Berry Tramel: New OSU coordinators like to talk football and that's refreshing
- Mar 15, 2025 Updated Mar 16, 2025
Like this. On a pocket passer or mobile quarterback: “If you have a pocket guy, you gotta have that one receiver that can make it happen, like with (Brandon) Weeden and Justin Blackmon."
Interesting. Never thought about it that way.
Or this. “You gotta find plays that are all-purpose, or you’re just going to sit there and check every snap. So find all-purpose plays that you can get up there and just snap the thing and get on about your business. And sometimes it’s not going to be the perfect play. If you sit there and play chess with these guys now, man, it’s hard to win.”
Really? I didn’t know to what extent defenses were countering offensive audibles.
Then it hit me. The guy who talked just before Meacham, new OSU defensive coordinator Todd Grantham, did the same thing. Just talked football. How refreshing.
These days, coaches like to talk football only to each other, making an occasional exception for players.
Wasn’t always like that. Coaches haven’t always treated football strategy like state secrets. Anybody remember Bud Wilkinson’s “little men” from his landmark television show? Or Pat Jones analyzing a game, without filter?
The new generation of coaches talks in generalities. In abstracts. If they talk at all.
Mike Gundy last year joined the chorus of coaches who are the lone voices in their programs. Coordinators and assistant coaches weren’t allowed to do interviews. Some let the playcallers talk immediately after games, but that’s it.
We take what we can get. But man, it would be a shame to mute Meacham and Grantham. They are not of the new generation.
Grantham is 58. He was on Frank Beamer’s fourth Virginia Tech staff; Beamer coached the Hokies for 29 years and has been 10 years retired. Meacham is 60. He’s old enough to have played for Jimmy Johnson at OSU, back in 1983.
Grantham and Meacham don’t know any better than to just talk football with people who don’t understand much of it anyway. Here’s a sampling of what we got from Gundy’s new coordinators.
Grantham, describing his scheme: “No. 1, you want to keep it simple … you don’t want people to run the ball. And at the end of the day, how do you affect the quarterback and make him play bad? I mean, if the quarterback doesn’t play very good, your chances of winning are not very good. So if we can eliminate the run, force him to throw it, and then when you get into, OK, making the quarterback play bad, what is that? Well, obviously, pressure.”
Make the quarterback play bad. That’s fantastic. That’s exactly the unstated goal of a defense. Maybe not in 1979. But in 2025, that’s the name of the game. Only it goes unnamed, until Grantham brought it up.
“You can pressure,” Grantham said, going into a hypothetical gameplan. “It can be post-snap disguise. Meaning, hey, we’re showing one thing, and at the snap of the ball, it’s going to be something else. Cause if you look at the history throughout my career, we’ve always been very high in turnovers, and we’ve been high in interceptions. And that reason is, one, making them one-dimensional.
“But then also trying to give the quarterback a picture, then that picture tells him where to throw the ball, then we want to take that picture away and we want to get to where the ball’s going to be thrown.”
Already we’ve learned a little about defense in general and Grantham’s OSU aspirations. Nothing Oregon or Baylor or Arizona can use in early-season games, before opponents have full intel on a new coordinator. But interesting viewpoints about the sport.
And the same when Meacham started freewheeling about offense.
“It’s not long ago, guys kind of lined up and showed you what they were going to play,” Meacham said of defenses in the Big 12, a league in which he’s coached 19 of the last 20 seasons. “Nowadays it’s a total disguise. Every snap’s a disguise.
“You’re going to see uneven safeties. That usually meant rotation that direction. Well now, they’ll show this uneven and go the other way. They’ll show a blitz one side, bring it to the other … lot of different rotational stuff. You got all the stuff that Iowa State brought to the table, with the three-safety business with the robbers and all that. It’s just super multiple.”
There’s some insight into the Iowa State defensive success. The Cyclones, under coordinator Jon Heacock, have become the Big 12 blueprint in recent years. In 2023, Gundy even hired a coordinator, Bryan Nardo, out of Division II Gannon University, because of Nardo’s familiarity with the Heacock defense.
Meacham is the first coach that I know of to mention something other than the Cyclones’ alignment. Who knew that it was important how ISU gets to the alignment?
More Meacham: “Well, you want big and fast, because if you miss on a big, fast guy, then hey, you missed on a big, fast guy,. If you miss on a slow, small guy, it makes it feel not as fun. The bottom line is you want bigger, faster, twitchier, and at the same time, you want guys that are smart, can learn football and enjoy the process. The stuff that’s not measurable is what we have to do a good job of. Everybody can see measurables and 40s and how far they can jump and all that business. It’s what’s on the inside, that’s what we have to decide.
“And what kind of kid, what’s his background, how does he learn, can he learn? And ultimately in today’s game with all the transitioning, you want guys that can think and enjoy the process as much as anything. If you’ve got a big, fast guy that can’t learn, it’s 3-2-1, we’re playing a game. Well that won’t do anyone any good.”
Nothing terribly groundbreaking there, other than honest football talk. But still, it’s fun to hear the actual list of priorities.
And more Grantham: “College football is actually harder than NFL football, schematically. Reason I say that is one, in college football, tempo’s tempo. In pro ball, we’d get our advance scout and they’d say, ‘they go fast.’ I’m like, ‘That’s not fast. That’s not fast.’ So there is a difference. It’s all in what your perception is of what fast is. So you have that.
“The next thing is, there are more formations in college, because you can create unbalanced formations, with all the receivers on the same side (because of wider hashmarks). So you have to adjust to that.
Then the third element is the quarterback’s ability to run the ball and create 11-on-11. Now, in pro football, you obviously got the quarterback, you got skill, the passing game. That stuff’s more advanced. But as far as structure of formations, tempo, handling the truly 11 on 11 plays, you get challenged in college football more.”
College schemes more difficult than the National Football League. Who knew?
