Option Central recently became a member of the CompuSports Network of web sites.

CompuSports Staff Writer Jim Reese sat down with Coach Mike Schuster to discuss a variety of topics. In this first part of the interview, Mike talked about the origins of the web site and its evolution from a site with a single focus on The Freeze Option to what would eventually become the web's premiere online collection of Option Football information.

In Part II of the Interview, Jim and Mike discuss the recent changes to the site among other topics.

JR: After having seen Option Central grow to become the site it is with coaches from all over the country contributing their ideas, how do you feel personally about the future.

MS: I feel very good about it. With the responsibilities in my life developing as they have, it was becoming very hard to give Option Central the kind of attention that it needed to be a serious, quality reference. And continuing in that mode was just not acceptable to me – it felt irresponsible on a lot of levels I guess I would say. So having CompuSports come along was, to me, a very fortunate break. I’m very pleased with the direction that the partnership is going in.

JR: Do you see your concept reaching an even larger audience of coaches?

MS: I don’t know, that’s really a function of doing the legwork to get yourself in front of people and that’s in the hands of CompuSports from here on out. I think in a lot of ways this kind of material sells itself though. So with CompuSports putting some horsepower behind it, I’m hopeful that Option Central will broaden its reach.

JR: Few sites that I’ve seen, if any, have the attention to detail that Option Central exhibits. I’m sure you must feel that was critical to the acceptance of the articles you used. Is that correct?

MS: First of all, thank you for that compliment, Jim. It’s nice to have that recognized. Yes, being as detailed as possible was always something that I felt was absolutely necessary. My vision was always that someone would take this material and use it directly or base something they were going to do off of it. For that to happen, you can’t leave big holes in the presentation or leave obvious critical areas like assignments and strategic considerations unaddressed. That might sound kind of obvious  but there are a lot more casual articles out there that don’t really come at you with everything you would need to actually implement or install the concept being presented. I wanted to avoid that as much as possible. My goal was always to leave the reader feeling like he had as complete a picture of the concept as I could provide – and I do think that was a key element in building the following that Option Central developed, yes. Additionally, I think my guest authors took this mandate very seriously as well, and it really does show in a lot of their work.

JR: Do you now, as a defensive coordinator, see yourself contributing more ideas from the other side of the ball? Might we expect to see 10 Years of Defending Against the Option or articles concentrating on linebacker and/or secondary play?

MS: Not in the immediate future, no. The defensive system I am working in is only in its third year of development. Remember that Option Central didn’t come along until nearly 7 years after I had been working in that offense. I just need to see a lot more things yet on the defensive side of the ball before I feel comfortable giving advice about it or throwing ideas out there.

JR: Which do you prefer coaching, offense or defense?

MS: Coaching the positions is kind of six of one and a half-dozen of another.  You’re just trying to get them as good at the various techniques and schemes as you can. Coordinating each requires a radically different mindset though, I think. Offense has a lot more room for creativity and experimentation and during the game you’re working in attack mode for the most part – that’s really what I like about coordinating the offensive side of the ball. Coordinating a defense during a game is much more reactionary on the high school level. I’d love to be like Dick Le Beau and constantly have some new killer schemes to throw at an offense that actually makes them have to adjust what they are doing, but the reality is that we just don’t have the practice or planning time to get really nutty with what we do. In high school, the name of the game defensively is simplicity and mastering a few fundamental schemes and then making that ultra-flexible. High school offenses are all over the map – we’ll see spread gun one week and then a two- or three-back power offense the next and then a one-back zone offense after that… so we really need to stay fundamental on defense and make sure we aren’t doing a “defense of the week” EVERY week. 

JR: What is your personal feeling about the longevity of option football as it has evolved over the years? Why has it been so popular?

MS: I think at this point the Option has evolved into the weapon of the underdog. It is extremely rare to find yourself in a situation as a coach where you honestly think that you have a dominant team. If everyone really felt like they could go out and mash people into paste with their superior size and strength, very few people would be thinking they need the Option. They’d just line up in the I-formation with one or two tight-ends and hand the ball off all day. Same thing with the emergence of the spread going on right now… coaches feel like they need some kind of equalizer against superior opponents. You tell coaches, “Hey, you can run this and your outsized little guys up front can go right to the second level and not have to block the big 260 lb defensive tackle in front of them…” then that starts to sound pretty damn good! That’s really where I’d say 75% to 80% of the guys that want to find out more about the Option are coming from. What no one realizes is that if you DO have a dominant team, running the Option with them will REALLY kill people…

JR: Why is it so difficult to defend against it?

MS: Well at the most basic level, it’s just mathematics. If you hand the ball off and don’t block with your QB you are blocking a play with nine people, max. Of course we know the defense has 11 to come get you with. If you run a QB sweep, you have 10 to block with, etc... From there, the easiest way to explain it is to say that the Option subtracts people from the defense.

If I run a simple double option at the defense, I have two potential ball carriers, neither of which is a blocker – so I am running at the defense with nine blockers, 9 vs. 11. But in fact, I don’t have to block 11; I am now blocking 10 because I am letting someone be un-blocked to be the read. So now it’s 9 vs. 10. That’s the core of it. The rest is in understanding how defenses align against offenses – no defense intentionally un-balances itself; that is, no defense puts less people on one side of the ball than the offense has blockers.

Take a snapshot of any play before the ball is snapped – if you count people on each side of the center you will see that the defense always has usually one more guy than the offense on each side. Against a perfectly balanced set like the double-slot, the defense will still have a one-half-man advantage to either side – that’s the worst a properly aligned defense can do. In a Pro-I set, for example, the strong side of the offense will have four players: guard, tackle, tight end and flanker. The defense will usually align over there with six people. If I run the triple Option over there though, I am not going to block two of those defenders… and voila: four on four. The two defenders I am letting go have three potential ball carriers running at them.

For the defense to put seven over there, the have to seriously unbalance themselves – there will be fewer defenders on the weak side than there are blockers. This is the cat and mouse game that Option coordinators play against defensive coordinators. When it fails, it fails either because someone in my four vs. four doesn’t get it done, or a bad read is made. If neither of those things occur, it is literally impossible to stop if you play with a balanced defense (which of course everyone does…)

JR: As you look back upon 10 Years of Option Central, would you have done anything different in bringing the concept of shared information about a specific offense together?

MS: That’s a tough question… because about 95% of what happened was unplanned – how it all came together was very reactionary. I think I did OK reacting to what was happening in front of me, but occasionally I think about ways that it could have been better organized, or ways that I could have broadened the appeal or gotten people involved more. Like for instance - there was a time there when I had embedded a chat room on the site – anyone could log on and then you could see who else was on and chat back and forth – and I got Jerry Campbell involved and advertised live chat sessions with Jerry and he would log on and other guys would be logged in and everyone was just picking each other’s brains, you know? That was really neat but I didn’t keep up with doing it and it kind of went by the wayside. Stuff like that I wonder about. Sometimes I think it might have been better to have just put together a semi-permanent staff of writers – because quite of few of the guys that wrote for me wrote more than one article. They were the guys who really enjoyed the communication aspect of it, I think, and had a lot to offer every time they put something together – good quality information every time. But with the diversity of coaches that did write for me, and the range of Option-related things they covered, the open door policy I had in regards to posting material from people worked out pretty well I think.

Aside from delivering the best quality I could, I just really wanted to keep Option Central a living, expanding resource – I wanted coaches to have that incentive to keep coming back and learning and interacting. The thing about books is that at some point they end – and I didn’t want that last chapter to ever come. So if there’s anything I would have done differently, it would’ve been finding better ways to keep Option Central diverse, vibrant and expanding. I’m still not exactly sure what that would have entailed, but that’s the one area that you can never really stop getting better in if you’re going to do something like Option Central.

Thanks for the interview Jim! ,