Over the last decade and a half San Diego State’s football program has been led by Brady Hoke and Rocky Long, two coaches with defensive mindsets who were happy to control the clock and win a game 13-10. Aztecs fans got used to an offense that was physical but not exactly innovative.
Now the SDSU faithful get to watch a Sean Lewis-led offense. The difference is … how can I put this?
It’s like going from watching the 1966 Adam West Batman movie on a portable 9-inch black and white TV to watching The Dark Knight in IMAX. Technically they’re both Batman stories. They’re just presented in entirely different ways.
SDSU will still be playing offensive football. It’s just going to look like it came from another planet. Lewis sums up his offensive philosophy thusly:
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“Think fast, know fast, do fast.”
When he was the head coach at Kent State the Golden Flashes used the play clock as a timer. Here’s what they averaged in time between snaps under Lewis (national ranking in parenthesis):
KENT STATE SECONDS PER PLAY
Local
2022 – 20.7 (6th)
2021 – 20.3 (2nd)
2019 – 21.7 (7th)
2018 – 20.9 (6th)
AVG – 20.9 seconds (5th)
And how does that compare to the Aztecs pace with Hoke at the helm during that time frame? Safe to say SDSU was a bit more methodical:
SAN DIEGO STATE SECONDS PER PLAY
2022 – 29.2 (125th)
2021 – 28.1 (112th)
2019 – 27.6 (103rd)
2018 – 27.3 (102nd)
AVG – 28.1 seconds (110th)
We threw out the 2020 COVID season for obvious reasons, although it is fun to note Kent State led the nation in scoring that year. Now that we know the tempo this offense wants to maintain let us ask the most pertinent of questions:
How do they do it?
Turns out, even with the skill position players having to line up in all kinds of different formations there is one way this offense is similar to any other scheme because it all starts with the line.
“We can only go as fast as those guys get up and get set and identify and make the calls,” says Lewis. “We’re going to press the issue and work to get it to the level it needs to be so that it can become a major competitive advantage for us.”
While the big dudes are getting set, the coaching staff is also under the (shot)gun. They have to get calls in almost immediately after the end of the previous play, which means the delivery method has to be clever but not complicated.
“I’m not smart enough to make it complicated. It’s gotta be simple,” says Lewis with a chuckle. “For us to go as fast as we go we can’t have very long verbiage with what we do. It’s simple, it’s concise, and that’s the only way we’re able to do the things we do.”
You know those signs on the sidelines with random pictures on them? That’s one of the ways the signals will be relayed to the offense, and you never know what you’re going to see.
“There’s colors, there’s numbers, there’s mascots, there’s pirates, there’s musical instruments, there’s a little bit of everything,” says Lewism who even talks fast when he gets excited. “Our concepts are in buckets. When we come up with something new, we ask the kids, how are you going to remember this? What’s the signal that you’re going to remember so we can go and execute it at a high level?”
The pace will be set in practice, where you might hear the phrase “40 in 15,” which is the benchmark Lewis and his staff want to set.
“In a 15-minute period at practice we’re able to get 40 plays. That’s what we’ve done in the past,” says Lewis.
That evens out to 22.5 seconds per play, which is actually a bit slower than they’ll likely be going on Saturdays.
There are 11 guys on offense, all doing something different, with minimal time to do it. In the early going there are bound to be mistakes. In fact, throughout the season there will likely be mistakes on plays that still end up working.
Think of it like a great guitar player. Jimmy Page would make mistakes during a solo but play off them so flawlessly you’d really never know. In this offense there can be missed assignments on an 80-yard touchdown because, whatever everyone was doing, they were 100% convinced it was what they were supposed to be doing.
“We'll talk a ton about, great teams communicate and as fast as we're going, there'll be times maybe where we don't make the exact right call. But, as long as our guys communicate with one another and they're making the best call that they believe and they're doing it on the same page, we can be wrong and still be right because we're executing with confidence together,” says Lewis. “Then we'll refine it and we'll get better at it so that we make the right call more consistently. But again, as long as we're on the same page and we're operating with conviction and we believe that that's the right thing to do, then it's amazing sometimes that power of belief that, hey, I believe that this is right, and then you have to go do it. That's a pretty powerful thing for the guys to have.”
And it can work against elite competition. In his final year at Kent State the Golden Flashes put up 22 points at Georgia. That might not seem like much but only LSU and Ohio State scored more against the undefeated national champs that year and those clubs had Jayden Daniels and CJ Stroud at quarterback.
As Lewis says in one of his social media profiles, “Life is too short to huddle.” I hope that’s the title of the book he writes if he leads SDSU to the College Football Playoff. San Diego State's final week of Spring Football will end on Saturday with their aptly named FAST Showcase at 1:00 p.m. at Snapdragon Stadium.
