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MT. RUSH MORE

How Air Force football has established itself as the nation’s preeminent rushing team

BY BRENT BRIGGEMAN brent.briggeman@gazette.com

Air Force is well on its way to running to another national rushing title.

If the Falcons can finish this one off — they are running for 369.8 yards per game as the midway point of the season approaches on Saturday; no other team is above 300 — it will be the third rushing title in as many seasons.

“I would say their running game, as an old defensive coordinator, it scares you to death,” Wyoming coach Craig Bohl said before playing Air Force last month. “It’s like a hot knife going through butter.”

It wasn’t always like

this. From 1982, when the Falcons first used the triple-option to climb into the national top five in rushing yards, through 2019, they placed in the top 10 in 36 of 38 seasons but were first only once.

Now, the Falcons have seemingly entrenched themselves at the top.

So, what has changed? Football, first and foremost.

It’s all relative

Tracking a team’s success in a statistical ranking is, by definition, relative, and since the early 1980s, teams have adopted and abandoned a run-first approach, while Air Force has remained steady.

The 369.8 yards per game the Falcons are averaging on the ground would only be the third best in school history. Place that number in 1989 college football and it would lag behind Nebraska and Colorado on the rushing list.

The Cornhuskers dominated the category for years under coach Tom Osborne. The Buffaloes, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Fresno State and Notre Dame also perennially put up big ground numbers at different points in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Over time, however, spread offenses replaced the wishbone and passing became en vogue.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of tracking the rises and falls of great rushing offenses in college football, particularly over the past decade, is the frequency the fall has come to the detriment of the program’s win-loss record.

Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern and New Mexico all emerged as some of the best rushing teams in the nation in the past decade and saw their best records in recent memory coincide with their best rushing seasons.

All have since abandoned a run-dominated approach and have seen their records plummet.

Even Army and Navy, while still prioritizing a rushing offense, haven’t put up numbers at the same rate as they once did. Not surprisingly, their best seasons of late have come with their best rushing offenses. Navy ran for 360.7 yards per game in 2019 and finished 11-2 and ranked No. 20. Army ran for 362.3 yards per game in 2017 and went 10-3.

Qualified teachers

If a strong running game so closely correlates to winning football, why doesn’t everyone do it?

First, it’s difficult.

“I feel like we work on perfection in practice,” Air Force tailback John Lee Eldridge III said. “That allows us to go out and play loose in games.”

Not everyone can teach that level of perfection.

Coach Troy Calhoun played quarterback under Fisher

Deberry (who first brought the option to Air Force as offensive coordinator under Ken Hatfield and then as the academy’s winningest coach) and coordinated an offense at Ohio under Jim Grobe that ran for 301.9 yards per game in 1997 and went 8-3. Calhoun followed Grobe to Wake Forest, then served as an assistant under Mike Shanahan for three years with the Denver Broncos when they featured a top-four rushing offense in the NFL. He then served as offensive coordinator for the Houston Texans for a year before replacing Deberry at Air Force.

Mike Thiessen, also a former Falcons quarterback, is the longest-tenured offensive coordinator in the nation, serving in the role for 13 seasons under Calhoun.

“They know what they’re doing,” Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo said. “Mike and Troy do a good job on offense. They know exactly who they are, they’ve been together for a long time, so schematically they know who they are and what they’re trying to get done.”

Run with the available skill sets

Even Air Force will diversify its offense when it has players who necessitate a change.

When Chad Hall, a Heisman Trophy candidate and future NFL player and coach, was a senior in 2007 he caught 50 passes. This year the Falcons aren’t on pace to complete 50 passes as a team.

Jalen Robinette amassed an Air Force-record 2,697 receiving yards from 2013-16. Nobody on the current roster has more than 320 receiving yards.

Calhoun tried to capitalize on the arm strength of quarterbacks Kale Pearson and Nate Romine, so the rushing numbers dipped slightly in 2013 and ’14 when they started the majority of the games.

“It might be how a season unfolds and who you collide against and what their philosophies are,” Calhoun said. “It might be your personnel. … You just always try to craft to where you think your strengths are.”

The current two-plus year run of rushing supremacy corresponds with quarterback Haaziq Daniels and fullback Brad Roberts stepping into starring roles.

Roberts, who led the Mountain West in rushing a year ago, is No. 8 on Air Force’s alltime rushing list. If he maintains his career per-game average of 108.4 yards, he would finish in the top four.

Daniels doesn’t have the flashy traditional numbers — though his 94-yard run vs. Florida Atlantic and 92-yard pass against Colorado State in 2021 are the longest rushing and passing plays in team history — but he is two wins from cracking the team’s top five in career quarterback wins.

If he guides the Falcons to a 10-win season, as he did a year ago, he would match Dee Dowis at No. 2 with 22 wins.

Daniels ranks third all-time for Air Force in passing efficiency (155.7) and yards per completion (20.1), critical aspects in keeping defenses from selling out to stop the run — or punishing them when they do.

“He is very, very adept in that regard,” Calhoun said of Daniels as a facilitator of the offense and in his ability to take a snap and instantly make a number of decisions.

Eldridge has added a new dimension at tailback this year, ranking fourth in the Mountain West with 81.6 yards per game despite averaging just 8.8 carries per contest.

“What they do, they do elite,” Niumatalolo said. “You can tell they are well-coached. There isn’t any hesitancy from their linemen blocking to the people downfield blocking and on the perimeter and the backs running the ball. They have a great grasp of what they’re doing, and I think that’s a testament to their coaches and teachers and the type of players they have.”

Not for everyone

There’s an entertainment element to football, and the modern option game has a tricky time carving a place in that space.

“Does your fan base really want to watch you hand it off to the fullback 10 times in a row if that’s what triple option tells you that’s what you should do? I’m not that guy, personally,” said Utah State coach Blake Anderson, whose team won the Mountain West last year with a very un-air Force-like up-tempo offense that produced the second-most passing yards in the conference. “So some of it just may be preference as much as anything.

“There’s probably some schools in the country that don’t run the triple that probably would benefit from running it in the conferences and leagues that they’re in. It might give them an opportunity to be more competitive than they are currently trying to do more conventional style of offense.

“But is the fan base really willing to watch it?”

The other downside is that building a dominant run game has generally come at the expense of flexibility. Big pass plays frequently accompany a consistent running attack, but on days when the yards aren’t there on the ground, there generally isn’t a sophisticated passing attack to pick up the slack.

Most coaches prefer to remain balanced and more easily game plan around their weekly matchup.

Air Force doesn’t hide who it is, making running part of its brand. On game days the in-stadium video boards show highlights to intro a song that features the line, “I’m gonna run all over you.”

Hatfield and Deberry used their ground-based offense to build Air Force into the dominant service academy of the 1980s and ‘90s, and Calhoun has carried that forth into a consistent winner — taking the Falcons to bowl games in all but three of his 14 full seasons.

They’ve won 10 or more games four times since 2014 and are 28-9 since the start of the 2019 season.

That they have become the preeminent national rushing power has been part of that, even if that wasn’t the specific plan.

“That’s not intentional,” Calhoun said. “We don’t set that as a goal.”

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2022-10-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

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The Gazette, Colorado Springs