It's not quite Blue Oyster Cult, but that is how Demon football coach Scott Stoker refers to the closed ranks of college football coaches whose teams employ the triple option offense out of a wing-T formation.
"I've tried, I really have, to get inside the circle and learn about it, but those guys keep it to themselves," Stoker said Thursday at the Bossier City-Shreveport QB Club lunch at Ralph & Kacoos. "The rest of us coaches, we get together and talk all day and night about what we do, but for the option guys, they have little cult thing going and nobody outside gets in."
It's ironic, because Stoker really admires Nicholls State head coach Jay Thomas, who he calls one of his better friends in the coaching ranks.
"We talk pretty much every week all year long, except this week," he said.
Scheming against the option offense Nicholls uses is a challenge for any team, because it's such a departure from what the rest of football does. In the 1970s, the Wishbone and the splitback veer were in vogue. Time shifted to the Pro I and the Option I, and now the spread offense, a variation of the West Coast Offense, is the most widely used basic scheme.
The option is somewhat like Chinese water torture. The theory goes that at some point, a defense is going to break. There are a lot of nuances and variables built into it, but basically Nicholls keeps chipping away hoping to take advantage of a momentary lapse. Play 55 plays well and 4 badly, and there's potentially 28 points allowed.
So, how did the Demons shut out the Colonels 9-0 last season?
"We guessed right, sometimes," said Stoker. "That's the truth. We guessed right and were lucky. We made a lot of good plays but we made some good guesses on our calls and they weren't so lucky.
"We were the first FCS team to shut them out, and that's something I bet won't happen again for a lot of years," he said.
Doug Ireland, SID
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