FSU Football: What will ‘Noles offensive identity be under Kendal Briles?

FSU football lacked a real offensive identity in 2018 other than being pretty terrible. We look at what that identity will look like under Kendal Briles.

FSU football will be gearing up for spring practices soon under new offensive coordinator Kendal Briles.

Briles has likely spent time watching FSU football games to find strengths and weaknesses of offensive personnel since being hired.

He’ll be tasked with implementing an offensive identity that’s been missing the past two seasons. Jimbo Fisher used a really balanced attack whereas Willie Taggart had more of a establishing the run and leaning on it type of reputation.

One thing we saw was FSU get away from leaning on the run in 2018, but that was likely because they couldn’t establish a run game and were often playing from behind.

What will a FSU football offensive look like under Kendal Briles? Will it be balanced? Will he lean more on the run or the pass in 2019?

Those are interesting questions so I wanted to look at what he’s done since he first became an offensive coordinator in 2015 at Baylor. Here’s what we have:

• Baylor 2015: 1,103 total plays (389 passes vs. 714 runs)
• Baylor 2016: 1,108 total plays (474 passes vs. 628 runs)
• Florida Atlantic 2017: 1,026 total plays (361 passes vs. 665 runs)
• Houston 2018: 1,010 total plays (474 passes vs. 536 runs)

Thoughts

The four years prior to Willie Taggart coming to FSU his offenses ran tempo and averaged 69 plays per game while running the ball over 65 percent of the time for a 6.16 average per play.

I think now you can see why Willie Taggart wanted Kendal Briles as his offensive coordinator. Briles leans heavily on the run and Taggart borrowed a lot of concepts from the Briles offense.

Briles’ offenses average 82 plays per game and run the ball on average 60 percent of the time while averaging 6.7 ypp over the past four years.

One thing that stands out is his final year at Houston(last season) was much more balanced between the run and the pass compared to the previous three seasons.

Briles will feature a physical, downhill running game from sets of four receivers split very wide which creates space for running backs to do damage.

The splits will make it more difficult for teams to make defensive adjustments due to the uptempo style too. If teams bring more guys down in the box to stop the run that’ll leave players like Tamorrion Terry in one-on-one coverage.

We can look at the Louisville and Boston College games from 2018 to see the result of those situations.

Of course a lot of this depends on the offensive line making strides and QB play taking a step forward over the level of play provided by Deondre Francois last season.

All in all, I think we’ll see more run game in 2019 and more plays per game compared to FSU football 2018. Hopefully that’ll translate into more points per game, explosive plays and more importantly more wins.