Xs and Os ahead of undefeated Cincinnati's Friday night showdown with West Virginia, from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

It must be something unique to the American psyche that we are not satisfied if someone is a success within their field; we must have geniuses. Karl Rove or David Plouffe become tactical geniuses within the political realm (depending on your persuasion); Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro become "acting geniuses"; and then there's the football world, where everyone from Bill Walsh to Mike Leach to Nick Saban are not merely effective coaches, they have attained de facto MENSA status. One otherwise well written article about Oregon's Chip Kelly was entitled "A Beautiful Mind," likening the Ducks' success in the spread option to John Nash's pioneering, Nobel prize-winning work in game theory.

When the spread was still in its nascent stages, Brian Kelly had the genius moniker thrown about. He began his coaching career at Assumption College, where he also played, then took a spot as a graduate assistant at Division II Grand Valley State. There he rose to the head coaching spot only four years later, a job he would hold for the next 12 years. It was at GVSU that his version of the spread took hold, and while Kelly was an early mover to regular multiple-receiver sets and a better spread run game in the vein of Rich Rodriguez and others, he was different in that he didn't have his quarterbacks do much reading. Instead, Kelly's running game remained basically power football with pulling guards and tackles, all from the shotgun. But he did not lack for success: His 2001 GVSU offense remains one of the most potent in college football history at any level, averaging more than 58 points per game.

He refined his scheme as head coach at Central Michigan from 2004-06, before replacing defensively-minded Mark Dantonio at Cincinnati, where he's in the midst of guiding the Bearcats to the most successful season in school history for the third year in a row. By the time he took over at UC, the spread was no longer the new, new thing; it had trickled down from the innovators, permeated through the early adopters and become the province of hacks as well as forward-thinking coaches looking for an edge. Instead of hanging on to the identity of schematic genius, Kelly has been content to cast himself in a far less exciting but far more important role: As a damn good fundamental football coach.

Take his very basic approach to the passing game that's made a star out of every obscure passer who operates it. Aside from preparing his players so well -- of which the best evidence is his continued success at multiple, generally disadvantaged stops -- the one feature of Kelly's passing game that differentiates it from most others is its foundation in the concept of "vertical stems." It sounds more complicated than it is.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Cocktail Party from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

The good news: You're undefeated. And by all accounts, if you win out, you will play for the national championship. The bad news? Your once high-flying offense has been sputtering the last three weeks like it's out of fuel.

The team is Florida, and while mediocre victories due to offensive ineptitude against Arkansas, Mississippi State, Tennessee and LSU might be generally acceptable (a win is a win, and the mainstream pollsters are still breaking for the Gators as the No. 1 team in the country), this edition of the UF offense is a far cry from the attacks that dominated the SEC the last two years. Worse, the underlying assumption is that the Gators won't be able to beat Alabama playing the way they are now, when the offense's regression has become more apparent by the week. Against SEC opponents, Florida is barely scoring one touchdown in every four red zone trips, Tim Tebow has more interceptions than touchdown passes and the running game has become excessively reliant on No. 15 keeping the ball up the middle (Tebow already has three games with at least 20 carries, a mark he hit only once last year, against Oklahoma). The Gators have been held below 30 points in four of five SEC games, after scoring at least 30 in every conference game en route to the SEC and BCS championships in 2008.

There are a lot of possible culprits. Tebow is "pressing" too much and putting too much on his shoulders; the new offensive staff, including coordinator Steve Addazio and new quarterbacks coach Scott Loeffler, has not gelled; and the receiving corps has been a disappointment with the losses of Louis Murphy and Percy Harvin to the NFL. All these are clearly issues. In particular, the Gators red zone reliance on Tebow has gone far overboard, though the extra Tebow plays don't really explain by themselves how startlingly bad the red zone offense has been. Another factor has been turnovers, especially fumbles -- Florida's already lost nine loose balls, more than all of last year, and carries a negative turnover margin for the season for the first time in Urban Meyer's tenure.

What jumps out, though, is how bad the Gators have been in pass protection. Florida is in the bottom half of the SEC in sacks allowed for the first time under Meyer, and even that number doesn't capture how often Tebow has been hurried into making a bad decision, which he's done too often.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Penn State-Michigan showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

Defense and Penn State go together like Don Draper and pocket squares -- not only does it just look "right," it feels inevitable, as if this is how the world should be. When that team, wearing those uniforms, led by that coach, shuts down a hapless opponents under a sea of blitzes and gang tackles, "Linebacker U" speaks to something primordial.

Joe Paterno, of course, must get much of the credit for building his team in his tough, irascible image, but so should longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Sandusky, now retired, assembled those rugged 4-3 defenses over several decades, mutating it over multiple revolutions in offense, from option football back to I-formation running and west coast passing, and even into the early rumblings of the spread revolution in the late '90s. While talk of Paterno's eventual retirement continues to swirl, his longtime staff goes about the details of coaching players to excel. De facto defensive coordinator Tom Bradley (in one of its many traditions, Penn State does not actually name its coaches "offensive coordinator" or "defensive coordinator") and linebackers coach Ron Verlinden are among the very best and most knowledgable guys in the game, while anyone who has heard defensive line coach Larry Johnson speak will no doubt remember it for years afterward. Bradley in particular has kept Sandusky's great tradition intact, by keeping the framework that Penn State has used for decades while updating it for the newest waves of offensive evolution.

When you are assigned a position at Penn State, you are reminded of the ghosts that came before. Each linebacker has a position name to make sense of the defensive calls: Sam (strongside linebacker), and "Fritz" and "Backer." Penn State linebackers know which players, in the decades preceding them, were Fritzes and which were Backers. Similarly, in many systems the strong safety is known as a "monster" player because he plays all over the field. For PSU, the concept lives though Coach Rip Engle, who coached the Nittany Lions from 1950 to 1965, thought "monster" derogatory and thus called him "Hero" instead -- yet another tradition carried from from the age of Eisenhower to the present.

But once you peel back the layers you see the biggest holdover of them all for Penn State's defense: They are maybe the last, great "Cover 3" team -- i.e. their base coverage is a three-deep, four under zone defense. This is surprising because it eschews the fad coverage -- quarters, "Tampa Two," and even Cover 1 "robber," though they can use those if they like -- but also because Cover 3 is often seen as such a simple and, well, old coverage. But, like Draper's suits, while Penn State's defense might be a throwback, it works so damn well because they get all the little details right.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Texas-Oklahoma's showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

It's difficult to find much fault with Oklahoma's offense in last year's back-and-forth, surprising 45-35 loss to Texas. If anything, the burden fell on Bob Stoops' defense: Longhorn quarterback Colt McCoy carved up the Sooners with his usual deadly precision, with UT receivers Quan Cosby and Jordan Shipley each hauling in more than 100 yards receiving and unsung running back Chris Ogbonnaya adding 127 yards on the ground. On the other side, McCoy's counterpart, Sam Bradford, passed for 387 yards and five touchdowns (with two interceptions); 35 points ultimately matched OU's regular season low for the year, but under any circumstances should still be enough to win, maybe even when the opposing quarterback's gutsy performance is thrusting him to the front of the Heisman race.

But it's possible to find fault with the Sooners' offense that afternoon, namely in the running game, which pounded out just shy of 200 yards on 4.7 per carry and produced two 1,000-yard rushers for the season but only managed a meager 48 yards on 26 carries against Will Muschamp's defense in Dallas. This was something of a theme: The OU running was only held in relative check three times in '08, and two of those were on the team's biggest stages, in the losses to Texas and Florida. (TCU also went all-out to shut down the Sooners on the ground, but forfeited 411 yards and four touchdowns passing in the effort.) So the run game is quite important to making this vaunted offense go, regardless of who's in place at quarterback.

Before the '09 season, much was made about the massive turnover on OU's offensive line. So far, though, even in the losses to BYU and Miami, the run game has held up well -- veteran backs Chris Brown and DeMarco Murray are just a shade off their '08 pace, combining for 150 per game on just shy of five per carry. Aside from Bradford's shoulder injury, it seems the bigger issue for OU has been the loss of Bradford's top five targets from last year, including injured Jermaine Gresham, who won't be back, and Ryan Broyles, who might be back as soon as Saturday. The upshot, with a gimpy Bradford and a still depleted receiving corps, is that the burden falls on Murray and Brown to redeem their poor performance against Muschamp's unit last year.

Spreading and running, and Stoops' soul searching. When Oklahoma's offense is rolling, as it was most all of last season, it is a thing of beauty: One play the Sooners line up with four receivers, then come out with a tight end and fullback the next. They can run the ball out of spread sets where the running back motions from the slot into the backfield, or where Bradford tosses the ball back to a more traditional I-back. And they do it all from a high-speed, no-huddle tempo that discourages substitution by the defense and ultimately mows then down.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Florida-LSU showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

There's another side to the will-he won't-he drama surrounding Tim Tebow's prospects of suiting up this Saturday when Florida takes on LSU: Will this be the coming-out party for quarterback John Brantley, not as just as the Gators' quarterback of the future, but, as some believe, college football's next great quarterback? This week provides the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at how Urban Meyer might readjust his offense to take advantage of Brantley's more traditional set of skills if he's the man at LSU, and how Tebow's absence changes how the Gators will attack.

To use Isaiah Berlin's phrase, Tim Tebow is a fox: He does everything well. No running quarterback on the college level has ever been a better passer, or if you prefer, no passing quarterback has ever been a better runner. In 2007-08, Tebow passed for more than 6,000 yards and accounted for 97 total touchdowns (62 passing, 35 rushing) while finishing in the top four nationally in pass efficiency and leading his team in rushing both seasons. Such extreme versatility is the key: Tebow lacks the kind of breakaway speed of past great running quarterbacks like Tommie Frazier, and though I think his passing abilities are often underrated, no one would say he's a truly polished passer. His proficiency in both areas, though, puts defenses in binds attempting to defend the range of his skills. More than anything, it's that incredible ambidexterity that fuels the Gators offense: It can do it all, because Tebow can.

But if Tebow is a fox, Brantley is a hedgehog: He is a classic pocket passer, and that's what he does well. A star recruit out of Ocala, Fla., Brantley has inspired not only early faith among his teammates, but also hyperbolic commentary from the faithful that, had Tebow left for the NFL, Brantley still would have been the second-best quarterback in the SEC coming into the year, behind only Jevan Snead at Ole Miss. Yet, no matter how talented he is, Brantley still has to find a way to fit into Urban Meyer's run-first spread, designed for foxes like Tebow.

Scheme stability. While Meyer and offensive coordinator Steve Addazio will tweak the system for Brantley, anyone who expects them to download the nearest NFL playbook and go "pro-style" is fooling himself. Florida's offense will look much the same: Plenty of shotgun, plenty of varying formations, plenty of motion, and, yes, even plenty of option. I haven't seen a lot of Brantley but he's not a total stiff, so I can't imagine that Meyer will simply throw all of that stuff out -- too much of his offense is built on making the quarterback some kind of threat to run.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Auburn-Tennessee showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

Gus Malzahn, magus of the up-tempo/no-huddle spread offense, has Auburn's once-moribund attack rolling at a breakneck pace. Through four games, the Tigers look like a completely different team than the dysfunctional unit that led to the midseason ouster of AU's last spread whiz, Tony Franklin, and eventually of his boss, Tommy Tuberville. Given free rein by new head coach Gene Chizik, Malzahn has engineered one of the more remarkable turnarounds for an offense in recent memory, with basically the same players that flailed under Franklin -- including much-maligned quarterback Chris Todd, one of the most efficient passers in the country through September after being ditched along with Franklin in the middle of last year's debacle.

Compare: In '08 the Tigers were 104th nationally in total yards per game (302.3) and 11th in scoring (17.3 points); so far in '09, they're third in both categories (526.3 yards and 45.3 points per game). In '08, they ranked 70th in rushing yards per game (136.8) and 99th in yards per pass attempt (5.8); in '09 they rank fifth in rushing (261.3) and sixth in yards per pass (9.4). They've surpassed 500 total yards in three of their first four games after failing to hit that mark in a single game from 2006-08. These improvements have a real effect on playcalling, as well: The Tigers have improved their average gain on first-down runs by over 2.1 yards, making second downs that much easier to convert.

While the numbers are nice, Auburn has yet to satisfy Malzahn's preferred metric: He really wants the Tigers to average 80 plays per game. (So far, they're averaging nearly 75 plays a game, up from 67.5 last year). In Malzahn's offense, tempo reigns over scheme -- he wants the ball snapped on most plays within five seconds of the official setting it for play. If other spread offenses use racecar names for their no-huddle (Tony Franklin called his "NASCAR"), then Malzahn's temp is nothing short of Mach speed on a football field.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Miami-Virginia Tech showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

Something stirs in Miami. There's talk of a sleeping giant being back, and the return of the U's swagger. All that is probably premature. But there is no question that, in their first two games, the Hurricanes have put on a show, as they downed rival Florida State in dramatic down-to-the-final-play fashion, and delivered a vengeful barrage to a Georgia Tech squad that had dominated them a year before.

The biggest change from '08 to '09 has clearly been with the offense, and more specifically the passing offense. The 'Canes have gone from averaging less than 200 yards passing per game in 2008, good for 77th nationally, to eighth in the country on the strength of emerging quarterback Jacory Harris' 328 yards per game. But anyone who's watched Miami play isn't just struck only by the yards: It's the way they get them. This isn't some Texas Tech team that dinks and dunks it down the field; Harris is out there throwing strikes downfield, behind the secondary, on a consistent basis. And the stats bear this out. In '08, the Canes ranked 86th in yards per pass attempt; this year, they are ranked first, with an average gain of more 11 yards every time Harris drops back to pass.

Much of the credit for this turnaround has been deservedly heaped on new offensive coordinator Mark Whipple, a man who, much like the original Mr. Whipple, has blasted into the limelight at lightening speed. (During the Georgia Tech game, the announcers mentioned more than once that Whipple might very well be gone after this season to take a high-profile head coaching job elsewhere.) Indeed, after two games the wisdom of the Whipple hire has the smell of inevitability: Why of course this NFL-bred guru could come in and work his magic with the amateurs. But Whipple's career path has hardly pointed inexorably to this moment: He won a I-AA national championship as head coach at UMass in 1998, but left in 2003; he later surfaced as quarterback's coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers, where Bill Cowher reportedly "loved" him, but Mike Tomlin was not as impressed, and he fired Whipple shortly after taking over, citing Ben Roethlisberger's "regression." Whipple was hired by Andy Reid in Philadelphia to the strangely vague title of "offensive assistant coach" (presumably Whipple was insurance if Reid's offensive coordinator left). So rather than being inevitable, maybe Shannon's hire was inspired.

Shooting to kill. But there is no doubting Whipple's brains, and whatever his pedigree, he knows how to put players in position to score. And what he's done for Jacory Harris -- a player with whom he's quickly developed a very good relationship -- has been impressive. And though Harris, who went undefeated at Northwestern high school running a spread offense, is a focused, cool-as-ice kid (on the field, at least), he's still a young signal caller, and Whipple has tried very hard to give him favorable situations.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Texas-Texas Tech showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

Without Graham Harrell or Michael Crabtree, the common assumption is that the Texas defense will be able to use its superior athleticism to wear the high-flying Red Raiders into submission. But that ignores Mike Leach's history of success against the 'Horns defense -- consider that last year's 39 point burst in the most dramatic victory of the season was actually down from the 43 Tech scored in 2007 in a losing effort. As far back as 2002, when the Leach program was just setting sail, Kliff Kingsbury threw for 470 yards in a 43-38 Tech upset in Lubbock; Tech put up 40 again the following year in a 43-40 nailbiter in Austin. With the exception of 2004-05, Mack Brown's best teams at UT, Leach's offense has routinely put up a handful of touchdowns and gobs of yards the 'Horns.

Saturday, however, will be defensive coordinator/head coach-in-waiting Will Muschamp's second chance at slowing down Texas Tech's aerial attack, and the home crowd in Austin greatly increases his chances. Last year, it seemed like Muschamp went into Lubbock thinking Texas Tech was like most pass-first teams, and any differences were only in degree, rather than in kind: He had the better athletes (with the exception of Crabtree), and he could put pressure on Harrell, play games with the line and the coverages, and more or less pound the offense into submission with those athletes. But, in literally every way imaginable, Leach is sui generis. His line was able to absorb the pass rush that had terrorized Sam Bradford and Chase Daniel just weeks before, and his quarterback easily picked the defense apart early on. It was clear that Texas was out of sync.

Over the course of the game the 'Horns defense settled -- one has the feeling that, although the finish was thrilling, if the two teams had played a few more quarters Texas might have cruised to a victory after having fallen behind so early. Muschamp is an excellent schemer in his own right, and despite his reputation as an aggressive fire-breather is unlikely to be seduced by the thrill of the easy blitz. Leach's teams have to be understood on their own terms, and because they execute so well, the defense's priority is less about just stunts and blitzes as it is with just flat executing.

Keepin 'em honest. As documented here last year, one of the more surprising keys to Texas Tech's victory was its unusually solid effort on the ground against the 'Horns defense; all things considered, it was probably the best rushing effort at Tech since Leach arrived nine years ago.

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Post-facto Xs and Os from Saturday's Ohio State-USC showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

There's no sugar-coating this: Jim Tressel and his staff were outcoached against Southern Cal and Pete Carroll, . Again. Particularly on offense, Ohio State's gameplan against the Trojans was utter rubbish, and it failed to meet the number one requirement of every gameplan: put your players in position to succeed.

When I watched the game live, I was struck by what I considered poor playcalling and mediocre execution. But after watching the game again in detail, going over replays and studying all the players, I'm convinced the situation in Columbus is nearly hopeless. For all the talk of Tressel's buttoned-down, conservative approach, and how his teams don't make mistakes, the most basic and fundamental errors permeated throughout Ohio State's offensive plan like cancer in its late stages, and the only conclusion I could draw from this game is that Tressel -- whatever he may be as a motivator, a recruiter, a teacher of technique or as a disciplinarian -- is not up to the challenge of leading his team past others that equal his in talent. He is not good enough of a tactician to win against the national elite who, unlike practically everyone he schemes against in his conference, have the talent to match Ohio State's, and those are the only games where coaching really matters. With his facilities, talent, and resources, winning the Big Ten is not the test.

Look at the numbers. Ohio State's failure to beat a quality opponent since defeating Michigan to punch a ticket to the national championship game in 2006, Tressel's teams have been outclassed, outsmarted, outplayed and outprepared in every big game they've played.

Yet the saddest part about the Buckeyes' 18-15 loss to the Trojans is that, for the first time in the last few tries against similar opponents, the Buckeyes were not outplayed. That's what made Saturday night's performance almost disgusting: OSU's players played a hard, fast and determined game; the crowd in Columbus seemed nothing short of unreal; and the pomp and majesty of playing there more than drowned out USC's exotic traveling road show, known to transform opposing stadiums into home venues. No, this loss falls squarely on the coaching staff. And the fissures run deep.

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Xs and Os on Saturday's Michigan-Notre Dame showdown from the proprietor of the essential Smart Football.

Jimmy Clausen has become the great quarterback he was recruited to be. Over his last two games the new-edition blonde bomber has thrown for 716 yards and nine touchdowns on just 44 attempts (16.3 yards per attempt), and his completion percentage is an astouding 84.1 percent. Yes, Clausen is at the peak of his game, and Notre Dame is back.

So say the Irish faithful, anyway. Before those blistering performances against the famed steel curtain-esque defenses of Hawai'i and Nevada, though, Clausen had a horrific day against Southern Cal, managing only 41 yards (1.9 yards per attempt) and throwing two picks. And before that? Clausen played a so-so game against lame-duck Syracuse in a humiliating upset. The Irish are still 1-14 the last two years against teams that finished .500 or better, and Clausen has been mostly terrible in those games. Assuming Michigan really is much closer to the team that rocked Western Michigan in last week's opener than to the one that fell on its face on a weekly basis last year -- and never more so than a six-turnover catastrophe in South Bend -- Saturday is a classic "Prove It" game for both.

A Deathbacker Never Forgets, Either. There was much speculation coming into the year about new defensive coordinator Greg Robinson's intentions with the Wolverine defense, where position names were given titles like "deathbacker" and "spinner," and alternating reports of a 4-3 or a 3-4 defense accumulated daily. One game in, we can confidently say what Michigan is running: A 4-3 under scheme with 3-4 personnel. (Got that?) What that means is that Robinson, who has coached with Pete Carroll, runs the same front that Carroll does at USC, except that he's replaced the weakside defensive end with a "hybrid" linebacker/defensive end who gives the defense more versatility against spread offenses.

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