The major strategic revolution of the last few years is obviously the upward mobility of "the spread," in its myriad forms, from backwaters like Northwestern and Purdue to heavier hitters on the food chain. However you configured your final poll, four of the top five teams this year (Florida, Utah, Texas and Oklahoma) operated overwhelmingly from spread formations, along with Oregon, Texas Tech, Ole Miss, Oklahoma State, Cincinnati, Missouri, BYU and West Virginia in the year-end top 25. Illinois, Kansas and South Florida all started the season in the polls after winning big with various iterations of the spread in 2007, to say nothing of staunch power-running schools like Michigan and Auburn (and sometimes Penn State), whose wholesale adoption of multiple-receiver, shotgun-based systems signaled their final stage of their "arrival" for the foreseeable future. Every team in the NFL occasionally empties the backfield in the course of its regular gameplan. Anyone who continues to refer to "the spread" as a novelty at this point is hopeless.

The most important point in the jejune-ification of the trend isn't just that so many teams are succeeding with four and five-receiver formations, but that so many talent-rich outfits are now failing with them, too. The transitions to the spread at Michigan and Auburn were unmitigated disasters, while Kansas, USF, Missouri, West Virginia and Illinois all regressed to various extents on the heels of steady offensive gains since first spreading it out and moving athletic quarterbacks into the shotgun. Arizona State, Purdue, Washington, Washington State and Louisville had horrible seasons. Nobody expected much from Arkansas' first stab at implementing Bobby Petrino's pass-oriented system, and they didn't get much. With these obvious diminishing returns, 2008 was perhaps the year "the spread" finally graduated from a gimmick to just another standard that depends on athletes and execution.

Some people have been asking for years if the spread was at its apex in terms of effectiveness, but in terms of sheer influence, more and more teams have continued to adopt it. Now we're beginning to see signs that the spread window has closed. Chris at Smart Football suggests today that Purdue, beacon of the spread in the salt-of-the-earth Big Ten, is probably done as a spread-only team with the ascension of new coach Danny Hope and "NFL-esque" offensive coordinator Greg Nord from Florida Atlantic. In the same conference, Minnesota cut loose offensive coordinator Mike Dunbar, a spread guru from Northwestern, shortly after hiring a new offensive line coach in an effort to return to its power-oriented roots, at least in part; it remains to be seen where the Gophers are going to go with their offensive coordinator hire, but indications are that head coach Tim Brewster wants more balance after bottoming out as the worst rushing team in the Big Ten. West Virginia offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen's background is with the triple option, and the move to a more multiple offense last year might be the first step in the Mountaineers' long-term deceleration from the Rich Rodriguez-era spread with its main proprietors, Rodriguez and Pat White, both memories.

Meanwhile, there's a good chance that there won't be any new adoptees to the spread-as-philosophy in 2009.

Nobody will be able to evolve totally away from the spread, whose useful adaptations -- especially the concept of "spread to run," and forcing the defense to account for the quarterback as a potential ballcarrier -- are already a subsection even of almost all "conventional" offenses, and will remain so. But watch as the pendulum swings away from the "pure spread," and toward balance and variety with shotgun and multi-receiver concepts sprinkled in rather than serving as the basis for an entire system; the effective elements of the system will remain, but the days of ubiquitous read options, bubble screens and spring practice chatter about "going spread" are likely over. For coaches stuck without much talent, a new innovation will have to come along to take its place (and I wouldn't hold my breath for the A-11).