Halftime UConn 21 Fordham 0

You’re right that the offense doesn’t resemble the SU offenses of the 80s. The option offenses that Don McPherson and Marvin Graves ran in the late 80s and early 90s were not the same as the offense Donovan McNabb ran in the mid-nineties and were very different than the offense that Perry Patterson ran in Coach P’s last year at Syracuse.

DeLeone himself stated that the early freeze option (or Pro-Option, as they called it in the Coach Mac years) was based on a philosophy of “Okay, we probably aren’t quite good enough to throw at will against you, and we probably aren’t good enough to run down your throat, but let’s mix it up and see if you can stop it.” Those teams ran a lot of I formation with three wides and made you pick your poison… defend the pass, the option, the power run game… and went with what you didn’t set up to stop. It was often a very wide open, unpredictable and entertaining offense to run. Sometimes they ran to set up the pass… sometimes the other way around.

At some point in the 90s, the coaches seemed to want to pretend we were Nebraska, and try to run the ball down your throat and then throw off of play action. So we began running a LOT of two tights, loads of running off tackle over and over, and curiously, less and less option. Occasionally they would run a lead option play just to keep the defense honest, but that was about it.

There were some practical reasons for this… one I think that gets overlooked is that our wide receiver corps was not what had been. We didn’t have a wide out, let alone two, the caliber of Rob Moore, Qadry Ismail or Marvin Harrison. So our passing game wasn’t what it used to be… and everyone knows we couldn’t get another McNabb after he left… so there’s that.

So the offense morphed into something similar to UConn’s run-heavy offense under Edsall. But what UConn is running now looked, to me, to be a carbon copy of what SU ran in Pasqualoni’s last couple of years there… right down to the short side option plays and the Wishbone formation on the goal line. Granted, they were playing Fordham, so they were keeping it very basic and they may have other wrinkles we will see later.

Edsall’s run-game looked to me to be more NFL-like… predominately zone blocking, inside zone and then stretch plays to the outside. I hadn’t seen a lot of UConn football so UConn fans feel free to correct me, but that’s how I remember Edsall’s offense. The current UConn / former SU offense has some zone-blocked stuff (mostly out of double tight ace-back formations) with a lot of old-school iso blocking out of the I, power-O blocking (off tackle play where the backside guard pulls and leads along with the fullback) and some trap plays.

So I think, yes, this offense does resemble what Randy Edsall ran here, that’s because the Syracuse offense of 2004 had become something very similar to it. And now it’s back.

SU fans who remember differently from the things I said… feel free to throw in your two cents.