Origins of the Houston Veer - Coach Bill Yeoman

" I didnt realize it but for a long time, I didnt know what I wanted to do. I used to labor over the practice schedule for two or three hours and then I finally decided what it was I wanted to do."

"We played Ole Miss at their place my first year. Johnny Vaught and his squad came out of their locker room and we came out of ours. I looked at them and knew darn well that we were never going to compete with them with a conventional offense. Right then and there, I decided we were going to run the option."

"We tried to create an offense that would take advantage of anything you did, but our basic play couldn't be stopped with a balanced defense. We had to find out what you did with your line, linebackers, and secondary to take care of our basic play."

"Now if you gave us a balanced defense, we were going to run our basic play until the world looked level. When you overshifted we were going to fnd out where we could attack it."

"When we prepared for the week, we looked at people. We tried to find somebody we could whip and then that is what presented us our gameplan. We found the guy we thought we could whip and then went ahead. That was out game plan"

" To make a long story short, we ran what was an outside triple option against Florida State in 1962. It was our Wing-T. We'd run a guy across and we'd have two backs left. We'd take a slide step with teh halfback, and he would go to teh inside leg of the tight end. The quarterback would come straight down the line and do the read on the defensive end. Our guy in motion would attack the defensive end from the oustide or slide on through to the safety. So it was really an outside veer. It was a play, not an offense."

"I remember against Penn State in 1964, we didnt have two guys who could make Penn State'e travel squad, but we still scored, I think one or two touchdowns, so I knew that it wasnt all that bad. But again, it was just a play, it wasnt an offense."

"We go out and scrimmage one day, I think it was in the spring, and we are trying to run a power sweep into a tight slot against an eight-man front. Butch Brezina (we had a whole family of Brezina's, five of them) kept coming up field, ruining the double team and screwing up the power sweep. I was standing thereand I told the slot and the end, just make a fake at him on the double team, go downfield and just get out of the way."

" I dont know why we had two backs lined up behind the guards, but we did, and I cant tell you why, but I said, 'Just run the 3 Dive in there." I told the tackle to just block inside. So they made the fake at the tackle, he came way up field, and there was a five-yard hole there."

"We ran that three of four times, the defensive tackle stopped going up field and settled down so we could run our power sweep, which is what I was trying to run. Then we went in and looked at the film and I thought, 'Whoa, we have to think about this a little bit."

"We were playing Florida State that year and they had a great defensive football team. We ran the tight slot, and after a few plays, we realized we were going to have to put somebody on the corner and then somebody on the safety. We read the defensive tackle, but with the slot, we got a little more movement with the defensive tackle outside. We doubled down and put three on two and ran that dive up in there. We had already done the read on the thing against them in 1962, we just hadn't done it inside."

"So we ran it the first time against Florida State and we scored a touchdown and by golly, we tied Florida State. That following spring we put in an offense. We had the inside and outside veer, we had the counter option, and we averaged eight and a half yards every time we snapped the ball that spring."

"We got close to the start of the season and Bum Phillips was on the staff at that time, and he and Chuch Fairbanks and a couple other guys on staff talked me into not running this stuff because you just dont turn two defenders loose on the line of scrimmage when you are running it. If you had fired as many blanks as I had at that time, you would listen to a lot of things you probably shouldnt, so I said okay."

"We junked the offense going into the opener, and we ran the unbalanced line split end and it was the biggest collection of nonsense I have ever seen. So we were cruising along at 1-5. I called the squad together and I apologized to them for doing this but I said I wanted to see if this stuff is going to work."

"So the next week we got a little bit of the offense back in and beat Tennessee-Chattanooga. The next week we played Ole Miss, the week after they had beaten LSU 22-3 at Baton Rouge. They had some real players. We got a major portion of our offense back in that week and beat Ole Miss for the first time ever."

"The next week we got the whole offense back and beat Kentucky and that was the week they received the Cotton Bowl invitation. We beat them 30-19, or something like that, and then we tied Florida State the next week to end the season."

"We went to it completely the next year, 1966, and we won the offensive championship that year and the next two years and thats when I knew it was good. But at the time people didnt know what we were doing and they couldnt believe it worked. I remember Bud Wilkinson cornering me in the Shamrock Hotel in Houston and I had to diagram it for him. It was a different concept but we stayed with it, lived with it, and made a little adjustments as we went along."

"What was nice about the offense was that you could change the block of a tackle, or a guard, just the smallest thing and make a very significant difference in the whole deal."

"But the most important thing, was out kids believed in it 100 percent. They loved to run it, they knew the adjustments. They knew if the defense did this, we did that. They kenw what we had to do for it to be successful. One thing I was really encouraged by was seeing one of our quarterbacks, Ken Bailey, lecturing high school coaches on the triple option when they came in for a visit."

"This is terrible, but we almost wanted to get the ball inside our 10 yard-line so we could put 98 yards up on the board and get to the other endzone and out kids felt that way."

"One thing is, and people dont understand, is that we didnt just run, run, run. We had a receiver who set four NCAA records, and I think he still holds one or two of them. So we threw the ball alot. We would run, run, run until you had enough folks up there to stop it, and then we would throw, throw, throw. So it was a very diverse offense. We felt it was imperative that we be able to throw the ball well so at practice we never threw less than 45 minutes in a two-hour practice."

" The thing that I still think was so great about it is that our kids would talk to each other. When they came to the sideline and said, 'I cant make that block, but I can make this block.' I knew they werent trying to find an easy way out. They were telling me what was going on. I think that allowed us to make really effective adjustments in the course of a game."

"People say on Thursday, well, all the hay is in the barn. Thats a bunch of baloney. The hay is in the barn when the gun goes off at the end of the game. Where you earned your money as a coach is in the adjustments you made during the game. You dont know what the other guy is going to do on defense, so you have to be able to adjust to it."

"Well, we kept doing the same things over and over. Everybody knew what we were doing, they just didnt know when we were going to do it. Our kids could execute because they believed in what they were doing and it was fun."

"I'm sure you all go back at the end of the season and chart your offense like we did. When we charted, almost all the holes would come out even for a season. But from game to game there would be a huge difference. I can still remember one game agaisnt Texas Tech. They had a great big defensive linemen who was really a good football player, but he stunted every time. We ran 34 counters at him. Its boring, but it was worth five or six yards a play."

"You have to find out what will work each game and keep hammering it. If they stop it, then fine, you can go to something else. But you have to make sure that you go ahead and hammer whats going well.