Chris Klieman won four national championships in five seasons at North Dakota State, bludgeoning teams with a run-heavy offense predicated on a bruising line and a deep stable of talented running backs.
Old-school football. The kind he grew up watching in Waterloo, Iowa.
But when Klieman was hired to replace Hall of Fame coach Bill Snyder at Kansas State after the 2018 season, two closely tied questions followed him: Could he replicate the tremendous success he had at the Football Championship Subdivision level in the Big 12? And could he do it relying on the same seemingly bygone offensive system he ran with the Bison?
Turns out the answer to both was yes.
The Wildcats leaned on Deuce Vaughn, who was eighth nationally in rushing and is now with the Dallas Cowboys, to win the conference championship last season, upending eventual College Football Playoff participant TCU in the title game. As a team, they joined Oklahoma in finishing in the top 15 nationally in yards-per-game on the ground.
“We have to run the football,” Klieman said by way of explanation. “If we struggle, it’s because we can’t run the football.”
Sounds simple, but that line of thought represents a tremendous shift from the days when the Big 12 was dominated by the Air Raid, that high-flying offensive system arguably perfected by the late Mike Leach at Texas Tech.
In 2014, seven of the top 13 teams nationally in total offense had branches tracing back to the coaching tree of key Air Raid architect Hal Mumme. By the following year, more than half of the Big 12 was running some version of the Air Raid, and three of the top eight nationally in passing offense came from the landlocked conference.
So what has changed? Why have teams that once embraced no huddles and thin playbooks, wide offensive line splits and running backs who rarely ran shifted toward — at minimum — balanced offenses and, in some cases, ground-based attacks?
Start with the turnover in the coaching ranks.
Many of the Air Raid’s staunchest advocates have moved on — think then-Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury, who headed for the NFL, or former Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley, who is now at USC. In their place came coaches like the Red Raiders’ Joey McGuire, who grew up embracing the ground-and-pound run game, and the Sooners’ Brent Venables, whose offensive coordinator Jeff Lebby is an old line and running backs coach.
Even at TCU, where coach Sonny Dykes learned the nuances of the Air Raid from Leach during their days at Texas Tech, there is an emphasis on running the ball. That is a big reason why Dykes hired Kendal Briles to run his offense this season.
“I think we come from the same place as far as our football background in a lot of ways,” Dykes said. “He wants to run the ball; he wants to be a physical offense that runs the football. And that’s what I want to be as well.”
It worked last season. Kendre Miller ran for nearly 1,400 yards as the Horned Frogs advanced to the national title game.
“We saw the value in having a tough, physical, hard-nosed run game,” Dykes said.
