Like a lot of things in college football, Bill Yeoman’s creation and usage of the veer option offense was the result of a fear of being fired. After an 11-18-1 start at Houston after being hired in 1962, and a 1-4 start to the 1965 campaign that had the young head coach firmly on the hot seat, Yeoman decided to try out something he had drawn up in the offseason.
"I'd drawn it on paper and practiced it in the spring of 1965," Yeoman told Sports Illustrated in 1973. "But I didn't have the guts to go to it until midseason when it looked as if we were all about to be fired."
Hilariously enough, an experience that helped create the offense was Houston’s truly dreadful offensive line. The Cougars were struggling to run a halfback dive in practice, so a frustrated Yeoman gave some advice to his line.
“Since you can’t block, just get out of the way.”
As the story goes, they did, the next play went for 15 yards, and Yeoman had a new obsession that he would eventually flesh out in the spring of 1965.
Once he made the switch, there was no looking back. Houston went 3-1-1 to end the season, saving Yeoman’s job and kicking off a dominant 21-year run that saw the Cougars become one of the best teams in the loaded Southwest Conference through the 70s. Defenses eventually adjusted into the 80s, ending Yeoman’s rein, but his legacy prevails regardless.
Before that adjustment, however, you’d be hard pressed to find a team that did more with less talent in the late 60s and through the 70s than Houston did under Yeoman’s new ground-and-pound, read-based option.
The latter of those two is what really defined Yeoman’s option, because the veer served as the first time that offenses realized that multiple defenders could be isolated and read on a single play, freeing up two additional blockers while leaving both defenders unaccounted for. Older option attacks usually consisted of a single read, but Yeoman’s added a second, hence the term “triple option” that was often used to describe the veer.
This all sounds very simple now given the adoption of triple option concepts into essentially all modern offenses, but at the time it was revolutionary.
It shows in the results. Houston’s offense jumped from 15.9 points per game in 1965 to 33.5 in 1966, and then just kept getting better. The Cougars put up an unmatched 42.5 in 1968, and 38.4 a year later. Even as the points stabilized closer to 30 per game through the 70s, Houston could still run on just about anybody in the country.
As it turns out, the ability to create a two-blocker advantage on almost every single play changed the game for Houston. Defenses had yet to truly understand how to adapt to the option (the key, in general, is to get better and bigger athletes), and Yeoman was able to put years of option excellence on tape that’s still influencing the way the option is run today.
While the early years produced greater point totals, the best years of the Houston option arguably came later down the road, near the end of the 70s, as Yeoman really started to master the minutiae of his offense. The late-stage Yeoman teams are more precise and closer to the original vision of the offense (and there’s more available tape of them), so that’s what we’ll be focusing on in this film study.
Yeoman’s offense – even as the years passed by – was always pretty simple, as most option attacks are. He had several base looks that varied in both gap assignments for the ball carrier and blocking schemes up front, with each base look adjusting for defensive front as well.
This 13 Veer play from Yeoman’s playbook is a good example. There aren’t a ton of plays in the playbook, but each one has adjustments for just about any defense that Houston would face off against. Its partner, 17 Veer, just goes to the opposite side of the field.
At the core, however, all option plays relied on the same basic concept of isolating a defensive lineman, usually an end, for the first read, and then attacking a linebacker for the second read. In 13 Veer, the play side linebacker and end are ignored, so that the tight end can get down the field to block a safety or the back side linebacker.
This isn’t an exact comparison, but this is pretty close to what that looks like in practice. Notre Dame has five men on the line, so Houston isolates the edge player as the read for quarterback Danny Davis. The execution isn’t completely smooth as Davis waits a tick too long to toss, but the blocking is still good enough up front that Emmett King can get to the edge and follow behind his tight end for a decent gain.
On a similar look here, Davis shows off another option, reading that isolated linebacker playing too far in, causing Davis to pull the ball and move to read No. 2, with the outermost edge player again isolated. This time, he plays the halfback, so Davis tucks the ball and does it himself, again following that free tight end.
This, a year later, is 12 Veer (opposite side is 18 Veer), essentially the same as 13 but designed for the halfback to hit the C gap rather than the B (or A) gap, used in the case of a loaded box as Nebraska showed for all of this game. The reads are the same, and Terry Elston runs it well, pulling the ball quickly when he sees the end collapsing in, and never really considering a pitch with the linebacker running straight at his halfback. This is about as well-run as a veer can get.
If that end doesn’t collapse in, the ball goes to the fullback, and can create a little bit of breathing room for the offense against a defense that’s putting too many guys in the middle of the field, a common problem for the option.
There’s also this, which doesn’t seem to actually be in the playbook, though it could be described as a quarterback iso, with Elston following behind his fullback after the read, using him as a lead blocker. There’s a decent chance that this was actually in the playbook by 1979, but chances are equally good that Elston just made this up on the fly.
To round out the basic running game, Houston had 3 Dive and 7 Dive, which sound like exactly what they were: a fullback dive to the strong and weak sides, with no sort of deceptive blocking. No playbook can be genius all the time.
Where things start to get really cool is in the counters and passing section of the playbook. Houston did its best work with a little bit of misdirection, usually in the form of a very basic veer trap counter that looked like this.
The fullback is doing the same thing he usually does, hitting the A gap, though he has a slight footwork modification that’s too niche even for me. Davis starts the play opening to the opposite side of the fullback, before turning to his fullback to fake the handoff (the footwork here is called Whirlybird), freeing up time for two things: 1. letting the halfback sell his fake and 2. giving the pulling guard the time he needs to get around the edge, so that he can take on a linebacker.
Only one player is being read, the outside end, while the guard gets his linebacker and the playside tackle gets downfield to look for a second-level block. The end stays put, so Davis makes the toss to King for a big gain.
That brings us to what is unquestionably the most interesting part of the offense, which is funny, because it’s the part that Houston used the least. While the Cougars were a run-at-all-costs team, they had one hell of a passing attack just waiting to be unleashed, and Yeoman almost stumbled upon the run-pass option in the process.
The passing game was usually done with the counter as a base to move linebackers away from the target, which was almost always a tight end coming off the edge, or a wide receiver on the perimeter. Here, the target is a wideout, running a quick curl against man coverage.
Davis shows off that whirlybird footwork again, but this time, with the defense in to stop the run, he fires off a quick dart for a decent gain. Houston rarely had quarterbacks during this time that were dripping with arm talent, but when the passing plays hit, they hit in a major way.
There was also the occasional deep shot, with a tight end and wideout streaking into the seam off of the fake in the backfield, as Houston was hoping to catch a lazy safety napping. The Cougars do that here, and just like that, the counter play action has an easy touchdown pass for Davis.
In all, it’s a spectacular, monumental playbook and system that Yeoman produced, and frankly, the fact that the man isn’t widely considered a legend in college coaching outside of the state of Texas is a travesty. This is the basis for just about every option play being run right now. Championships and Heisman trophy awards have been won because of what Yeoman built. It’s an offense that, despite some of its kinks and flaws, has stood the tests of time through more than 50 years. In football, that’s immortality.
Up next: Major Harris, and the only truly multiple offense ever fielded.
Graphics by Kristen Lillemoen.
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