Why Spread Attacks Are Not Killing Traditional College Football

"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it." 

          – Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

College football is changing before your eyes, and you don't need to be an expert or a writer or even a cyber-quack with a keyboard to notice it.

The size of the sport has grown, but the size of its stars has shrunk. Fullbacks have been replaced in most starting lineups with a slot receiver, substituting one of the game's most physical positions for one of its least. In the past 10 months alone, a 5'9'' receiver was drafted No. 8 in the NFL draft and a 6'0" quarterback won the Heisman. 

The catalyst of this change has been the advent (and mass adoption) of the fast-paced spread offense, one of the most divisive issues in a sport where even agreement leads to debate. It has revolutionized how the game is played, who the game is played by and what the game entails.

But what, exactly, is it? That one's a little tough to answer. The spread isn't one single thing, but more of a broad-stroke movement. B/R's Michael Felder does about the best job one can do at trying to define the scheme, breaking it down into three easier-to-process sections. But really, for the sake of this argument, the specifics of what "spread" means aren't that important.

What matters are the principles behind the spread—or at least behind its innovation. Yes, it was technically invented by Rusty Russell in the 1920s, but that's not when or how this new variant came to be. Today's spread exists because someone, somewhere, through exhaustive time and research, noticed an exploitable hole in modern defenses. And though that someone wasn't the first, his system was unique in one important way: it worked.

But that disrupted the status quo, which predictably fueled the backlash. Influential figures like Bret Bielema and Nick Saban are most noted for wanting to slow down the spread, but they're doing so for the sake of player safety—or, if you're a cynic, for the sake of competitive advantage.

The more toxic (and much more misguided) form of spread-related vitriol lies with the pundit/fan community. And it probably needs to stop.

The prevailing thought among these types, "traditionalists" for lack of a better term, is that spread concepts are killing pure football; that games like last year's West Virginia-Baylor shootout are a different sport entirely; that this is not how football's forefather's intended the game to be played.

But that ignores the beauty of football—and really, of most sports in general. Anything that works, so long as it's within the bounds of legality, is by definition how the game is meant to be played. That's the First Amendment of fair competition: The Right to the Freedom of Scheme.

Evolution isn't just a part of college football, it is college football. Pioneers have moved the game forward since its inception; only now, instead of embracing that change, folks are looking at it and crying football-homicide. It's like being shown the Human Evolution Chart and arguing that man was wrong for killing homo-sapienism. 

In 2013, for reasons that are hard to understand, the term "traditional offense" connotes balance. It evokes what Saban runs at Alabama, a system that establishes the run to set up the pass and is equally capable of doing both. 

But why is that traditional? The concept of "setting up the pass" was foreign to football's inventors. They used the run to set up the following run, lining up in the (since-banned) Flying Wedge formation to advance the ball through sheer force.

In 1869, Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first college football game. Six to four! One-hundred years later, to commemorate the centennial of that match, Chevrolet commissioned Arnold Friberg to paint a rendition of the First Game.

This is how it came out:

That picture is technically, by letter of definition, the first image of traditional college football: Not organized chaos but actual chaos, a feral kind of madness with order and tactics for naught.

Is that the kind of football you want to see on Saturdays?

Of course not. But it changed. The men playing in that game—the "traditionalists" of their time—would have scoffed at the notion of forward passes or 30-point games or five-receiver sets. The mere mention of those concepts would have been blasphemy. Football was a game played on the ground, like a human locomotive, and a venture that was supposed to end 6-4.

Anyone who suggested otherwise was killing their game.

This phenomenon, the questioning of all that's radical or new, is not unique to sport. It's peppered throughout the past few centuries (if not longer) in almost every discipline.

Elvis killed traditional music until he was traditional music. Then it was the Beatles' turn to ruin Elvis, and so on and so forth until eventually, through a series of cyclic mutations, some guy named Avicii went platinum.

This isn't the death of college football, it's simply the next iteration. And it's a good thing. Not necessarily the spread offense in particular; that point is up for debate. But that the game is changing. The sport that moves is the sport that breathes, and the sport that breathes—like the organism that breathes—is the one that continues living.

If there was no new advent in college football, if the "traditional offense" was allowed to exist forever, if inertia became the schematic norm—that's what would kill the game. It would mean the absence of forward thought and innovation; football would become like the book-less borough in Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian world so devoid of creativity that the term "intellectual" was a swear.

The spread is killing one "traditional offense," but in turn it's becoming the new one. And someday a different offense, something today's minds can't even fathom—perhaps a system with two quarterbacks or five tight ends—will come along and do the same thing.

The schemes of college football are like "Doctor Who" actors, replacing each other in turn after one has expended its mileage. The fittest tactic dominates the weakest until the latter learns to adapt, like football's own version of Darwinism.

That's the way it's always been and the way it will always be. This is just the next logical step in that cycle. So really, when you think about it, the spread isn't killing college football's tradition.

It's embracing it.