In college football, offensive innovation often comes from the teams that don’t have the man power to beat you in traditional ways. The original spread, run and shoot, air raid offenses were developed by guys at small schools. They didn’t have the horses to line up and run the ball straight at their opponents so they had to get creative just to be competitive. The same thing with the no huddle. At first the “big” programs laughed and called it gimmicky. “You’ll tire out your defense. You need to control the clock”. Until those small schools running gimmicky offenses started scoring a ton of points and beating a lot of the traditional powers. We saw what schools like Auburn and Clemson were able to do against all powerful Alabama when they switched tempos. Now most of the top schools run some type of hurry up. Maybe not everyone is lightning fast but most of the best teams are running around 75 plays a game. A team like Wake Forrest rarely had big leads so they were forced to keep their foot to the floor. Same for Lashlee’s SMU squad. They had to run 80+ plays to give themselves a chance to win. LSU also operated at a break neck pace but they often had huge leads so they could slow thing down in the 4th quarter. I mean if you’re already up 30, you don’t need to operate at maximum efficiency on offense anymore. Go out there, kill some time and if you pick up a first down or two, great. Clemson, LSU and Ohio State were all top ten in plays per game and I don’t think any of them had weak defenses.