GOLDEN, Colo. – The best offensive mind you've never heard of was home Jan. 4, watching football way past his 7-year old son's bedtime. The Orange Bowl kept going later and later, the outcome long since decided, but Bob Stitt didn't want his family to miss a single snap. West Virginia just kept scoring and scoring, but even from 2,000 miles away in suburban Denver, Stitt couldn't help but feel a connection to one of the most important games of the season.
The Mountaineers eventually put up 70 points that night, running one play over and over that Clemson just couldn't stop. Stitt recognized the play immediately. He had invented it.
Back in 2008, Stitt made an impromptu stop at one of Houston's practices during a fundraising trip to see Dana Holgorsen, whom he had met at a coaches' clinic a few years earlier. By the time practice was over that day, he had helped Holgorsen, then Houston's offensive coordinator, install his version of the "fly sweep," a classic misdirection play that had been a staple of Stitt's NCAA Division II program at Colorado School of Mines.
Now, a few years later, the sense of pride watching Holgorsen shred Clemson with it was undeniable. Stitt's wife, Joan, just rolled her eyes. She had been used to her husband calling her into the living room whenever a big-time college coach borrowed one of his wrinkles, and it became the running joke of the household. "There's my play!" he'd say. "So when are you going to get paid like those guys?" she'd respond.
But when the Orange Bowl ended and Stitt got up to put his son to bed, he almost did a double-take. As ESPN's Lisa Salters was finishing her postgame interview with Holgorsen, she asked about the play that "looked like a volleyball toss" and nobody could quite figure out.
A big smile crept across Holgorsen's face. "My good friend Bob Stitt at Colorado School of Mines gave me that," Holgorsen said.
Stitt had to run it back on DVR. He couldn't believe it.
"It's fun for me because I kind of get to live a little bit through those guys," Stitt said. "And when you're coaching at a smaller level people say, 'Well, that might work here, but it won't work in the big-time. And then you see it and you can say, 'Yeah, it does.' "
The next innovator
Alabama's traditional, straightforward approach may be the gold-standard formula for winning national championships, but there is undoubtedly a philosophical shift taking place in college football. More and more coaches are ascending the ranks from nontraditional backgrounds, bringing unique ideas and changing the fabric of the sport.
Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris, the nation's highest-paid assistant, was a high school coach in Texas as recently as three years ago. It took more than a decade of setting high school records in Arkansas before Gus Malzahn got a shot on the college level, where his wide-open offense almost instantly became the toast of the SEC. Chip Kelly spent 13 years toiling in anonymity at New Hampshire, honing an up-tempo system that has produced a 42-6 career record at Oregon. Hugh Freeze, a longtime high school coach in Memphis, blazed a trail of touchdowns from Lambuth, an NAIA school, to Arkansas State to a head coaching job at Ole Miss all in the span of four years.
As long as wide-open, spread offenses continue to score points and sell tickets, college football will remain a place where undiscovered talent can turn into overnight stardom. And if you set out to discover who that next innovator might be, you'll invariably be led to a tiny engineering school nestled in the Rocky Mountain foothills where Stitt, 48, has built a consistent winner and done things offensively that programs like West Virginia, Texas A&M, Louisiana Tech and Cincinnati have borrowed.
"It's hard to flip through the channels on a Saturday and not see his influence some place," said Hal Mumme, who came from a small college background and shocked the SEC with his Kentucky "Air Raid" offense in the late 1990s. "He's a really bright guy, and people are becoming aware of what he's doing. I promise you, he's going to get a big job somewhere. He's going to get his chance if he wants it."
Stitt says he'd be willing to move up as an offensive coordinator, but only if the head coach would give him total offensive control. It's not difficult to see why he's so well-regarded in coaching circles, especially by those who run wide-open offenses. At 6-3, Stitt is closing in on his 11th winning season in 13 years. In all but a few of those years, the Orediggers, who play in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, have ranked among the top-10 in Div. II in passing offense. This season, his sophomore quarterback Matt Brown is the nation's leading passer, throwing for 3,424 yards and averaging 34.5 completions per game.
And all of this is happening at a school of 5,200 of engineering majors where the average ACT score is 29. His recruiting strategy is largely built around the school's petroleum engineering program, which plays well in Texas high schools. It's happening at a school with such poor facilities and so little track record of success that every one of his friends in the business told him it would be career suicide to take the job.