Mike Leach, now head coach at Washington State, has gone out and hired someone with a little pistol offense pedigree:
One interesting note from the hiring and firing that occupies college football fans for the better part of the holiday season is the hiring of former Nevada and UCLA assistant Jim Mastro by Washington State. Mastro is schooled in the pistol offense, a run-first attack known for cranking out 1,000 yard rushers with regularity. It seems incompatible with Leach’s pass-friendly Air Raid scheme, but it may not be as inharmonious a match as you might think.
Leach protege Dana Holgorsen has worked with integrating the pistol formation and other variants of the scheme into his sets at West Virginia and Oklahoma State. In order to keep his attack fresh and unpredictable in his return to coaching, Leach may be looking to do the same thing by going straight to one of the attack’s sources. It’s a fun tweak, but don’t worry, Cougar fans: Leach will still throw the daylights out of the ball, and then probably pass some more even after he’s all out of daylights, so to speak.
I think this is right: Don’t expect Leach to junk his Airraid anytime soon, though you may see more pistol. What’s interesting is that Leach has talked about the importance of the pistol, contrasting it with, say, the wildcat, which he didn’t think is a lasting change. Instead the pistol, says Leach, will have staying power as it “changes the angles” in the running game. You can see this in the clip below:
Of course, as I’ve said many times, the “pistol” does not mean one thing: it’s an alignment by a runningback but it can also refer to a specific offensive scheme, most notably associated with Nevada under Chris Ault. Holgorsen tends to use the pistol simply as an alignment, one that doesn’t give away which direction the runner is going but otherwise it’s not that different from traditional sets. Nevada, by contrast, uses it to run a lot of read or option schemes, meshing them with downhill run schemes. I don’t expect Leach to go this direction.
But there is an analogue. At Texas Tech, Leach needed to engineer a bit more of a run game, and he did that using some “triple shoot” concepts involving a jet sweep and inside runs as a counter off of the jet sweep action. How Leach integrates this into his vaunted Airraid offense.