Number of No-Huddle Offenses on the Rise Rich Rodriguez worked on the defensive side of the ball as a player and assistant, so when he became the head coach at Glenville State, his offensive goal was simple: Make it as difficult to defend as possible. Rodriguez knew he wanted to run a spread offense, but with a small quarterback, he opted to make it a run-based system. To make it even tougher to stop, he also decided to run his offense without huddling. Not as a change of pace. All the time. Every play. I thought: What's harder to defend than the two-minute drill? Rodriguez said. So we decided to do the two-minute drill all the time. That was 1990 and Rodriguez is still having success with his get-it-and-go offense at No. 24 Arizona. So are a lot of other teams. Taking the popular spread offense to another level, college football teams across the country have switched to no-huddle attacks to keep defenses off-balance. Urban Meyer has done it in his first season at No. 12 Ohio State, so has Larry Fedora at North Carolina. The Big 12 is already full of no-huddlers and there are plenty of new ones out West, including No. 22 UCLA and both Arizona schools. Kentucky, No. 23 Tennessee, Colorado, Syracuse, Miami, Mississippi, New Hampshire - the list of no-huddle newbies seems to go on and on. "It almost seems like an anomaly these days when someone gets in the huddle," said UCLA coach Jim Mora, who has the Bruins at 2-0 after switching to a no-huddle scheme. You don't see huddles. You see up-tempo, fast-paced offenses. You see a lot of formations and movements, plays that have multiple options. It's fun to watch, tough to defend, I think it makes the game exciting. The tough-to-defend part is why most teams switched. Over the last decade or so, the spread had become a popular choice in college football, the four and five receiver sets out of the shotgun creating gaps in defenses. At its peak, the spread generated prolific numbers as defenses tried to find ways to catch up. But, as is always the case, defenses started figuring it out. One way to combat the spread stoppers was to pick up the pace, play frenetically all the time instead of just in the final two minutes of a half. The nonstop no-huddle gave the defense no time to adjust, leaving coaches unable to make the substitutions they wanted and players to figure out what to do on the fly instead of having 40 seconds to get input from the sideline or think about upcoming assignments. "The defenses figured out ways to play the spread and look at alignments and tendencies and personnel," said Tim Beck, orchestrator of the no-huddle offense Nebraska started using last season. The faster you go, the less likely you can gather all that information and relay it to your players. The faster they go, the more tired they get, too. Unless their offense happens to run no-huddle, most defensive players don't experience the full force of playing nearly nonstop until the game starts, when it's too late. And because the opposing team is playing so quickly, often snapping the ball as soon as the official places it on the field, there often isn't time to get substitutions in, leaving the players on the field gasping for air. Oregon has been the master of going faster, its revved-up offense leaving opposing players so tired they've faked injuries to get a breather.