Where have you gone, offense?

ESPN, in partnership with the SEC, ran some fun documentaries about the conference in the past year. Topics ranged from the creation of the Conference championship game, the Auburn/Alabama rivalry and Arkansas and Nolan Richardson's 40 minutes of hell.

The latter showed clips from an Arkansas-UNLV game played in February 1991. UNLV went to Fayetville full of swagger as the defending champ while Arkansas, #2 in the nation, looked at the game as an opportunity to declare to the world they had arrived. Instead, UNLV overwhelmed them in the 2nd half, never losing a double-digit lead until a meaningless 3 at the end of the game, winning 112-105.

112-105 in a game that matched up 1 and 2. No overtime. Let that sink in for a moment. Wouldn't happen today. Can't happen today. And that's a shame.

As an aside, we know Duke beat UNLV in the national semifinals but they were a better offensive team with a healthy Bobby Hurley and explosive Grant Hill. Duke was able to run and score with UNLV in 1991.

I'm going to link a post to a story that was written by Sports Illustrated's Luke Winn that looks back at a game from February of 1990 between Loyola-Marymount and LSU. The score of that game was 134-134 at the end of regulation. It's a fascinating game and game recap recalling how the play-by-play typist couldn't keep up with the action and her typewriter literally froze from overuse.

Loyola's offense was uptempo similar to what Chip Kelly incorporates at Oregon. Paul Westhead was the coach at Loyola and he now coaches the women's team at Oregon. Westhead's offense was simply known as "The System". Westhead has been a bit of a vagabond since then but it makes one wonder why this hasn't been used since? Winn gives the answers we'd expect about coaches being afraid to be contrarians given the money involved. But all it takes is one coach at one school willing...we can dream.

Today's best teams are usually amongst not only the most efficient but most proficient offensive teams. Look at the numbers inside the story on scoring and possesions, it's remarkable the drastic differences from today's best offensive teams to those of 25 years ago or so. It's a shame, because the game isn't better today at all. Today's game is too much of a slugfest, barren of athleticism bottled up by coaches and the media's cliche ridden defense wins championshps. Today's athletes are bigger, stronger and faster. There's a real contradiction there. It isn't better defense or more "fundamentally sound" teams, it's conservative coaching. Unleash them.

Here's the link