his wrinkles, and it became the running joke of the household. "There's my play!" he'd say. "So when are you going to get paid like those guys?" she'd respond.

But when the Orange Bowl ended and Stitt got up to put his son to bed, he almost did a double-take. As ESPN's Lisa Salters was finishing her postgame interview with Holgorsen, she asked about the play that "looked like a volleyball toss" and nobody could quite figure out.

A big smile crept across Holgorsen's face. "My good friend Bob Stitt at Colorado School of Mines gave me that," Holgorsen said.

Stitt had to run it back on DVR. He couldn't believe it.

"It's fun for me because I kind of get to live a little bit through those guys," Stitt said. "And when you're coaching at a smaller level people say, 'Well, that might work here, but it won't work in the big-time. And then you see it and you can say, 'Yeah, it does.' "

The next innovator

Alabama's traditional, straightforward approach may be the gold-standard formula for winning national championships, but there is undoubtedly a philosophical shift taking place in college football. More and more coaches are ascending the ranks from nontraditional backgrounds, bringing unique ideas and changing the fabric of the sport.

Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris, the nation's highest-paid assistant, was a high school coach in Texas as recently as three years ago. It took more than a decade of setting high school records in Arkansas before Gus Malzahn got a shot on the college level, where his wide-open offense almost instantly became the toast of the SEC. Chip Kelly spent 13 years toiling in anonymity at New Hampshire, honing an up-tempo system that has produced a 42-6 career record at Oregon. Hugh Freeze, a longtime high school coach in Memphis, blazed a trail of touchdowns from Lambuth, an NAIA school, to Arkansas State to a head coaching job at Ole Miss all in the span of four years.

As long as wide-open, spread offenses continue to score points and sell tickets, college football will remain a place where undiscovered talent can turn into overnight stardom. And if you set out to discover who that next innovator might be, you'll invariably be led to a tiny engineering school nestled in the Rocky Mountain foothills where Stitt, 48, has built a consistent winner and done things offensively that programs like West Virginia, Texas A&M, Louisiana Tech and Cincinnati have borrowed.

"It's hard to flip through the channels on a Saturday and not see his influence some place," said Hal Mumme, who came from a small college background and shocked the SEC with his Kentucky "Air Raid" offense in the late 1990s. "He's a really bright guy, and people are becoming aware of what he's doing. I promise you, he's going to get a big job somewhere. He's going to get his chance if he wants it."

Stitt says he'd be willing to move up as an offensive coordinator, but only if the head coach would give him total offensive control. It's not difficult to see why he's so well-regarded in coaching circles, especially by those who run wide-open offenses. At 6-3, Stitt is closing in on his 11th winning season in 13 years. In all but a few of those years, the Orediggers, who play in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, have ranked among the top-10 in Div. II in passing offense. This season, his sophomore quarterback Matt Brown is the nation's leading passer, throwing for 3,424 yards and averaging 34.5 completions per game.

And all of this is happening at a school of 5,200 of engineering majors where the average ACT score is 29. His recruiting strategy is largely built around the school's petroleum engineering program, which plays well in Texas high schools. It's happening at a school with such poor facilities and so little track record of success that every one of his friends in the business told him it would be career suicide to take the job.

"When I came on the interview, person after person told me there's no way you'll ever win here," said Stitt, who was Harvard's offensive coordinator at the time. "One of them said, 'If you come here, just don't embarrass us anymore.' But I wanted it because I was going to prove everybody at this school wrong."

At a school where you weren't going to recruit many great athletes, Stitt knew he'd have to do something different to win.

As a graduate assistant at Northern Colorado, he had studied the West Coast offense under Kay Dalton, a longtime college and NFL assistant who had learned it from Mike Shanahan on the Denver Broncos' staff. Stitt took it with him when he became the 25-year old offensive coordinator at his alma mater Doane College, an NAIA school just outside of Lincoln, Neb., and then to Austin (Texas) College and, finally, Harvard.

Over the years, Stitt began to look at football as a game played not from the inside-out, but rather outside-in. He had taken those old West Coast concepts and started experimenting, spreading out the formations and using one-back sets, trying to create mismatches on the perimeter that made it easy for the quarterback to recognize where the ball needed to go.

At a place like Mines, which has almost no recruiting advantages, offensive creativity would be paramount. He didn't have receivers who could beat press coverage, so he became an expert on the back-shoulder fade pass. His offensive line couldn't block a quick nose tackle one on one, so he ran the option out of the shotgun, and it took a year for defensive coordinators to figure it out. He put in blocking schemes intended to give defenses false reads. He saved his best plays for red zone packages, figuring that his conversion percentage in those situations would be the difference between winning and losing games.

Success came almost instantly, and by his second year the team went 7-4 and averaged 42 points. By 2004, his offense had produced an 11-0 regular season record and a quarterback in Chad Friehauf who threw for a Div. II record 4,646 yards. That's when everything changed.

The Fly Sweep

Stitt had come strictly from a small-college background, and nobody in big-time football had ever taken much interest in what he was doing. But in January following the unbeaten season, he got a phone call from a graduate assistant at Texas Tech. Mike Leach, the most renowned disciple of Mumme's "Air Raid" offense, wanted to know how Mines rushed for nearly 170 yards per game while also throwing for more than 400. The assistant asked if Stitt would be interested in trading some game film.

That led to an invitation to speak at a "one-back clinic," a concept started by Mumme back in his Kentucky days where a select group of coaching staffs that ran one-back offenses would get together periodically in a private setting and share ideas.

Stitt made a presentation on the fly sweep, a play Steve Spurrier had used some in his 1990s Florida days where a receiver would come in motion at full speed and take a handoff from the quarterback almost as the ball was snapped. At Mines, Stitt found the precise timing of that play almost impossible to pull off until one day on the practice field it hit him: Have the quarterback shovel pass the ball, which meant that even if the timing got completely screwed up, it would be considered an incomplete pass.

Stitt met some kindred spirits that weekend in Sonny Dykes, Holgorsen and Mumme, who saw a little bit of himself in the unconventional way Stitt approached the game and succeeded at a school that hadn't won before.

"I kept up with all the small college guys and what they were doing because it's a great breeding ground for ideas," Mumme said. "I immediately saw a lot of similarities to what I had done at Valdosta State."

Though Mumme is now coaching at Div. III McMurry University – his influence has never been stronger, with Leach now at Washington State, Holgorsen at West Virginia, Dykes at Louisiana Tech and Kliff Kingsbury, who played quarterback under Leach at Texas Tech, the offensive coordinator at Texas A&M.

Stitt isn't exactly part of that club, but they are all cut from the same mold: Coaches who value innovation over convention and don't care what other programs do as long as it works for theirs.

"When he turns the film on he thinks everything's open," Kingsbury said. "As an offensive coordinator, that's the mindset you have to have. To him, there's never a play covered, and that's good. You've got to think you're unstoppable."

Experiment and evolve

For Stitt, the best part about coaching at Mines isn't the mountains surrounding the practice field, going to rock concerts with his assistants (they have tickets to The Killers next month) or even the upcoming multi-million dollar stadium renovation that will give him 75,000 square feet for a weight room, a meeting room and a high-tech film system, none of which he's had before.

The best part is the ability as a head coach to experiment and evolve without looking over his shoulder, whether it's implementing the little ideas he gets in the shower (he keeps pen-and-paper nearby so he won't forget) or going out to West Virginia's spring practice for five days and getting convinced to run the no-huddle, which he didn't do until this year. Now Mines is averaging 93 plays per game and look more dangerous than ever.

"You always try to stay two steps ahead of the defense and keep changing, because if you've got a top offense in the country or your conference, everybody's just going to watch your tape all winter and try to stop you," Stitt said. "You've got to come out with something completely new. We're changing all the time so people can't zero in on what we're doing.

"If I have talent like LSU and Alabama with that size and speed, maybe I'd line up in (a pro set) and run power at you, but we're not only not going to get a yard running that, we might lose two. We out-execute people and beat them to the punch. That's what we have to do at this place."

And now people are noticing because a style of football that once seemed like a gimmick is scoring points and winning games in basically every conference in the country. Stitt may choose to stay in Division II football for the rest of his career, but eventually some athletic director or big-time head coach may just want to see if his stuff would work like it did when someone else was running it in the Orange Bowl.

"I know it would," he said.