New Oregon head coach Willie Taggart has proved he can adapt and evolve

Imagine Jim Harbaugh running a spread offense at Oregon.

Oregon -- a place defined as anywhere by up-tempo, spread offense -- just hired a former member of Harbaugh’s offensive coaching tree as its new head coach, and here’s the thing: it’s a great fit.

Willie Taggart, who has USF ranked No. 25 in the current AP Poll amid its first-ever 10-win season and previously led Western Kentucky to its first bowl, has continually evolved his approach to coaching offense.

From our Steven Godfrey’s entertaining 2012 embed with Taggart’s WKU* as it prepared to play Alabama:

Had Taggart been born a decade later, he’d likely have been the perfect quarterback for a spread, but under the growing influence of the Harbaugh system, the sentiment inside WKU’s offices is that the spread is worthless against a defense as fast and technically sound (read: proficient at single, open-field tackles) as Alabama. The appreciation for the Harbaugh offense — call it “Power Coast” — started as Taggart entered his senior year at Western in 1998.

“As I came closer to graduation, our offense started to change,” he says. “It still had option in it, but we started to develop into a power team. Those things always seemed to work for us, for what we were: blue collar. That was the attitude we always had. Going out to Stanford, Jim was the same way. Blue collar, go out and rattle somebody.

“If you look at what football’s come to now, I think it gives you an advantage. You look and so many teams are running the spread that playing us is kind of like going against an option football team. You don’t see it everyday.”

Compare that to Godfrey’s 2016 profile on Taggart’s final days at USF:

On a bye three years ago, Taggart set aside his strict observance of smash-mouth, West Coast, power football.

He embraced what he saw in his Floridian roster: raw athleticism, as fast as possible.

“That’s so important to us. That’s why we have the respect. Because you don’t normally see coaches do that,” senior running back Marlon Mack said after the win vs. UCF. “I don’t know of coaches at this level that would listen to players asking to change things. We said, ‘Please, let’s go fast, let us go and we’ll show you,’ and he did.”

“At first it was, well, let’s just run West Coast, but see how it looks in the ’gun,” Taggart said. “And then it got intriguing, because we started seeing all the options available that we didn’t have under center. And then we started running all the practice reps, Quinton in the ’gun, spread out, but with the shifts and motions. And it was like … wow.”

It didn’t pay out overnight, but there was faith enough in the experiment to keep going. USF started 2015 1-3, but lost to surging Memphis by only seven. Taggart was hot-seat fodder.

“When we made the change, we were beating ourselves up over, ‘What is it? What are we doing wrong?’ It wasn’t the schemes. We just needed to get more and more reps,” associate head coach David Reaves said.

“We’d see USF when I was coaching against them. You’d watch their tape and say ‘Man, they’ve got athletes, they just need to get them the ball more,’” new co-offensive coordinator T.J. Weist said. “It jumps out at you. But unless you’re a true power team, with a big offensive line like Michigan, it’s hard to make it work.”

“I remember Coach Taggart coming back at the first meeting after Memphis and saying, ‘We’re close. We’re close. We just need the win.’ We went out the next week and beat Syracuse, and it took off,” Reaves said.

USF scored 45 in a win over the Orange and closed on a 7-1 run. Then their offensive staff hit the road, a West Coast power congregation auditing spread theology at places like Baylor, Clemson, and Ole Miss to create the unitarian points revival and the state of Florida’s best offense.

“That’s probably the biggest thing to take away. What I’ve seen is a coach who’s been adaptable, who’s been willing to change. Because we did change. A whole lot,” Reaves said. “We were 12 personnel [one running back and two tight ends], running the ball, motion and shift, two and three tight ends and fullbacks, and then we’re taking meetings all over the country with spread teams who do the exact opposite so we could better understand them.”

It worked.

USF’s 2016 offense ranks No. 3 in Bill Connelly’s opponent-adjusted, garbage-time-filtering S&P+, No. 1 in yards per carry against FBS teams, and No. 20 in passer rating against FBS teams. USF ranks No. 3 in the country in 40-yard plays. Oregon would be pretty happy with producing numbers like that again after a slight down year on offense, right? (Yeah, defense is a whole other story.)

Even better than knowing what to do is knowing when to change what you do, and Taggart’s been one of college football’s best examples of that, outside Nick Saban himself.

* By the way, even Saban learned something from our WKU story.

WKU’s found a tell on the Alabama offensive line. The Topper coaches believe [offensive tackle D.J.] Fluker is tipping off which plays are run and which are pass by his posture, with an accuracy of over 90 percent.

From a weekly presser:

Saban paused when he was informed that Western Kentucky was picking up signals from Fluker.

“Good to know,” Saban said.

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