Ole Miss changes calls to throw off SEC rivals
It seems trivial in the grand scheme of things.
A football play is a football play, after all, no matter what jargon is used when it is called.
But Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze revealed this week that the team spent much of spring practice changing the names of every formation and play call in its offense. That's a significant undertaking, but a necessary one.
Freeze said that one of the reasons for doing so was that his former assistant coaches and staff members are starting to spread out into the rest of the college football world.
Ole Miss retained all nine of its assistant coaches from last season, and the only one to leave in two years (Wesley McGriff) is in the NFL and a cornerbacks coach. The same applies for Kane Wommack, a former defensive grad assistant who just was hired as an FCS-level defensive coordinator. But Ole Miss is not playing the New Orleans Saints or Eastern Illinois this season, the two spots to former coaches landed.
This is about Alabama and Tyler Siskey. The former Arkansas State wide receivers coach/Ole Miss recruiting staffer went to Alabama a year ago and was in the coaches' box with a set of binoculars during the Crimson Tide's 25-0 win against the Rebels this fall.
Nick Saban denied anything untowards, and it's hard to imagine a scenario where Siskey could have recognized a formation and it be communicated to 11 players before the snap. But the situation did not seem quite right.
Add in David Gunn, once Freeze's running backs coach at Arkansas State and now a staffer at Auburn, and Darren Hiller, ASU's offensive line coach and now in the same position at Cincinnati, and it was time for change.
Keeping these things a secret is harder than it once was. The speed of the hurry-up no-huddle offense requires the play to be communicated to the entire offense at one time, rather than given out in a huddle.
"It's certainly not the easiest thing to totally start over, which we did," Freeze said. "But I do think we came up with the best possible scenario. The thing that I demanded to our coaches is that it has to make sense, whether we're signaling it, using the flip chart or using the boards. I think we got a system now where we could easily use any of the three and it make sense to our kids."
Everything is broken up into "menus," so there's a code that at least clues the player into at least what family of plays the call is in. The team went significantly slower than it has in the past this spring, as the offense learned what everything meant.
"It's quite a bit easier when we're all standing out there with them and they're not going at a fast tempo," Freeze said. "We'll see in fall camp. The good thing is they're having their player-guided practices in June and July. That'll hopefully be a big emphasis."
The whole process is made easier by the amount of returning starters (some of them now three-year guys) on the offense, Freeze admitted. But he was using the same play calls from the time he began calling plays at Lambuth in 2008, carrying them with him as he traveled up the coaching ladder. It may be harder to break him of old habits.
"The hardest thing is for me really, and for whoever is doing the flip charts and the signals," Freeze said. "It easily could be that they have to decipher my old stuff and make it right. I told them that if I've been saying, 'Rambo,' for seven, eight years now and that's a menu in my mind and all of a sudden it's not Rambo anymore — I could see myself messing that up."
Changing the play calls is not as hard, and not nearly as significant, as changing the actual offense. There was little reason to do that: even with Ole Miss' well-documented struggles in a handful of SEC games, the Rebels averaged 30 points and 473.3 yards per game in 2013.
But if it helps even a bit this fall against Ole Miss' SEC West rivals, the switch-up will prove to be worth it.
Hugh Kellenberger, writes for The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.
