It's Time For Turk Schonert's Offense In Buffalo

(Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Shortly after the Bills’ 2008 season came to an end, owner Ralph Wilson met with head coach Dick Jauron.

The two discussed many different topics, most of them directly associated with the immediate future of the Bills’ organization.

Wilson, not happy with the performance of the offense under first-year coordinator Turk Schonert, requested that Jauron fire Schonert, but the head coach refused.

Jauron had no choice but to stand by his beleaguered offensive coordinator. Despite promising a wide-open, no-huddle passing attack when he was first hired, Schonert’s offense instead was built more around flare passes and dump-offs to the running backs.

However, the Bills’ struggles on offense last season weren’t Schonert’s fault. The blame for the offensive’s ineptitude falls directly on the shoulders of Jauron.

He was the one who held back Schonert and restricted the Buffalo’s offense, so he had to stand up for him when Wilson asked for a change to be made.

Jauron is a defensive minded coach, so by nature he tends to be on the conservative side. In his defense, much of Jauron’s reasoning for scaling down the offense made sense early on in the 2008 season.

The Bills had a young quarterback in Trent Edwards, who was entering just his first year as a full-time starter in the NFL. Asking Edwards to do too much early on may have stunted his progression and ruined his confidence.

Buffalo really had just one gamebreaker at receiver in Lee Evans last year. No other Bills’ pass catcher struck fear into a defense, which is why Evans saw double and triple teams virtually every week.

It isn’t easy to open up the offense when you don’t have the weapons in place to do so.

Finally, Buffalo’s offensive line was being re-shuffled pretty much on a weekly basis and its play throughout the season was inconsistent, making it difficult to play a wide-open brand of offense.

Not checking down a lot on passing plays might have gotten Edwards killed.

So Jauron did have some very logical reasons for not letting Schonert go hog wild and turn the Bills into the old Houston Oilers of the Warren Moon "run ‘n shoot" days.

However, he also couldn’t let Schonert take the fall for the offense’s ineffectiveness in 2008 because, in all honesty, that really isn’t the offense Schonert wants to run.

To get an idea of what we can expect from Buffalo this season on offense, one just needs to look at Schonert’s pedigree. He learned offense under Jim Fassel and Sam Wyche.

Say what you will about those two as head coaches but no one can deny that Fassel and Wyche know a thing or two about offense; particularly the passing game.

The main thing Wyche and Fassel preach is tempo. They like their offenses to play and practice at a fast pace, which would be a complete turnaround from anything the Bills have done on that side of the ball in recent years.

What Schonert is doing is installing the no-huddle offense in Buffalo, and that is going to accomplish a number of different things. First and foremost, it’s finally going to make the Bills less predictable on offense.

I was talking to an AFC East scout. He doesn’t scout college players, rather opponents for the team that employs him. He told me that out of all the teams he evaluated last season the Bills threw the ball over 20 yards the fewest times.

Let’s face it; the Bills were very predictable on offense in 2008. Making Edwards and Co. more difficult to defend is the first thing Schonert needs to change, and he has the pieces in place to accomplish that goal.

Not just any team can run the no-huddle offense. Like any system, the no-huddle takes certain players in order for it to work. For instance, the Baltimore Ravens and Tennessee Titans probably wouldn’t be good fits for the no-huddle. They are better suited as power-based run teams.

The Bills, however, look like they have the tools to run Schonert’s offense very well.
It all starts with the quarterback, and for what Schonert and the no-huddle asks out of the position, Edwards appears to be a perfect fit.

The key to running a no-huddle offense isn’t arm strength or mobility, it’s intelligence.

Look at the quarterbacks who have been successful in the system, guys like Jim Kelly and Boomer Esiason. They were so good in the offense because of their ability to call plays and read defenses; a quality Edwards is believed to have as well.

As a matter of fact, when you talk to people around the NFL,

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