I noticed it first in observing how effectively UNLV’s offense was working (at times) against Memphis. It was also very evident from Memphis’ offensive strategy. Finally, I was catching up to the latest iteration of the North Dakota State dynasty, now competing in FBS. In that game I saw glimpses of the same thing.

What I’m seeing is the influence of Veer and Shoot offense across multiple programs with teams marrying the outside passing dimension and inside power run game by emphasizing strong-armed quarterbacks. It’s an approach that is increasing in prevalence and I’m not sure what the lower level defenses are going to do about it.

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I wouldn’t say the first week revealed anything particularly shocking or surprising. At least not to me.

USC ripped through a West Coast G5 team, Jackson Arnold struggled to make quick decisions, TCU found out it’s not that easy to just run the ball and win, and my Pop Warner squad struggled on offense. I also took the family to the first ever varsity football game in the brand new “Wrangler Stadium” to see Legacy Ranch take on overmatched Manor New Tech to open a new chapter in Liberty Hill football.

We’ll go through em.

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If I spend too much time on preamble, the word count on this sucker is going to get long so…

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Texas A&M could potentially be great on defense this season, ditto Michigan and God knows who else. It’s getting easier and easier to build great defenses because of the improved tactics available and the ease with which the transfer portal allows teams to build veteran secondaries every year.

It used to be teams would come out of nowhere and have great seasons owing to talented and savvy secondaries they’d randomly hit on. The 2000 Oklahoma Sooners were an example of a team that had a terrific back seven and good scheme that got by without an elite D-line. But now, anyone can build a group like that1 and do so every single year.

Building an elite offense that can handle these modern defenses is something else. There’s two paths that we’ve seen find success. Bully-ball teams with some unique feature that allows them to run even against the best defenses, and pro-spread teams with multiple future NFL wideouts. The pro-spread teams have won the two expanded playoff titles thus far, but bully-ball propelled each of the two runner-ups.2

Predicting offense is harder than predicting defense, but today we’ll try and project whether any contenders can match either approach.

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First we scrimmaged the JV (3rd/4th grade) A-team on Wednesday. Then we took on a 4th/5th/6th grade team from Lago Vista and (I think) a 5th Grade B-team from Cedar Park. For the most part, these experiences cemented impressions we already had from facing the A-team.

One of those impressions is that there’s certainly plenty to work on and sort out, especially on offense.

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My appreciation deepened the other night because I started calling plays for our Pop Warner team and we tried to run offense against the A-team sans our biggest offensive guard.

It was awful.

I wasn’t dispirited. We discovered a lot of things we could do well, multiple players on our team flashed some skills, and our post-practice analysis revealed a ton of good follow-up ideas.

But we got crushed.

The biggest problem was that I kept calling formations designed to position my new tight end to create double teams on the perimeter for our outside zone running game. It was working extremely well, on the perimeter, but our backs could never get out there to take advantage. The defense would always position their 3-technique to the tight end side and our poor guards were getting demolished trying to reach block the 3-technique without a double team. Salute to the A-team D-tackles, y’all are going to have a great season.

In the future we will run outside zone to the weakside against them so we can double the play side D-tackle and avoid running at a 3-technique.

I think much of college football is going to have similar issues this season dealing with the various defenses across college football. There are a number of squads coming together right now with the potential to be truly elite. Your National Champion may be either “whoever has the most dominant defense” or else “who can even function against elite defense?”

For today, I’m going to catalog the various teams making a case for “most dominant defense.”

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Then he was a disaster as head coach of the Detroit Lions and retreated back to New England and Belichick. Once there, he was made the O-line coach after years on defense, which didn’t go particularly well. He spent 2023 as a defensive consultant for the Eagles in a season that didn’t go great (30th out of 32 in points per game) and in 2025 resurfaced at last with Ohio State.

Those failures suggested the man was either a fraud or else the sort of guy whose deep knowledge of the game is actually hindrance to his players playing clean, smart football. Sometimes the guys with all the answers end up trying to turn their players into robots who can’t think for themselves rather than enriching them with a share of the useful knowledge.

Last year was a major data point toward Patricia actually being closer to Belichick. The coach known for having an encyclopedic knowledge of defensive tactics was able to build a simple, flexible, and wildly effective defense for the personnel he had on hand in Columbus last year. The question for 2026 is now not whether the Buckeyes can run back last year’s defense. It’s if Patricia can draw up another smart, college-friendly, and flexible scheme pulled from his mind palace of defensive schemes.

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Especially in a game like Pop Warner 5th-grade ball, where bad tackling and mistakes can lead to points that are the difference between winning and losing. Right now, the best hope for our squad is that we:

1. Don’t commit turnovers (just gonna run the dang ball).

2. Hit explosive runs now and again with our speed.

3. Are difficult to score against.

Basically your traditional formula of defense + run game. But playing great defense will hinge on the development of the secondary, which I’m overseeing with a lot of help from another coach.

Fall camp for the B-team secondary after we broke up into two squads started off pretty well, quickly cratered, and is now looking up again. I’m starting to see the possibility that we could be very good in the secondary.

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Every day of fall camp you hear about some important senior coming back with a fresh year of eligibility materialized out of thin air, or an important rising junior who just blew out their ACL and is done for the year.

Amidst all that, I see no reason to rush into playoff picks. But, of course I’m tracking fall developments for everyone and cementing impressions borne of months of thought and research over the offseason. Here are some things I’m reading and noticing.

Everyone’s favorites

There are three teams that seem to have a universal approval rating which I also think will be good, although one of these fits a little more into the “I’m skeptical” group.

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It was predictable. I worried on their behalf about winning again at a high level while reloading on defense and lacking an obvious star outside receiver. It turned out the Mustangs did fine on defense and were about as good as one might have expected outside at receiver. They did lose ground in the run game without Brashard Smith at running back and Roderick Daniels, Jr. in the slot.

So while they had replacements everywhere that were pretty good, without elite firepower outside, they couldn’t navigate a tougher schedule. The 2025 slate of opponents included eventual National Runner-Up Miami, Clemson, and a tougher ACC draw. Interestingly enough, the Mustangs actually won all of those but dropped early non-conference games to in-state rivals Baylor and TCU and conference road trips against Wake Forest and Cal.

On the year they finished 29th in offensive FEI, 35th in defensive FEI, and scored 32.2 ppg while yielding just 20.5. It was a solid season spoiled by the early losses that resulted mostly from weaker play in the secondary (cornerback in particular) but also from not quite having enough firepower in the rebuilt offense.

If you look at the Mustang roster and 2026 schedule, they have a much better chance to get back to the playoffs than they did in 2025. It’s hard to find many teams better situated to claim a spot…

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We were running drills to try and teach block destruction and leverage on the ball from the secondary. So we’d give a quick toss to a player and have them hit the perimeter like you would on a swing screen or quickly bounced run, then we’d have two receivers throwing blocks on the safety and corner.

The goal was to teach the defensive backs how to leverage the ball and fight through blocks to do so. What we quickly found was that anything that got on the perimeter was a nearly certain score or big gain. Some of the plays probably would have been stopped short of the end zone if we’d had the linebackers and D-line on the field, but it still looked pretty rough.

Teaching young kids to tackle each other is probably one of the harder tasks in this venture. It takes time to de-program their natural inclination to not run into contact. Guess which types of players end up in the secondary?

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It’s the most developmental position in football. One of my favorite things to say about quarterbacks is that there are no diminishing returns for reps and experience at the position. That’s sort of true for a lot of positions, but obviously the wear and tear of football’s physical grind tends to reduce the effectiveness of most football players past a certain age.

But at quarterback? It’s routine to see guys make substantial leaps deep into their college careers and for guys that most had written off as busts on their first contracts to become savvy winners later on.

I’ve been arguing for years that the real key at quarterback is to pay the experienced guy who’s showing signs entering his late 20s or early 30s rather than drafting from the crapshoot and expecting a 23-year old to play with poise. Last year my theory received further vindication when older vet Sam Darnold took the Seattle Seahawks to the Super Bowl and won. It was his sixth year as a starter and his fifth NFL team. He was what he was…until he wasn’t.

All that to say, preseason evaluations of quarterbacks are tough. None of these guys necessarily “are what they are.” But I’d like to take a moment to look at some key stats and considerations I like to evaluate when determining, at the least, what a quarterback has been to date. Of the guys commonly considered the top dudes in the game heading into the year, which have actually demonstrated 4 laws safe quarterback play?

I already did this for the transfers so we’ll skip over them1, and as always here are my four laws of college QB play:

Dante Moore, Oregon

Lots of folks are really high on Moore, especially as a draft prospect, which always raises my antenna. I was high on Moore going into the season because I liked how he had another year to sit before playing and the fact he’d have Will Stein cooking up offense for him. For me, he met expectations.

For others, he came out of nowhere and was hailed as a genius, which aged poorly when he was destroyed by playoff defenses from Texas Tech and Indiana.

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I think on that sometimes when considering the marketplace for coaches. He’s not currently a hot commodity after getting labeled as a lazy recruiter at Florida. Coaches who don’t have tons of energy and organizational skill are generally a poor fit for modern college football. The demands of balancing all these transfer rules, NIL negotiations, and the need to evaluate the high school and college scene for potential talent will burn through the energy of all but the best delegators.

But Mullen went to UNLV last year and immediately took them to 10-4 with the 44th ranked FEI offense in the country. He inherited an 11-3 team from Barry Odom, but he also elevated the offense and did so with transfer quarterback Anthony Colandrea, who used his time with Mullen as a springboard to Nebraska.

“Darth Mullen,” as I like to call him…

…has long been one of the best spread offensive minds in the game of football. Urban Meyer singled him out from their time together at Bowling Green, Utah, and Florida for his unique understanding of the geometry and angles of the game. Mullen justified that praise later on when he built the 2020 Florida Gators offense, one of the best spread passing attacks I’ve seen in a long time, which gave the National Champion Alabama Crimson Tide a tougher challenge in the SEC title game than either of their eventual playoff opponents (Notre Dame and Ohio State).

Mullen took three years off after being fired from Florida to work the booth before getting back into coaching at UNLV last year. I doubt he stays there long, especially if he can work his magic again this coming season. Let’s take a glimpse at what sort of Death Star technology he’s been working on out in the desert away from prying eyes.

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I’ve learned that the returning dads and players from last year’s championship team are almost certainly going to comprise the core of the A-team group. A former classmate of mine from high school who coached in high school football for a while might be the best overall coach, but he’s newer and his kid is newer, so he’s likely to end up in charge of the B-team.

My kid and I seem destined for that as well. The B-team had coach, who I’ve learned worked with Cody Alexander of Match Quarters at his last high school job, told me he would like to put me in charge of the B-team offense while he focuses on defense. My mind has been on fire ever since, working through the likely makeup of our team and considering what tactics to major in.

For the first week, one of the main points of emphasis in early practices has been shotgun meshes between the quarterbacks and running backs in the inside zone-read game. I’ve been off to the side working with receivers, so I can tell you from first-hand observation the B-team is not going to be as stacked with a ton of passing options or lethal deep threat wideouts. We’re going to need a good plan for ball-control and running it. It sounds like zone-option1 is going to be the name of the game.

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But while Harpring is an experienced and multi-faceted player, I’m not sure he passes the Spread 201 test. Without a dual-threat quarterback at the helm, the Gators need their tight end in the spread offense to be able to block and ideally to block defensive ends. Can Harpring do that? Well… he wasn’t that good at it last year. He could grow and be better at it, which is certainly the hope. It’ll be hard for the Gators to maximize if he doesn’t improve some unless Faulkner has some clever workarounds in his bag.

Later I was watching a Landon Tengwall video on the incoming tight ends for Oklahoma, who didn’t have a single tight end last year who could block worth a lick.

He covers the relative strengths and weaknesses of three incoming Oklahoma tight ends, all of whom have different skill levels as blockers.

These days teams use tons of very different football players under a universal label of “tight end.” In reality, all are ancillaries1 who serve to support the receivers, support the O-line, and only occasionally to actually star as primary skill talents. Today we’re going to break down the various types of ancillary who draw the label of “tight end.”

Here’s a major cipher. The important differences are not in receiving skill, but blocking. Who you can credibly block sets the table for what your offense can do at “tight end.”

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The quote reads worse than the actual video. He’s joking around, but clearly he is at least mildly perturbed and demonstrating what you could call authoritarian tendencies.

That didn’t go over great on the internet, within the room, I imagine it was fine. One of my notes after years of observing this sport is that detail-oriented, fastidious coaches who are comfortable wielding authority and don’t tolerate dissent tend to be pretty effective.

Then we learned from his wife that Sumrall is a big fan of pedicures:

Once again, this set off a storm of discussion, much of it predictably centered around whether it’s manly or not to get a pedicure. You know what it is? It’s indicative of someone who is obsessed with order and tidiness. Once again, this is a good sign for a football coach in charge of managing a large operation.

But I don’t really want to make a mountain out of a molehill. These are little clues or insights into the man, I can think of more concrete reasons to think the Gators may be better this year than people are anticipating.

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I picked up copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. I read a prose version of the former, for the latter I chose to listen on audiobook (as Homer would have wanted!) in what also turned out to be a prose version of the poem.1

This was a questionable thing to do, because obviously it colored how I would interact with Nolan’s take. I didn’t go in with fresh eyes. I came in ready to compare and contrast what Nolan did with the original story.

As it turns out, Nolan had every intention of offering a contrasting version of the story, and I consequently have a lot of thoughts about it.

I’m going to save spoilers for after the break, but don’t read beyond if you haven’t seen the movie and want to go in fresh.

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I was planning on abstaining from the preseason All-SEC and predicted order of finish poll for a couple of reasons. One, it’s meaningless. The whole point is to drum up interest and content to sell the coming season. Which is exactly what I’m doing with it here today.

Secondly, the level of research and intention you need to pay in order to really rank every team’s players at every position is beyond what I was willing to put in. But considering the low stakes and limited options offered, I decided to do it in our hotel while watching the old “Troy” on cable.1

The results came out today. Here was the predicted order of finish:

I have plenty of thoughts about it.

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His name is Willie Fritz.

He’s a 66-year-old coach who grew up playing in Kansas, then in college in Missouri. He got into coaching there after his playing career back in the 80s but ended up moving south to Texas to find more coaching opportunities, doing a second GA run at Sam Houston State before going into high school coaching (Willis, TX) and became a head coach for the first time at Blinn Junior College in the 90s. From there he went to Central Missouri before getting what you might call a break in the form of the Sam Houston State head coaching job in 2010.

He’s been a head coach ever since, hilariously always on the radar for poor Kansas who never hired him, and always in relative obscurity in the FCS or Sun Belt. Recently it was Houston who gave him his next break. Lowly Houston who routinely has its best players and assistants poached in the transfer portal by schools from within their own conference1.

He’s consistently been an effective coach who never quite broke out with the biggest accolades like an FCS Championship (lost the Final two years in a row) or playoff appearance (obviously hard at that level) and didn’t break out at Tulane until years seven and eight after going 2-10 in 2021.

But he took the Cougars from 4-8 before he got there to one more year at 4-8 and then 10-3 last year with a bowl game win over the LSU Tigers. Within the Big 12 they lost 35-11 to Texas Tech, 45-35 vs West Virginia, and 17-14 against TCU. They had a single player drafted (the tight end), retained much of the roster, and are now playing older and experienced starters at every single position in 2026.

It’s possible this new portal era is rewarding a different sort of coach than we might have assumed.

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They say playing multiple sports also has tremendous benefits for an athlete’s development of skills. I’m sure that’s true, although I have some suspicions about the extent to which it’s true.

Once a guy was telling me about the benefits to defensive backs of playing in the outfield in baseball because they learn how to track the ball in the air. He was noting different skills that can be acquired that carry over.

“You know how else a defensive back can learn how to track the football in the air though?” I asked. He laughed, “by tracking the football in the air?” Yeah.

I’ve learned, though that the geometry and physics of different ball sports tend to have a ton in common and the more you watch and understand the spatial relationships in one sport, the better you understand the others. For the last two months I’ve been watching the World Cup and learning the patterns and leverages of that game. What carries over to our favorite War Game?

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