Georgia Southern, Clay Helton and The Peculiar Case of the Option Offense
Georgia Southern football has a self-imposed identity crisis.
For the third time in just 15 years, the program has made moves that stray from the core approach central to every period of success in its history. Decisions made in the pursuit of progress continuously cause Georgia Southern to take steps back, and the latest continues that dubious tradition.
Even if his tenure at USC ended poorly, I do believe Clay Helton can be a successful head coach.
He won a Pac-12 Conference championship and a Rose Bowl, achievements coaches as bad as some of the more vocal USC insisted Helton is don’t sniff. He made earnest attempts to get back on track with some of his staffing decisions, most notably the hire of Kliff Kingsburgy after the 2018 season.
Kingsbury’s abrupt and almost instant departure after being offered the Arizona Cardinals head-coaching job is the biggest What If in recent Pac-12 developments, it’s only real contender being if Jimmy Lake had landed Kellen Moore as its offensive coordinator.
And, at the risk of incurring the wrath of Heisman Pundit, Helton seemed to be well-liked his players and treated reporters respectfully. Personality traits may not be predictive of potential, but I’ll admit it does make me want to him in a position to succeed.
Georgia Southern isn’t that position.
MTSU, if Rick Stockstill was to step down, is the perfect job for Helton. Given his Texas roots, North Texas is another program at which Helton could thrive. Both programs likely offering some leeway helps.
Leeway isn’t a luxury afforded the coach at a program with six NCAA championships — just look at the coach Helton was tabbed to replace, Chad Lunsford.
Lunsford never finished with a losing record in three full seasons as Eagles head coach. In 2018, he set the standard for Georgia Southern football at the FBS level in a 10-win campaign.
That the ‘18 Eagles flourished just a season removed from a disastrous campaign that included a 55-20 loss to UMass1 and subsequent firing of Tyson Summers.
Georgia Southern’s immediate turnaround was engineered in large part by Lunsford’s commitment to a very simple concept: playing Georgia Southern football.
Lunsford’s hire of Bob DeBesse as offensive coordinator helped restore the identity that’s been at the heart of all Georgia Southern’s crowning achievements.
Dating back to the Erk Russell dynasty of the late 1980s, the Eagles thrived running a triple-option offense. Paul Johnson returned Georgia Southern to the pinnacle of Div. I-AA at the turn of millennium, winning a pair of national championships with the triple-option.
When Brian VanGorder was hired to replace Johnson’s former OC Mike Sewak, the new regime took not-at-all-subtle shots at the option, dismissing it as a gimmick of a bygone era.
VanGorder’s attitude toward Georgia Southern’s past prompted Johnson to run up the score on VanGorder’s Louisville defense in 2018.
Shirking what some insisted was The Future for what worked in the past restored Georgia Southern as a contender in FCS when Jeff Monken came aboard.
The program’s transition to FBS was fast and smooth under Willie Fritz, a two-time national runner-up at Sam Houston with DeBesse as his offensive coordinator. The Bearkats ran a modified version of the triple option that extended the field sideline-to-sideline with an effective series of short-to-midrange passes.
The scheme Georgia Southern ran in Fritz’s tenure was more akin to the traditional triple-option, and remained effective.
At the same time Fritz successfully transitioned Georgia Southern into the FBS, DeBesse accomplished the ultra-rare feat of giving New Mexico hints of relevance. The Lobos had a potent rushing attack operating out of the option during his tenure, and finished 2015 with a winning record.
That same season, I interviewed several coaches about the challenges of defending the option and the offense’s nuances. The deep-dive is available to Patreon subscribers. At the time, I believed perhaps we were on the precipice of seeing the offense regain popularity, perhaps even some of the more traditionally woeful Power Five programs adopting it for a strategic edge.
No dice.
In fact, shortly after the publication of that article, Fritz accepted the opening at Tulane. Georgia Southern made the peculiar decision, a decade after the VanGorder debacle, of straying from its identity.
Tyson Summers came on ahead of the 2016 season, hired David Dean as offensive coordinator, and implemented a spread with David Dean as offensive coordinator.
Dean came to Statesboro with plenty of credentials in the Peach State, having won two Div. II national championships at Valdosta State.
As head coach of West Georgia, a position he accepted after one season as Georgia Southern offensive coordinator, Dean oversees one of the most exciting, pass-heavy offenses in D-II.
But it just didn’t fly at Georgia Southern. The Eagles dipped to 5-7 in 2016, foreshadowing the dire straits of a two-win 2017.
Coincidentally, Dean’s success at Valdosta State offers a lesson for Georgia Southern: You don’t need to screw with what works.
VSU isn’t the birthplace of the air raid, but the scheme as we know it really began to bloom when Hal Mumme and Mike Leach were there in the first half of the ‘90s. The Blazers are permanent fixtures in the Div. II title chase, including this season when they wrap the regular season in pursuit of a perfect record and possible No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Playoffs.
Current Valdosta State coach Gary Goff is a product of the VSU spread, having played wide receiver there in the ‘90s.
Goff’s version of the offense differs from the early scheme Mumme employed, and is far more balanced in the run and pass games than anything Leach has ever implemented. I interviewed Goff in 2020, and he said Valdosta State’s current incarnation of the offense takes inspiration from Lincoln Riley’s scheme at Oklahoma, using plenty of RPO and lining up tight ends when situations call for them.
Ultimately, though, the offense is a branch of the same tree from which generations of success have sprouted.
Such evolution of the air raid can be instructive for the option. It doesn’t need to be the same system on which Erk Russell’s dynasty was built, but history has proven repeatedly that Georgia Southern wins when it embraces its identity and loses when it strays.
To that end, GSU is something of a mid-major Nebraska — a program that craves its successes of yesteryear, but seems ashamed of what made it successful in those days. Georgia Southern isn’t nearly as resistant to reimplementing the option as Nebraska, which continuously loses ground in its pursuit of emerging as a national contender while avoiding its past identity2.
But that Georgia Southern has repeated instances of success as an option program and still eschews that identity is arguably more maddening; doubly so considering the success of nearby FCS programs.
Earlier this season, I asked Elon’s Tony Trisciani about facing option-based opponents in non-conference. He said it was necessary preparation for the postseason because of the likelihood of seeing an option opponent from the Carolinas or Georgia in the postseason.
Mike Ayers built Wofford into a perennial contender operating out of a hybrid blend of two old-school schemes, the Wishbone and veer. Davidson tabbed Scott Abell from Div. III Washington & Lee in 2018; the Wildcats were, at the time, the worst team in the Pioneer Football League.
Davidson is on course for its second consecutive PFL championship and FCS Playoffs appearance, dominating the conference where an actual gimmick scheme — that of Presbyterian’s Kevin Kelley — gets all the attention.
Then, right there in the state of Georgia, a Kennesaw State program that’s existed barely as many seasons as Georgia Southern has NCAA championship became an immediate FCS success under Brian Bohannon.
The former Paul Johnson assistant at Georgia Southern (and later, Navy and Georgia Tech) is in line for a fourth playoff appearance and third Big South Conference championship running the option.
Bohannon seems perfectly suited to Georgia Southern, a much more obvious fit than Clay Helton.
To Helton’s credit, his commitment to modernizing the USC offense bucked expectations3. The Graham Harrell experiment did not go as planned, but suggested a willingness to get out of a comfort zone to find an effective identity.
Perhaps he’ll veer4 course and hire an option offensive coordinator. Until then, this is a quizzical move from a program intent on past success without embracing the reasons for that success.
The non-conference matchup was a rematch of a 1999 Div. I-AA playoff contest.
Perhaps begrudgingly, Nebraska introduced option elements into its offense this season. I posit it’s no coincidence that, despite an unseemly record, the Cornhuskers have been competitive against opponents that would have blasted them off the field in recent years is the result of reintegrating elements of the scheme.
The USC fan base — and in particular, influential boosters — long resisted the idea of modernizing schemes. Ergo, the athletic department continuously hired Pete Carroll assistants in Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian who were doomed to fail; not only were they expected to match Carroll’s success, but to do so in a way that was a mirror image of the 2000s. USC occupied the opposite end of the spectrum from Georgia Southern, as there’s a decided difference in embracing your identity and stubbornly being married to the past. USC suffers from the latter.
And, ironically, both Kiffin and Sarkisian resurrected their careers running more modern offenses at Alabama under Nick Saban. I took an extensive look at the evolution of the Crimson Tide offense before last year’s National Championship Game for Athlon Sports.
Pun absolutely intended.