College Preview Section: An offensive challenge

Randy Sanders was only 4 years old when he started playing imaginary football by himself in his backyard in Morristown.

He still remembers his favorite outfit: shoulder pads, football pants, a blue helmet and blue jersey.

"Every time the blue team got stopped or scored, I would run back in the house and change into my red helmet and red jersey so I could be the other team," recalls Sanders, who is beginning his sixth season as Tennessee's offensive coordinator.

That childhood story says something about Sanders' attention to detail. It also serves as an allegory for the split personality of Tennessee's offense. UT coach Phillip Fulmer says the Vols are "like a chameleon,'' a species of lizard that has the ability to change colors to adapt to its environment.

Translation: If the defense loads up close to the line of scrimmage to stop the run, you pass. If the defense takes away the pass, you run.

That's the way it works in theory, at least.

However, Fulmer concedes, "The last couple of years we haven't been able to run as efficiently as we would like.''

The Vols ranked ninth in the SEC in rushing last season and seventh in 2002.

During five seasons under Sanders, UT has ranked 67th in the nation in total offense in 2003, 85th in 2002, 42nd in 2001, 57th in 2000, and 33rd in 1999.

What will it take for the Vols to get their groove on and return to the form they had in the 1998 national championship game? That was Sanders' debut as offensive coordinator, and UT piled up 392 yards against a Florida State team ranked No. 1 in the nation in total defense.

The problem with the offense? Some of the most prevalent theories:

• It's too conservative. The coaches play not to lose instead of trying to win.

• It has become predictable. New ideas are needed from outside the program because the last three coordinators have been promoted from within the UT staff - Sanders, David Cutcliffe (1993-98) and Fulmer (1989-92).

• The talent level has dropped off significantly after an era when the Vols were loaded with such players as Jamal Lewis, Travis Henry, Peerless Price and Peyton Manning.

"One thing I've learned is that things are always going to be somebody's fault - whether it's 9/11, the wheel tax in Knox County or a football game,'' Sanders says when asked about the perception that UT's offense lacks pizzazz and imagination.

"That's the way our society is. Somebody wrote me a letter last year and said the reason we gave up so many yards rushing to Auburn was my fault because we didn't do a good job of keeping the ball on offense.

"I have no doubt that if we wanted to, we could have averaged more than 400 yards a game on offense last year, but would that have given us the best opportunity to win 10 games? Probably not. I have never worried about stats."

In the next breath, Sanders jabs back with some numbers of his own. Ole Miss, coached by Cutcliffe, led the SEC in total offense last season with 433 yards per game.

"That's the same offense we use with a few less variations and the terminology is almost the same,'' says Sanders, whose offense averaged 371 yards.

"There's nothing wrong with the offense the way we do it."

Hold the mustard Some would argue that UT's offense the past few seasons has been somewhat like the football staff's lunch orders early in the 2001 season - stuck in a rut.

The week before UT's opener against Syracuse three years ago, superstitious assistant coach Doug Marrone ordered hot dogs for the staff on Tuesday, Mexican take-out on Wednesday and hot dogs again that Thursday.

"We won the opener so Doug kept ordering the same thing each day the next week,'' Sanders said. "Same thing when we won the next week and the next. Our winning streak finally ended when we lost to Georgia.

"On the drive home, I was mad and upset about losing. We pulled into the driveway, and my wife looked at me and said, 'Look on the bright side. At least now you don't have to keep eating hot dogs every Tuesday and Thursday.' "

How it began Hot dogs have been more than something the coaches order for lunch. One of UT's passing patterns from the mid-1980s was called "Oscar Meyer."

Tennessee still uses a version of that play, but the name has been shortened to "Meyer." Former offensive coordinator Walt Harris took the play to Pittsburgh when he became head coach of the Panthers.

"We used it in our bowl game last season, but we called it 'Orange,' '' Harris said with a chuckle.

Sanders says that is one of several plays in UT's offense that is "like the great-grandson of what they ran here back in the 80s."

Fulmer traces the roots of Tennessee's current offensive system to 1982 when Al Saunders was hired to coach the quarterbacks. To be specific, Fulmer says the transition occurred the week the Vols played LSU.

"We had some injuries to some of our guys, including our tight end Kenny Jones,'' Fulmer said. "So we put in three wideouts and we ended up tying a good LSU team. That started the process of where we are today."

UT had averaged a modest 133 passing yards per game under offensive coordinator Bill Pace in 1981. Tennessee's passing yardage jumped to 186 yards per game in 1982, a 40 percent increase.

However, Saunders departed Knoxville after only one season. In 1983, Harris became UT's offensive coordinator. He called Tennessee's plays the next six seasons through 1988.

"When Al left, he would not let anyone there know the pass offense,'' Harris said. "There were some sheets with pass routes diagrammed on them in the office, but nobody knew the hows or whys.

"So the offense we ran was the offense I brought in, and what I developed along with the staff."

The basic philosophy Harris brought to UT expanded on the packages employed by Saunders, and it was patterned after the West Coast offense Bill Walsh used at Stanford.

"I learned it first when I was defensive coordinator at Cal Berkeley and I had to coach against Bill Walsh,'' Harris said. "At Tennessee we put in that style within the personnel and formations we used because of our talent."

Calls from Tee That talent pool coached by Harris included a hotshot quarterback from Morristown who signed with UT in 1984: Randy Lee Sanders.

He played four seasons, mostly as a reserve. He learned the offense, spent two years as a graduate assistant and has been with the program ever since. He coached quarterbacks, wide receivers and running backs before being promoted to offensive coordinator prior to UT's 1998 national championship game.

Sanders is a product of the system he knows best. He scripts the first 10 to 15 plays to choose from early in each game. Why? That's how Harris did it as offensive coordinator when Sanders played quarterback.

During the '90s, Cutcliffe said the offense continued to evolve as defenses began to use more zone blitzes and defensive backs became more involved in stopping the run. Still, Sanders says the basic offensive philosophy has remained the same.

"I talk with (former UT quarterback) Tee Martin fairly often and he says they are running a lot of the same plays with the Raiders that he did at Tennessee but they just call it something different,'' Sanders said.

"He said the offense we run at Tennessee is the West Coast offense even though we don't call it that. I kind of laughed and said, 'Yeah, Tee, I knew that.' "

The playbooks A dozen or so thick black notebooks are lined up neatly on the shelves behind Sanders' desk in Tennessee's football office complex.

Those must be the plays. Those must be the countless diagrams of Xs and Os that spring to life on the football field at Neyland Stadium.

No, Sanders says those are merely his notes, handwritten and typed, from staff meetings and practices during the past three seasons.

He lifts the door of a cabinet to reveal another shelf filled with notebook after notebook.

"Those are playbooks,'' he says.

Then with a mischievous smile, he adds, "but they're not ours."

Playbooks from other schools aren't hard to get. As Sanders says, "a coach leaves, a player transfers, a player leaves it in the dining hall and somebody picks it up and puts it on eBay."

Two years ago, a 150-page playbook from Miami's 2001 national championship team was stolen from the office of the Hurricanes' linebackers coach, and part of it was posted on the Internet.

Of course, the incident that hits closest to home for Fulmer and Sanders is when disgruntled former UT assistant Jack Sells faxed 24 pages of hand-drawn play diagrams to then Florida assistant Ron Zook in 1991 before the Vols played the Gators.

Sanders could tell you where Tennessee's 2004 playbook is hidden, but he would have to kill you if he did. That's what you're thinking, right?

"We don't have a, quote unquote, playbook that has everything in it,'' says Sanders, who ironically was featured in a large newspaper photo studying his UT playbook when he was a freshman in 1984.

"That may sound strange, but for years and years we didn't have any kind of playbook around here as far as anything written down. As soon as you start writing something down, that's when it starts showing up in other places."

In a litigious society, there's another possible reason not to acknowledge the existence of a formal playbook. In 1996, a Texas A&M alumnus filed a request under the Public Information Act to gain access to the University of Texas' football playbook.

In the current climate of bitter battles involving attorneys representing Fulmer and two former Alabama coaches, it would hardly be surprising if someone filed a freedom-of-information request for UT's playbook.

"If you tried to put down on paper every possible play we could run, the thing might be 2,000 pages thick,'' Sanders said.

"We do have a good part of it written down in different places. but not all of it in one place. We give the quarterbacks the part they need to know, the receivers the part they need to know, the backs what they need to know. But as far as having one playbook with all of our plays in there, we don't have one of those."

Oldies but goodies Tennessee will wear throwback jerseys from the 1970s in the season opener Sept. 5 against Nevada Las Vegas. There's a perception by some that the Vols have been using a throwback playbook from the 1980s.

Sanders is the only SEC offensive coordinator who coaches at the same place he went to college. He says that continuity can be a plus.

"One of our receivers came in my office the other day and asked where I got the idea for one of the plays we've had a lot of success with the last two years,'' Sanders said.

"I told him that when I got here in 1984 it was one of our base plays. Then as defenses evolved, it wasn't a very good play for about 12 or 14 years. One day I was watching film and I remembered that play. We put it in and it was successful. Everything goes in cycles."

The brief cycle of throwing extensively to the tight end began and ended with the playing career of Jason Witten, who had 68 career receptions from 2000-02. Tight end Victor McClure caught only one pass last season. The Vols started three wide receivers in five games in 2003 with no tight end in the lineup.

"For a long, long time we've been a three-wide football team,'' Fulmer says.

"People say you don't throw it to the tight end enough. It's hard to throw to the tight end if he's not in the game. We'd like to have a Jason Witten but we don't have a Jason Witten right now. So we open it up and use the personnel we do have to spread the field."

Managing chaos Some of Sanders' earliest memories are of drawing plays on the sheets of graph paper his father brought home from work. He even devised a playbook for the backyard games in his neighborhood.

"You draw things up on paper or on the board and it looks nice and neat, but it rarely happens that way on the field,'' Sanders says.

"I like reading books about military generals like Patton and Douglas MacArthur. In one of the books they talked how war is like chaos and whoever manages the chaos the best will win. I think football is like that. As long as you are dealing with humans there are going to be mistakes."

The most maddening blunders are those that are self-inflicted such as delay of game, fumbled snaps, illegal procedure penalties, and too many men on the field.

Offensive chaos seemed to reach a peak last year in a loss at Auburn when the Vols were called for three illegal-formation penalties and two motion penalties.With freshmen Erik Ainge and Brent Schaeffer battling to be the starting quarterback, the potential for mistakes could be even greater this season.

Sanders says Casey Clausen had the freedom to audible at the line of scrimmage about 70 percent of the time last season. He expects that ratio to drop to 25 to 30 percent with a new starter this season.

"There are going to be mistakes but you try to avoid the major mistakes that get you beat,'' Sanders said when asked if he'll play more conservative with an inexperienced quarterback.

"One thing I've learned is that when things work for you, people say it's a wide-open offense and when it doesn't they say it's conservative. We never go into a shell, but some games are more wide open than others."

Sanders likes to use a golf analogy. Golfers don't always shoot for the pin. Sometimes it's smarter to hit to a part of the green away from a hazard.

He has often repeated the line that "as long as we win, they can boo me every play."

Sanders said "two of the most-conservative game plans" since he has been coordinator were the 1998 national championship win over Florida State and last season's 10-6 victory over Miami

"We felt like both of those teams were good enough that we needed to shorten the game and not make mistakes,'' he says.

Highs and lows Sanders' tenure has offensive coordinator has been defined by the extremes - crucial calls that flopped or succeeded.

UT led the SEC in scoring offense in 1999 with 31.6 points per game.

A low point in the Sanders era came in midseason 2002 when the Vols scored fewer than 20 points in regulation for five consecutive games. The last time that happened was at the start of the 1974 season.

Whatever shortcomings Sanders might have, he also has strengths. He has been virtually unflappable in overtime games, calling plays that led to UT's 41-38 victory in six overtimes against Arkansas in 2002 and a 51-43 win over Alabama in five overtimes in 2003.

Sanders knows that in the eyes of many fans he is only as smart, or dumb, as his last play-call. He sometimes turns on the radio in his car and listens as callers rip him on talk shows.

"I listen to try to gauge what people are saying,'' he says.

"When you have 100,000 people in the stadium, you can't help but hear boos sometimes. It (criticism) bothers my wife more than it bothers me. When you grow up playing quarterback, you kind of get used to the second-guessing. I can't say I've ever heard anything on the radio and then talked to my staff and said, 'Hey, we ought to run this play.' "

Former UT coordinators say the exchanges in some staff meetings became as spirited as any criticism on the radio.

Says Cutcliffe: "The reason Tennessee's offense evolved is because of some of those heated discussions in staff meetings. If you really wanted to get an accurate snapshot of how Tennessee's offense has changed, you would need a snapshot of every coach who has come through the program since Al Saunders."

Perhaps the evolution of the offense is symbolized by a jar full of pennies that Sanders keeps on the top shelf of the bookcase behind his desk.

They were all shiny and new at the mint.

Over the years, they became worn and dull.

The challenge for Sanders is to bring back the luster to an offense that has lost some of its glow.

Gary Lundy may be reached at 865-342-6274.