Eagles Try To Bone Up For Big Test

It all started with the Wishbone offense - which started in Texas like everything else football, even if it didn’t.

In time, it became the T-bone, and soon enough college football was one big boneyard, though most of those bones have fossilized now.

Air Force morphed the Wishbone into the Flexbone. With a quarterback named Tracy Ham, Georgia Southern once marketed its offense as the Hambone - so certainly, in the days of I.M. Hipp, Nebraska must have been running the Hippbone, no? Since Oregon State never escaped the butt-end of the Pac-10 in the Jerry Pettibone era, you’d have to call his offense the Tailbone.

At Washington State, Jim Sweeney - or was it Jim Walden? - ran the Funnybone.

And in Spokane, the good Catholic lads of Gonzaga Prep trot out the Fishbone - on Friday nights, at least.

Sorry.

We’re just boning up here for Eastern Washington’s NCAA Division I-AA quarterfinal game Saturday at Albi Stadium against Western Kentucky, where the triple option lives on in something the Hilltoppers call the I-bone.

If your preference is high school football, you still see this boney maroney all the time. But in the evolution of the college game, what WKU runs is not so much where football is going but where it’s been.

Of course, if the Eagles can’t defend it, then it won’t be about where they’re going at all.

So, then, it’s truly a bone of contention.

Right now, the man who has to contend with it is Jerry Graybeal, Eastern’s defensive coordinator.

His plan?

“You put it on J.D.’s shoulders,” he laughed, offering up offensive coordinator J.D. Sollars as a convenient scapegoat. “You’ve got to maximize your scoring opportunities because it might be a while before you get the ball back.”

The Hilltoppers line up with a fullback, a tailback and a wingback, run the football six times out of seven - and make quarterback Willie Taggart lug it four or five of those.

At six yards a pop, it all adds up, and the clock winds down.

“We’ll be breaking down their film,” Graybeal noted, “and all of a sudden the quarter’s over and they haven’t scored yet, but they’ve had it a long time.”

The Northwest football fan has been sheltered from this approach for some time now. Though balance is always a grail, teams in these parts do love to wing it. That means a substantial number of passes fall incomplete, stopping the clock - and inevitably leaving time a few seconds at the end for bonus drama.

But the Hilltoppers could have you out of the parking lot Saturday in time to stop and buy a Christmas tree, trim it and string the outside lights before nightfall.

You’ll either leave appreciating the precision of their attack, or appreciating Eastern’s preparation and discipline in stifling it.

“But for us,” said EWU head coach Mike Kramer, “it’s like teaching sharks to walk up a mountain. Unless I take my pickup out to practice and ram it into our guys, there’s no way we can simulate it.”

Kramer played guard at Idaho 20-something years ago, when the Vandals and damn near everybody else, it seemed, ran the Veer option or a variation. The other guard was Clarence Hough, now the coach at Ferris, “and we’d get upset when they’d call a pass in the huddle,” Kramer said. “Not running the ball was like taking our manhood away.”

“They” being the quarterbacks: The Vandals would go through two or three a season.

“The miracle of the ages,” Kramer said, “was how Jim Sweeney kept Ty Paine in one piece for three years running the option in the Pac-10.”

So it’s interesting to learn that the ‘bone - at least as practiced by WKU - is almost exclusively Taggart’s instrument.

“They really don’t want him to pitch the ball,” Kramer said. “The triple option used to be a dive-pitch game - the quarterback was the catalyst, but not the key cog. In the early ‘80s, Air Force had a lot of success featuring the quarterback as the main ballcarrier.

“It winds up being a chess game. They wait to see who is tackling the quarterback and adjust the blocking to take out that guy the next play. The question becomes, can you adjust who takes the quarterback on the same type of option enough to defeat what they do?”

The question also becomes, how do the Hilltoppers keep Taggart’s headbone connected to his neckbone?

“Their offensive line is very athletic, like ours,” said Graybeal. “They’ll get upfield and they’ll cut block you - once, twice, they’re very aggressive. The key becomes staying on your feet.”

If the Hilltoppers play as good a game as Eastern’s coaches talk for them, Saturday could be quite the amusement. But handicapping these things is the ultimate fool’s errand: Last year, three of four quarterfinal games were won by four touchdowns or more.

Bone appetit.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review