JKinney, both of your comments above are excellent, and I've tried to address them several times today, but I keep writing multi-page treatises that are going to try everyone's patience, so I'm going to address this one comment first, and hopefully I can address your earlier, longer comment later when I have a little more time to expand on it.
There are at least two schools of spread offenses, and you're describing the one that most people think of when they think of the Run & Shoot or the Air Raid offenses. I could literally write a dozen pages on the history of that particular style of offense and how it made a quantum leap when it geographically was brought from Portland State in the 70s (under Mouse Davis) to first the University of Houston in the 80s and then the Houston Oilers shortly afterward. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia, start looking at all of the current top-level coaches who came out of that area during that time, and your mind will be blown. Suffice it to say that the high-powered offenses from recent years of Dana Holgorsen at West Virginia, Mike Leach at Washington State and Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, TCU, Art Briles at Baylor, Kevin Sumlin at Houston and Texas A&M, et al. were all from that coaching tree and its influence on its neighbors. Frost's offense is NOT from that coaching tree.
In the late 90s several coaches in several places began experimenting with running a spread offense that was designed for a running QB who was a threat to run and could throw relatively safe passes that basically took the place of the old triple-option plays of the 70s and 80s offenses, such as Bill Yeoman's Veer at Houston, Barry's Wishbone at Oklahoma, and Osborne's I-formation at Nebraska. Instead of having an option pitch-back, they had a receiver camped out near the sideline on or behind the Line-of-Scrimmage. The QB could do a read off of a FB dive that was basically the same as what Osborne ran out of his Ace package in the mid-90s, but instead of bringing a WB (such as Shevin Wiggins) around as a pitchback, there would be a WR already in place as the equivalent of a pitch-man. Gus Malzahn was a high school coach in Arkansas at the time, and he literally wrote the book on the Hurry Up, No Huddle offense that he ran that was built around this type of scheme. He's famous for taking the old Delaware Wing-T offense and stretching it out horizontally (by replacing the TEs with Split-Ends and replacing WBs with Slot-Receivers) while putting the QB in shotgun. He and his co-offensive coordinator are believed to have accidentally come up with the Read-Option while coaching together at Tulsa when they told their QB to keep it if the DE kept crashing down hard on the RB during their hand-off mesh. Malzahn always loved the pass, but it was at Tulsa where he learned how effective it was to have a running QB out of the spread. Add in a Cam Newton and a national championship, and suddenly everybody was spreading the field to run more effectively.
Who was that other OC at Tulsa? Todd Graham, who until recently coached at Arizona State, but before Tulsa coached at West Virginia under Rich Rodriguez. Rodriguez probably did as much as anybody to popularize the spread-to-run concept, and he had a 70% winning percentage at WV to show that it was effective. He was already doing his spread-to-run offense in the early 90s at NAIA level in WV, then at Tulane, then at Clemson, and then at UWV in 2000. One of the guys in his neighborhood who was doing something similar at Bowling Green was a young coach named Urban Meyer. Tebow at Florida was the third iteration of spread-to-run after he'd had success doing the same thing at Bowling Green and then Utah.
In the 90s there was a guy in New Hampshire who started out coaching RBs then coached O-line and in the process saw new ways to simplify zone blocking schemes to allow elusive players to get loose in space. When he was named the OC in '99 at UNH, Chip Kelly was combining the Hurry Up/No Huddle ideas of Malzahn with his simplified zone blocking schemes to spread teams out to run. Mike Bellotti was trying to build a Nike-trademarked program in Oregon based on speed, and he liked what Chip Kelly did at UNH, so he brought him in to make everything go faster. They both brought in Frost, and that's where we get interested.
Frost combines elements of ALL of the spread-to run offenses listed above, and he's been saying for nearly a decade that he dreams of the day when he can combine all of that with the power running game of his glory days at Nebraska. If you saw Ohio State use a spread-formation version of Osborne's old Counter Tray to pummel Oregon in the 2nd half of the 2014-15 NCAA Championship Game, you can imagine what it was like for Scott Frost to be sitting up in the Oregon booth, waiting to call plays while watching Urban Meyer and Tom Herman literally doing what he'd been wanting to do for years.
Frost doesn't need star athletes for this system, though he will need to have a star QB about every other year to make it work,... so he's basically in the same boat as Osborne in the 80s and 90s when it comes to recruiting the offense. They need fast backs and receivers who can catch the ball, but those aren't that hard to find. He'll need Nebraska kids to commit to beefing up and re-incarnating the O-line from the glory days of the Pipeline, and I think that there will be Nebraska kids lining up to do it. It's poetic that Cam Jurgens--who is as high of a recruit that Nebraska has had from in-state in a long, long time--just signed on to become one of those guys by switching to Center. It's still possible to build O-linemen like the glory days, and this is where the state of Nebraska can contribute.
