Bye to the 'bone

Sporting News, The, Oct 3, 1994 by Michael Bradley

Jerry Pettibone's wishbone fantasy always leads him to the same place, the Rose Bowl, where no team has ever run the offense. The day Pettibone gets to Pasadena, he promises that his Oregon State Beavers will line up with three backs in an inverted V and triple-option their way through some Big Ten pretender.

Pettibone is one of college football's few remaining wishbone zealots, a throwback to a time when quarterbacks led their teams in rushing but barely completed 40 percent of their passes.

"The wishbone is the salt of offensive football," Pettibone says. "The linemen fire off the ball, the backs block, the receivers block, and the quarterback has to be a tough guy. It's a total team, non-star offense."

Once, great powers used the wishbone mercilessly, grounding opponents into the turf and winning national titles -- eight of them in a 16-year span. They rolled up obscene rushing statistics (wishbone teams have won 14 national rushing championships) and used the pass only as a diversion to prevent defenses from playing 11 men along the line of scrimmage.

No more. The wishbone is dying, and nothing can save it.

Today, the wishbone is the province of football's great unwashed, a last-chance offense used to resuscitate dying programs or create an advantage for teams with few strengths. Only a pittance of the 107 Division I-A schools employ the wishbone, and there's nary a contender among the more prominent programs that run it, Iowa State, Oregon State, Air Force and Army.

At a time when college football is trying to imitate its professional counterpart, the wishbone is nearing extinction. Football today focuses on the pass, with spread formations featuring three wide receivers and one back, instead of the other way around. Oregon State offensive coordinator Mike Summers derides one-back sets as "grass basketball" and says the wishbone's popularity is waning because "it doesn't look like what fans see on Sunday." The once-dreaded wishbone has found little popularity in a pass-crazy world, where many teams throw the football in order to attract recruits and have a viable entertainment alternative for fickle fans.

"If you're a wide receiver, do you want to come to a school to be a blocker, or do you want to catch passes?" asks Oklahoma Coach Gary Gibbs, who has been responsible for adding balance to the Sooners attack. "Does a running back want to be a lead blocker for the quarterback or get the ball 25 times a game?"

The wishbone was a success from the instant it was introduced at Texas in 1968 by then-Longhorns assistant Emory Bellard, and the triple option remains a part of many offenses, including Nebraska's. But the option isn't a way of life for those teams, merely a part of their overall schemes. They do it from pro sets, I-formations, one-back looks and even the full house. But not the wishbone.

"The wishbone is not an offense to sort of mix in," says Bellard, who coached the 'bone at Texas, Texas A&M, Mississippi State and Houston's Westfield High School before retiring in 1993 at 65. "You have to commit yourself to it. It's the optimum offense from which to run the triple option. But if you're not running the triple option out of it, it's a poor formation, because you don't have a second receiver."

The four aforementioned I-A schools that run the wishbone were a combined 3-11 through the first four weeks of this season and only 17-28 last season, hardly a strong advertisement for the offense. Even those four are slowly abandoning the offense as a full-time way of life. It used to be news when Oklahoma or Texas "broke the 'bone" and went with only two backs behind the quarterback. Now, a slew of hybrid fromations has been created to confuse defenses and -- say it isn't so -- promote the passing game. Within 10 years, the wishbone could join the V-trick, flying wedge and single wing as antiquated forms of attack.

"You have to convince people that the wishbone is not a dirty word," Iowa State Coach Jim Walden says. "It has never been a '3 yards and a cloud of dust' offense. That's the I-formation. The wishbone is predicated on being a big-play offense, except you're not throwing it downfield.

"It lets us play 11 on nine and minimize our need to match up physically with bigger opponents."

History records Texas' James Street as the original wishbone quarterback, but the first man to line up under center was Bellard, its inventor. Before the start of the 1968 season, Bellard watched film of West Texas State's split-back veer attack and noticed that the offense had trouble blocking the cornerback after the fake inside to the fullback. While tinkering with a few different alignments, Bellard added a second halfback to the formation and pushed the fullback two steps closer to the quarterback. The wishbone was born.

"The best way to run the triple option is an alignment that had the two halfbacks deeper than the fullback for a good pitch path from the quarterback," Bellard says. "That way, you can get the pitch man to the corner faster and have the lead blocker close to the pitch man."