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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Air Attack

Purdue\'s Joe Tiller Has Made His Fellow Big Ten Offenses Elevate Their Game.
by: Kevin Kaminski
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There are more than a few Division I-A offenses around the nation that can keep a defensive coach's eyes wide open in the week leading to that Saturday's encounter.

The trouble with Joe Tiller's record-setting air show at Purdue, however, is that the sleepless nights don't always end when the final gun sounds.

Just ask Penn State defensive backfield coach Tom Bradley.

His Nittany Lions actually survived their late-October showdown with the Boilermakers (31-25) at West Lafayette, Ind. But not before quarterback Drew Brees, who finished with 379 yards, drove his team 58 yards in the closing seconds to give Purdue four shots at the end zone from the Penn State 12.

Two days later, Bradley was asked if the swiftness with which Brees moved the Boilermakers into position, against one of the country's top defensive units no less, surprised him. How ironic, Bradley said. Head coach Joe Paterno echoed a similar sentiment shortly after reviewing the game film.

"Joe said, 'You know it was just incredible how fast they moved down the field on us,' " Bradley said. "Only he said it in a much different tone of voice. And his glasses were starting to fog when it was being discussed. Let me tell you, my coffee didn't taste very good that morning.

"Sometimes I think (Tiller) draws those plays up in the dirt just to agitate secondary coaches."

Close. Actually the origin of Tiller's fascination with the spread formations currently terrorizing the Big Ten can be traced to some scribblings on a cocktail napkin.

From where it came, however, is not the issue for the defensive minds paid to lasso the Boilermakers' fast-break, in-your-face aerial attack. The problem is how to stop it. And through three seasons, that problem remains unsolved.

Since Tiller's arrival in 1997, after a six-year stint at Wyoming, Purdue's sophisticated multiple-wideout formations have altered the offensive landscape in the traditionally bruising Big Ten. From 1939, when such statistics were first kept, through 1997, only three conference teams had ever surpassed 3,500 passing yards in a single season - Purdue in 1985 (3,760), and Iowa in 1987 and '88 (3,559 and 3,752 respectively).

Last year, with Brees rewriting the league record book in the process, the Boilermakers totaled 4,208 yards through the air.

"Other teams will occasionally spread the field on you," Bradley said. "But what Tiller does is spread you out all the time. It's a steady diet. Trying to emulate this scheme in practice is next to impossible because we don't see it all the time - and we don't recruit those types of players. The precision is so hard to duplicate that it takes a good half for our defense to get used to their timing.

"I have to admit, it's fun watching them on film. It's just not fun to play against them. I came home that night drained, like I had played in the game. When this offense gets going, you want to call timeouts just to slow them down."

Coaching at a school known for its "Cradle of Quarterbacks" - a tribute to such signal callers as Len Dawson, Bob Griese, Mike Phipps, Mark Herrmann and Jim Everett - Tiller has been the hand to rock that cradle. In 1996, Jim Colletto's last season as head coach, Rick Trefzger led the Boilermakers in passing with 1,158 yards. In Tiller's first year at the helm, with players still adapting to his WAC-style concepts, senior Billy Dicken managed to throw for 3,136 yards and 21 touchdowns.

If that sent some early tremors through the ground-oriented Big Ten, last season shook the league to its core. Though only a sophomore, Brees established school and Big Ten records for passing attempts (569), completions (361), yards (3,983) and touchdowns (39, which shattered the old mark of 29 set by Ohio State's Bobby Hoying in 1995).

Such gaudy numbers, however, have hardly been for show. Prior to Tiller taking over, Purdue had not posted a legitimate winning season since 1984 (a 5-4-2 mark in '94 included a forfeit victory against Michigan State which canceled a 42-30 loss on the field). With this year's success, Purdue has notched three consecutive winning seasons for the first time since 1978-80.

"Others may have had reservations about bringing this offense to the Big Ten, but I didn't," Tiller says. "This is lucky 13 for me, the 13th year I've been in this offense. I've seen it move around the block a few times. And it's been pretty productive wherever we've been or whatever we've done with it.

"The philosophies surrounding the offense are sound. And I felt they would be applicable to any situation."

Still, set against the "three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust" mentality by which Ohio State and so many other conference teams thrived, the sight of an empty backfield seems nothing short of sacrilege in the Big Ten. After all, this is a league that, between 1943-78, featured 11 team statistical champions which averaged over 300 yards rushing per game. During that same period, no conference team averaged even 270 yards through the air. As few as three seasons ago, Minnesota led the Big Ten in passing with 2,578 yards - while Ron Dayne and Wisconsin topped all teams in rushing with 3,242 yards.

But with Tiller at Purdue, change has been in the air. Literally.

"The best way to explain this offense is that we're always looking for the matchups," said the 57-year-old Tiller. "We're trying to create favorable situations by spreading the field. The other thing is, we're trying to turn it into a peripheral game. ... That's not to say we don't want the best offensive lineman we can get. But mostly, we're trying to put the ball in the specialists' hands as soon as possible, and de-emphasize the necessity of having really physical players up front."

While the slip screens, quick slants and four- and five-wideout formations, which define the Purdue passing attack, may be foreign to offensive brain trusts around the Big Ten, it's second nature to Tiller, who cut his philosophical teeth during a nine-year stint in the Canadian Football League (1974-82) with the Calgary Stampeders.

After spending the first three seasons coaching offensive and defensive lines, Tiller moved upstairs, taking over as assistant general manager and, later, director of administration and player personnel. In that capacity, part of Tiller's job was to follow the college careers of those Canadian-born standouts playing south of the border.

During a visit one year to San Jose State, which featured a couple of players from British Columbia, he and Spartans head coach Jack Elway - with whom Tiller coached in the early 1970s at Washington State - caught up on old times and talked shop at a local watering hole. Tiller, stunned at some of the one-back sets that Elway's team ran, picked the head coach's brain.

"I told Jack I never seen this before at the college level," Tiller says. "There were some elements of the Canadian game in the offense, making plays on the perimeter. But I found it all fascinating. So Jack sat there with his martini, and drew the formations for me on cocktail napkins.. . . And then I kind of forgot about it.

"Little did I know, several years later, I'd be coaching it." Oddly enough, however, Tiller would first go to Purdue - as a defensive coach. He spent four years with the Boilermakers (1983-86), including some time as the defensive coordinator. But in 1987, Tiller made the move to offense, serving as coordinator for Paul Roach at Wyoming.

Roach had taken over for Dennis Erickson, who spent one 6-6 season with the Cowboys before moving on to Washington State. Erickson, who had been on Elway's staff at San Jose State, brought the Spartans' one-back, multiple-wideout attack to a Wyoming program which had run the wishbone for the previous five seasons.

Though Erickson bolted after one year, he left his playbook behind.

"We did very little empty to no-empty sets in 1987," Tiller says. "In fact, we did very little four wides. It was mostly three wides. But coming from my CFL background, it looked familiar to me."

After spending two seasons as assistant head coach and offensive coordinator at Washington State, Tiller returned to Wyoming in 1991 for the first of six seasons as head coach. He promptly added to the offensive matrix of his predecessors by introducing motion toward the line of scrimmage, no-back formations, by throwing to the tailback out of a one-back set, and even substituting receivers into the backfield.

Now that the offense was in place, Tiller needed to fuel the scheme with just the right type of talent. With his keen eye and background in personnel, it wasn't long before Tiller had the Cowboys turning heads outside, as well as inside, the WAC.

"What we're looking for in this offense is a nifty guy, an athletic guy," Tiller says. "For instance, in the traditional two-back offense, the tight end is big and physical. In our offense right now (at Purdue), we have a tight end who played both wide receiver and tight end in high school. A lot of schools shied away from him because he's not your prototype tight end.

"But we know exactly what we want in our receivers. In the beginning, of course, we couldn't always recruit the quality of guy we wanted with the size we wanted. So we'd sacrifice some size for quickness. This offense is all about how you match up. And we want guys who will win that one-on-one battle."

In his final season at Wyoming, Tiller's team led the nation in passing offense (359.2 yards per game) and finished 10-2 - the Cowboys' first Associated Press Top-25 ranking since 1988. But his success at Wyoming didn't exactly give him a free pass with the somewhat skeptical players he inherited at Purdue.

"Cradle of Quarterbacks" or not, the Boilermakers had never seen anything like the schemes Tiller introduced upon his arrival in 1997. After finishing a dismal 3-8 the previous season, the new staff had much to prove.

"You should have seen the weird looks we were getting," Tiller says. "More than anything, it was curiosity. Kind of like, 'Do you guys really think this stuff is going to work?' "

A loss at Toledo in Tiller's first game did little to embolden the Boilermakers' faithful. But the following week, Purdue ended an 11-game skid against nemesis Notre Dame, the first of six consecutive wins during a 9-3 season that marked the second-greatest turnaround in school history.

The accolades poured in. But quietly, Tiller was wondering what his team could do for an encore in 1998. Dicken's departure at quarterback left the Boilermakers with an unproven 6-foot-1, 220-pound sophomore to run a complex attack still in its infancy at Purdue.

"We were so confident that Drew Brees could handle this offense that we went out and recruited a junior college quarterback (David Edgerton) last fall," Tiller deadpanned. "Quite frankly, we had no idea how good Brees could be."

It didn't take long for Tiller and the Boilermakers to find out.

One week after shredding the Minnesota secondary for 522 yards and six touchdowns on 31 of 36 passing, Brees set a Division I-A record with 83 attempts - and tied a record with 55 completions - in a wild 31-24 loss at Wisconsin.

Asked if he has been comfortable working in an offense that throws the ball anywhere from 30 to 50 times a game, Brees can only laugh.

"Thirty? If it was 30 times a game, I wouldn't have come here," he joked. "My freshman year, I actually played in the first game of the season in the fourth quarter. I was in for two drives and 22 plays. We passed 21 times. . . .

"It never feels like my arm is going to fall off or anything. You throw so many balls in practice that the game is like a warm-up drill. This is definitely a quarterback's dream. In fact, it's every offensive player's dream to be in an offense like this."

One man's dream, however, is another's nightmare. Over the course of the past three seasons, Big Ten defenses have thrown everything imaginable at Tiller's offense. And more often than not, Purdue has had an answer. Against a Michigan State team that came into the game undefeated this year and sporting one of the better defenses in the nation, Brees threw for 509 yards and five touchdowns.

"We showed them three-man rushes, four-man, all-out blitzes," Bradley said. "All you can do is keep mixing it up, changing your zones. The problem is, you can't get good at every coverage in practice - and yet you need them all in the game. We go into a Purdue game with more coverages than any other game."

"(Big Ten) teams just aren't used to seeing five wide receivers out there," Brees said. "Linebackers, especially, are used to playing in the box and stopping the run. . . . If a team leaves its linebackers in, they have to spread out and guard a receiver. Now, they may see this on film. But I don't think they believe it until they're standing there covering a wideout just about every play."

For the most part, seeing has been believing at Purdue. With Tiller masterminding an aerial assault unlike anything in Big Ten history, the Boilermakers have buried over a decade's worth of frustration to emerge as one of the major players not only in the conference, but also on the national scene.

"Is it having an impact around the league?" Tiller said when asked about his offense. "I see an awful lot of teams starting to run some one-back offense. But they haven't gone to the spread attack like we have. So slowly, it is having some influence. But in my opinion, at least for now, it's pretty minor."






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