How Mike Bobo plans to install his offense at South Carolina
The first day he was off the road from recruiting, incoming South Carolina offensive coordinator Mike Bobo starting installing.
Early on it was a few base runs, talking to the rest of his offensive staff to learn how they’d been doing things and impressing upon them the way he wants things done. He was sitting about 10 weeks from the start of spring practice, and he’s got some groundwork to lay so the heavy lifting can happen then.
“We’ll install ... I’d say probably 80% in the spring,” Bobo said. “Then install the other (parts) later and then we got to figure out what we’re going to be a week and a half, two weeks into fall camp. I think you got to install everything that you might be.”
That last part speaks to the breadth of how many staffs put in offensive packages. They go through the offseason installing a relatively wide set of concepts and schemes, far wider than they’ll use in an individual game and maybe wider than they’ll run all season.
Why do it this way? Because a team can always use more change-ups and week-to-week options, and in installing and running certain things, a staff might find out it’s good at running something unexpected.
“I’ve run a lot of offense over the years,” Bobo said. “But the base stuff we’ll install — how we run it, out of what formations, and what personnel groups — can change.
“The base stuff will be installed, the base runs, the base concepts, throwing the football.”
He laid out how the run game feeds into the play-action game, then add dropback passing and tempo elements.
Bobo’s schemes have evolved through more than a decade of calling plays, as has the sport at large. Many of his Georgia teams were based in two-back looks with fullbacks ahead of future NFL tailbacks.
By the end of his time in Athens, there were some more of the shotgun looks that are the base of most current schemes. When he went to Colorado State, there was a blend of old and new. Some of his teams used the I-formation, while others based out of three-receiver sets. Many of his teams knew how to feed talented top pass-catchers; some deployed the quarterback in the run game when the talent allowed; and his final team had a quick, small receiver it could use on jet sweeps.
He inherits some pieces at USC such as quarterback Ryan Hilinski, tailbacks Kevin Harris and Deshaun Fenwick, receiver Shi Smith and tight end Nick Muse. How he assembles and uses them, that’s still up in the air.
Part of the value of spring comes in the every-other-day structure. Practice one day, meet and review the next. It lets the staff throw a lot at players and only then figure out what kind of offense they might be.
“I really like spring because you get to work a lot fundamentally,” Bobo said. “You get to install a lot. There’s not a game, there’s not a scoreboard. So it’s just constant teaching and then you’re pulling all those clips back in fall and showing those guys of what they did and how they did it and how they did it right, how they might not have executed it right.”
