Thursday, October 14, 1999
What's the spread? UC's offense
Bearcats play to strength with wide set
BY MIKE DeCOURCY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The deeper the Cincinnati Bearcats advance into autumn, the longer this football season continues and the thinner their offensive line becomes, the wider their offense grows.
UC has become wed to the spread.
As UAB (2-3, 1-1) will learn at 3:30p.m. Saturday when it visits Nippert Stadium for a Conference USA game, the Bearcats (2-3, 0-1) often flood the field with four and five wide receivers and attack defenses with quick passes.
That wasn't exactly the plan as the season began. Coach Rick Minter expected to make some significant changes to his offensive approach, which was natural as the result of hiring coordinator Jimbo Fisher from Auburn.
But Minter still figured the Bearcats would look more like a basic football team. He talked effusively in the preseason about how nice it would be to have a pass-catching tight end like Ashley Hunt. In the first game, Hunt caught six passes. He didn't have another until last week's loss to Houston, when he injured his collarbone badly enough to miss the next two weeks.
“We'd like to be in regular personnel maybe more than what we are — tight end, two wides, two backs,” Minter said. “But we're just down in numbers and we're going with the strengths we have.
“We've got more wideouts, our offensive line is young, and we try to make it as easy as we can for them in terms of what they have to block. It was a simplification idea; it was a way to equalize our talent.”
Fisher's touch helped produce a 500-yard output against Ohio State and has the UC offense averaging 2.3 touchdowns for every turnover it commits. Last season, the Bearcats gave the ball away more often than they got it past the goal line.
The key reason UC has relied on the spread is that quarterback Deontey Kenner is so efficient operating the attack. Minter views Kenner as the offense's greatest asset, and he has played like it with 58 percent completions, 1,185 yards, eight touchdown passes and a 119.4 efficiency rating.
With such an inexperienced offensive line, UC has been able to lessen the strain on its linemen.
The spread makes it more dangerous for defenses to stack eight or nine players near the line of scrimmage.
“Do you want to block eight guys perfectly every time, or block nine perfectly every time? We're not as big and strong as we need to be,” Minter said. “Someday we might get more back into that — get into running at you, then spreading it — but right now we're just trying to do what our kids can do.”
The Bearcats will have to do it better over the next few weeks to recover the momentum they developed with an upset win over Wisconsin and a competitive loss to Ohio State.
They missed a chance to open the C-USA season with a victory because the offense was not as precise as it had been and not as sharp as Minter hoped, given the open date that followed the Ohio State game.
UC ran for only 74 yards and lost the ball twice on interceptions, including one that set up Houston's game-winning field goal in the final seconds. Freshman wideout LeDaris Vann had six catches for 111 yards, but leading receiver Jason Collins-Baker caught only two for 15 yards.
“I'll give Houston credit for forcing this, but offensively we didn't make the kind of improvement you would have wanted to see from the Ohio State game to the Houston game,” Minter said. “Execution is important.”
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 What's the spread? UC's offense
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