Why the triple option is still alive and well in high school football

Triple-option plays are part of basically every college and pro offense these days, assuming you count RPOs, even as old-school ‘bone formations remain rarities.

But what about at the high school level? Some kids don’t even start playing football until they reach high school — can option-heavy football work with 14- to 18-year-old kids?

In 2007, Scott Jazdzewski founded the Flexbone Association, which says it’s helped install an offense like the one used at Georgia Tech, Army, and Navy in over 200 high schools across the country.

“It’s systematic,” the OL coach at Harrison High in Georgia said of the flexbone’s advantages. “What I see now, what happens for a lot of coaches, is a lot of times they get into their meetings on Saturday mornings, and many times they look at the defense they’re about to play, and then they’re literally trying to put the game plan together. And that’s hours and hours at a time.

“And for me, the running joke I’ve always had is, let’s say we get to a Saturday meeting and say, ‘hey what defense are we playing this week? Oh, it’s a 3-4? OK got it. I’ll see y’all Monday.’ And that’s all the time I need because I already know what I’m going to do against that defense.”

Jazdzewski worked with Robert Ingram, the head coach at Riverview International Charter School in Atlanta at the time. Ingram said it changed his program drastically.

“The next four years that I was there, we went on to have the most wins in a four-year stretch,” Ingram, now an assistant at North Cobb HS in Metro Atlanta, said. “We broke numerous school scoring records. We placed 32 kids in college on scholarship, when that school had only sent like six in the history of the school that played college ball.”

The option is in Ingram’s bloodline. His father, Alan, coached high school ball in Georgia for 43 years and used the option later in his career. Robert’s younger brother, Ashley, has been an assistant at flexbone program Navy for 11 years.

“For us to be able to get to a point to where everything was fluid for us, we weren’t reteaching it everyday,” Ingram said. “It was just we had a system: this is what we were gonna do. This is our practice schedule. We knew what we were doing, and we dictated what the defense was going to do. We didn’t change our offensive philosophy based on who we were playing or what defense they run. We were going to do what we did.”

“That’s kind of our little secret,” Jazdzewski said when I asked about the difficulties of running it. “Everybody thinks that this is really hard and complicated to install. I tell these high school coaches, ‘Look, if I come up to your school for three days, I can get essentially the entire offense in, other than some of the small tweaks you’re going to need based on the defense.’

“I was at Pelham High School in Alabama five years ago. The kids would come off the field at the end of the series, and they would be telling me what’s available to run. That gives them ownership.”

A question specific to the high school level: how do you get your players recruited if they’re in an offense only used by a handful of Division I programs?

“OK, what are you gonna do [as a college QB]? You’re gonna get in the shotgun and run zone read and power read a bunch of times?” Jazdzewski asks. “That’s option football with the quarterback moved four yards back. So don’t tell me that the kid can get recruited if you snap it in the air, but he can’t if he’s under center.”

“If the option is not the go-to thing, then where did the RPO system evolve from that everybody’s doing now?” Ingram adds. “That’s triple option. You either hand it [off] or you throw it. It’s the same thing. People do it from the pistol. People do it from the shotgun.”

Being in a state like Georgia, which long had Paul Johnson and two other Division I programs he influenced, certainly helps.

“It wasn’t a hard sell,” Ingram says of recruiting. “But for a kid that gets a chance to go to Georgia Tech or Georgia Southern if they had offers from other people, the offensive lineman, it was a no-brainer. They went to those places because they love the system.”

Tech was mentioned by both coaches several times, a logical template for them in Georgia. Under Johnson, the Yellow Jackets went 83-59, along with two Orange Bowl berths.

“How many receivers has Georgia Tech put in the NFL in the last six or seven years? And one of the justifications these combine or draft guys will say is that ‘these Georgia Tech [receivers] are going to block because they have to.’”

“Nearly everywhere in the country, there’s not enough schools that are running option. So the defense you [use], particularly week to week, that coaching staff isn’t comfortable trying to stop you,” Jazdzewski said. “So they’re trying to figure out a way to stop a complicated offense. And I know that with any teams that run option, I always tell these schools that call, ‘hey they probably spend about three days figuring out how to stop you. They might have one or two bullets.”

“We spend time watching a lot of film,” Orlando’s Bishop Moore Catholic High School junior varsity defensive coordinator Paul Moriarty (who’s also my dad, and is awesome!) said. “So we know what [option offense] Lake Brantley or whoever we’re facing is bringing to the table. So we’re able to put together what we’re going to do face their option — what kind of tendencies they have, what players may come in when they are going to run a certain play.”

When practicing before playing an especially option-heavy offense, Bishop Moore doesn’t even have a football on the field. Why?

“Because we don’t want them to try and find a football,” varsity defensive coordinator Billy Hubbard said. “We want our d-line to go to the fullback. We want our linebackers to go to the quarterback. We want our safeties to go inside out the pitch. We don’t want them to find the ball.”

“Paramount,” Hubbard said of eye discipline. “A lot of people like to look in the backfield, but if you look in the backfield, you kind of get lost in what they’re doing. [An option offense] wants you to look in the backfield.

“What we do is we teach our kids to look at [the linemen’s] hands. If their palms are high, that means it could be a pass. If their hands are low and down on the field, it’s indicating a run. Of course we love looking at their feet — if their feet are pointed a certain way, they’re probably going to go that way. We don’t want our guys to be looking at the quarterback or in the backfield.”

Having three days to prepare for the option offense isn’t exactly easy to do, though.

“As a guy that was a defensive-minded coach my entire career and my entire life, one of the selling points on the option was: ‘OK I’m a high school coach and I’ve gotta get 11 14-, 15-, and 16-year olds to buy into a game plan that’s three days before these guys come in here and play,’” Ingram said. “And we haven’t seen this offense. Everybody else is in the shotgun, they’re throwing it all over the place, and all of the sudden in three days I’ve got to prepare for this.’”

“There’s huge advantages to high schools wanting to do it because it’s not as hard to put in as it is to stop,” Jazdzewski said.