COMMENTARY : Is It Just the Tip of the Iceberg for Offense?

You could never accuse Tom Keele of being anything but an optimist. The Cal State Northridge football coach stared through the chilly wind that whipped around the University of Nevada-Reno’s Mackay Stadium Saturday, his gaze fixed on the scoreboard that showed his team a 56-12 loser in its season opener, and declared the inaugural appearance of his run-and-shoot offense a success.

Cynics might better compare it to the fateful inaugural journey of the Titanic.

But that would be unfair.

The truth will have to wait for another day. This one was filled with too many extenuating circumstances.

Such as:

--This game was a given mismatch. CSUN, an NCAA Division II school, was facing a Division I-AA team considered to be a genuine contender for the Big Sky Conference title.

--The Northridge starting quarterback, Chris Parker, had never thrown a pass for the Matadors.

--Most of CSUN’s primary receivers had never caught a pass for the Matadors.

--All were trying to learn a complicated new offense that depends on passer and receiver improvising after the snap from center, based on the reaction of the defense.

“I think he (Parker) did very well under pressure,” Keele said. “Now we’re just going to go right ahead and get better. This was a I-AA football team, and we did a heck of a lot better against them than we would have in the I-formation.”

They figure to do still better when the kinks are worked out. Saturday, there were enough in the first half alone to send a less optimistic coach back to his drawing board in tears. There were illegal receivers downfield, dropped passes, ineffective blocking patterns, and a failure by the quarterback to effectively utilize the run.

It all changed in the second half, and the biggest reason why is because the run-and-shoot turned into the run-block-and-shoot.

“Our problem in the first half,” Northridge offensive coordinator Rich Lopez said, “was that they were rushing their outside linebackers, and our fullbacks were not picking them up soon enough. We told them they had to pick them up at the line rather

than waiting until they got in the backfield. We changed in the second half.”

Another second-half alteration involved the running game. It had been practically non-existent, with the Matadors showing minus three yards rushing for the first 30 minutes.

Northridge running back Mike Kane, who started the season just 239 yards away from the school rushing record, primarily was a safety-valve receiver in the first half. Parker gave him the ball in the second half (Kane finished with only 36 yards gained) but that, in turn, gave the Matador quarterback some breathing room.

“If you show nothing but the pass,” Lopez said, “the defense will just lower their heads and go full bore. They had no respect for our running game. But once we started to use the quick trap and show something other than the pass, they rushed a little bit slower.

“That gave our quarterback more time. And when he gets more time, he gets more confidence.”

Parker completed just 7 of 16 passes for 49 yards in the first half, and was briefly relieved by backup Danny Fernandez.

In the second half, Parker was shooting a lot better. He hit 14 of 20 for 161 yards.

Parker, a 6-2, 180-pound junior, came to CSUN from San Bernardino Valley College where he was a starter. Before that, he was at Saddleback College. And before that, he was team MVP, All-Southern Section, All-League and team captain of his Aquinas High football squad.

But never, at any of those stops, had he encountered anything quite like the run-and-shoot.

“When Coach Keele told us about it,” Parker said, “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. No way.’ In the formations I’ve been in, you just had to drop back and throw the ball. You never had to think.”

It was while watching the Denver Gold of the United States Football League work out on the Northridge campus at the beginning of the calendar year that Keele first started thinking about the run-and-shoot, an offense made popular by Denver Coach Darrel (Mouse) Davis.

Keele figured, aw, shoot, why not? His sixth season as coach of Northridge hadn’t exactly been one to build a foundation for the future on. His team was 3-7, and that included a forfeit win over San Francisco State.

So the teacher became a pupil.

Keele studied under Davis, attending practices, meetings and film sessions, for the entire six weeks the Gold spent at Northridge.

The result was 154 pages of notes and, Keele feels confident, the machinery to bring his team back to respectability.

The run-and-shoot consists of two wide receivers, two flankers, a lone running back and a mobile quarterback, who operates out of a movable pocket. He runs laterally, which gives him more time to avoid the rush (at least, ideally) while he studies his primary receiver and three alternates. They, in turn, run patterns based on the alignment of the defense.

So improvisation is the key. The problem is that both quarterback and receiver must improvise on the same wavelength.

That was extremely difficult Saturday, since the passer and receivers had never worked together under fire.

Nevada-Reno Coach Chris Ault thinks it went pretty well. “I like their new offense,” he said. “They did a pretty damn good job with it.

“We kept the heat on the quarterback all day, but he escaped a lot. I think they are going to win some games with that run-and-shoot.”

Said Lopez: “I thought the biggest plus is that rather than looking at films of Denver running the run-and-shoot, now we have films of our kids running it. That’s excellent. We can learn a lot by watching, by learning what we are supposed to do.”

And they’ll get another chance. That’s more than the Titanic had.