Weeks out from the start of the 2017 college football season, UNLV coach Tony Sanchez had a problem. His team’s Week 1 opponent, the Howard Bison out of the MEAC conference, had a brand new coaching staff, which always makes preparation for a season opener tricky.
Complicating matters further, Howard’s new staff, led by former Virginia coach Mike London, included a 30-year-old offensive coordinator who had never called plays at the college level. In fact, it had been three years since Brennan Marion had last called plays at any level, and that was at Waynesboro Area High School, located in rural central Pennsylvania near the Maryland border and hardly known as a football powerhouse.
Sanchez, though, sounded like a man who thought he had it figured out.
“We’re watching a lot of film from previous places (Howard’s staff has) been,” Sanchez told the Review-Journal days before the game. “You’ve got to prepare for different things.”
Sanchez probably did feel like he was doing his due diligence, but he also knew that it wouldn’t matter too much: No matter how unique the offense might be, it wasn’t going to make up for the severe difference in talent. After all, Howard had won only three games over the past two seasons and was coming into the game as a 45-point underdog. X’s and O’s matter only so much when the gap between the Jimmys and Joes is so pronounced.
Besides, football is football. There are only so many ways you can deploy those 11 players. Whatever Marion’s offense had planned, the UNLV defensive staff had surely seen it before and had answers for it in their mental Rolodexes.
“We do enough offensively [in practice],” Sanchez said. “We show our defense a bunch of looks.”
I don’t have footage of UNLV’s practices that week, but I feel confident saying that the coaching staff had not prepped the defense for what Marion would throw at it on that Saturday night. Nobody outside of Marion’s fairly small circle at that point could have expected what happened next: a completely unorthodox offense marrying the tenets of old-school triple-option run games with modern-day spread concepts flummoxed UNLV all night — and revealed to a broader audience a new offensive scheme, the GoGo, that has now filtered throughout the sport, finally reaching the NFL level late last season and in Week 1 this year.
Its architect — who is, unlike so many coaches dubbed offensive innovatiors, a young black man — remains fairly unknown: Brennan is in his first year as the wide receiver coach at Hawaii, which won’t play football this season due to the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s growing belief that offense he full unveiled three years ago is the next significant iteration in ever-more complex offensive schemes meant to take advantage of versatile QBs.
That uniqueness became apparent on Howard’s first offensive snap of the game against UNLV. The Bison came out in a shotgun formation. That was the only normal thing about it. Two running backs lined up to the left of quarterback Caylin Newton. The formation was unbalanced with no eligible receiver aligned to the right side of the offensive line. Even the line splits were wonky. The left side was tightly aligned while the right side was a little more spread out.
At first glance, this may look like your typical college spread set, with three receivers stretching the defense horizontally. That’s certainly how UNLV defended it, leaving only one linebacker in the box and going with a generic quarters look, which has become the most popular answer for defenses trying to slow down modern college offenses.
While Marion’s offense looks modern above the surface, those two backs give it old-school roots. With two backs in the backfield and a mobile quarterback, Marion says, “you can run every run play that’s ever been created in football.” Throw in some unbalanced formations and a dash of tempo, and the defense has a lot on its plate.
“Nobody else runs what we run, so when you’re going against a team, you’re trying to figure out how they’re going to play you,” Marion told me. “And the majority of their answers are, ‘Stop the run first.’ With what we do, the defense will always have to sell out to stop the run. I always know a team is going to do that. And if they don’t…”
Well, if they don’t, you get what happened to UNLV.
“When we played UNLV, they didn’t adjust to us having three guys in the backfield who could run the ball effectively,” Marion said. “They stayed in a two-high shell — like Cover 2 and Cover 4 — and we’re running triple-option right at them, and we ran for like 350 yards.”
On the fifth play of the game, Howard lined up with its three-headed backfield. The UNLV defense appears to have all of the gaps covered, but it’s failed to account for the extra gap that could be created by the second back. So when Newton pulled the ball on a zone-read, he had three blockers to take on the three defenders between him and the end zone.
It would have been far easier to deal with the odd formation if Howard was limited to only a few run concepts, as most college offenses that run out of the gun are. But with those two backs out there and a run threat at quarterback, that was not the case. While UNLV saw a fair share of outside zone and triple option, it also had to deal with tosses…
And this innovative counter concept with the quarterback reading a play-side defender rather than a backside defender, which is usually the case on counter read plays…
Marion even showed them some of the old Notre Dame “Box” offense from the first half the 20th century…
UNLV never really adjusted to the crowded backfield sets, sticking in that quarters shell all game. Howard scored 43 points and racked up 449 yards of total offense (309 on the ground) in a 43-40 win that made national headlines. The fact that the team had been quarterbacked by Cam Newton’s younger brother and had pulled off the biggest upset in the history of college football betting overshadowed how it had been done. At least nationally. But locally, people wanted to know what to call this unique offense.
Marion wanted to give it a name influenced by D.C. culture but had only been to the city once or twice as a kid. So he asked a family friend living in one of the city’s suburbs for some ideas.
“She said it’s the ‘GoGo’ culture. I was living on Florida Ave. right by Howard and they would play that Chuck Brown GoGo, so I was hearing it a lot,” Marion said. “And at practice one day I was just like ‘This is that GoGo stuff, we’re going to call it the GoGo offense’ and the players loved it. Then we beat UNLV and it just took off. ”
The name was new, but Marion had been putting the offense together well before he got to Florida Ave. In fact, the foundation for the GoGo offense was laid before he ever put on the headset.
****
Marion’s path to stardom as a Division I athlete was not a normal one. He didn’t play a full season of high school football until his senior year at Greensburg Salem High School, outside of Pittsburgh. The D1 offers weren’t pouring in, obviously, so Marion took the JuCo route, starting at Foothill College in the Bay Area. It didn’t go well — Marion was being used as blocking back — so he moved onto nearby De Anza College.
While things drastically improved on the field, they weren’t so great off of it. Marion didn’t have a place to stay, so he was sleeping in cars and at the team facility — anything to keep the Division 1 dream alive, he said. On the field, he thrived. He led all California junior college players with 1,196 receiving yards and 16 touchdowns in 2006. That production caught the eye of Tulsa head coach Todd Graham, who offered Marion a scholarship to play under an offensive coordinator named Gus Malzahn. You may have heard of him.
Malzahn’s offenses at Tulsa put up video-game numbers. It led the nation in total offense in 2007 and ’08 and Marion was the big-play threat. In his first season at Tulsa, he scored 11 touchdowns and racked up 1,244 yards on just 39 receptions, setting an FBS record by averaging 31.9 per catch. He made two all-conference teams at Tulsa but he tore his ACL on the final play of the Conference-USA title game, tanking his draft stock. Unable to participate at the NFL Scouting Combine, Marion went undrafted before signing on with the Dolphins as a free agent.
Marion spent all of what would have been his rookie season recovering from his injury. And Year 2 was even worse. In training camp, he tore up his knee again and was placed on Injured Reserve. With nothing else to do and a mind that needed occupying, Marion started helping out at James Logan High School back in the Bay Area. The head coach, a disciple of Chris Ault who already had a Pistol run game installed, wanted some help installing Malzahn’s pass game. Marion was an ideal offensive coordinator … and quarterback coach … and receiver coach.
Marion had a lot of responsibilities, but calling the offense wasn’t so hard.
“We had two guys drafted in baseball, four or five guys played Division I and one ran in the Olympics. We had a ton of talent, so everything worked. It wasn’t a scheme thing. Our players were just better than everybody else … We were mercy rule-ing teams. Scoring 60 points a game.”
Marion was smart enough to realize that it wasn’t his coaching prowess leading to those results and that things wouldn’t always be so easy. If he was going to commit to coaching, he’d have come up with his own offense.
But Marion was not ready to give up on his playing days just yet. He landed with the Montreal Alouettes of the CFL. Just two days into camp, Marion tore his ACL … again.
He was 22 and his dreams of a pro career had been dashed by four total ACL tears (three in one knee). But there was still coaching. Marion went back to California and got a job at the Harker School, where he was coaching the sons of billionaires. Here’s the one thing about billionaires, according to Marion: They’re not overly concerned with the performance of their kid’s high school football team, so expectations were almost nonexistent.
“We had the owner of the Oakland Athletics’ kid. Like the guy who started putting 3G chips in phones — his son. We had the son of an Indian prince. I was coaching super wealthy kids who had never played football,” Marion said.
“That’s when I started building my own scheme. When you have a lack of resources, that’s when the creativity comes. I started messing with this stuff because I was like nobody cares what they’re doing out there. Their parents didn’t have expectations of these kids being good football players.”
So what do you do when you’re looking to build something new in football? Conventional thinking might tell you to look around the current landscape of the sport and study the most successful offenses. Marion is anything but conventional, though, and was already steeped in Malzahn’s run-centric spread. So he looked to the past, studying the Veer and other old-school offenses that, to him, “made it through the test of time.” And he kept coming back to the triple-option.
“It doesn’t matter where their talent level is at,” Marion says. “Georgia Tech and Navy are going to win eight games every year.”
Ask any defensive coordinator and they’ll tell you the same thing: Preparing for any triple-option scheme is a pain in the ass. With all those bodies in the backfield moving in different directions, messing with a defender’s keys, great discipline is a requirement if you don’t want to give up 300 yards on the ground. That’s what Marion wanted in his offense, but there was one feature of those offenses that didn’t sit right with him.
“I didn’t want to be under center,” he said. “I didn’t want to be boring.”
As Marion moved on from Harker, he continued to build his offense. At St. Patrick-St. Vincent High School in Vallejo, California, he focused on the passing game. It wasn’t until he moved back to Pennsylvania that he went “wholesale” on the running game that eventually gave the GoGo its distinct look.
Marion was hired by Waynesboro, which was playing at the highest level of Pennsylvania high school football. There was just one issue: Waynesboro wasn’t very good.
“When I got to Waynesboro, they had no expectations,” Marion said. “They just wanted us to win one game. The year before I got the job they went like 0-10 and hadn’t had a winning season in 20 years. The season before I got there, they had scored fewer than 10 touchdowns.”
Once again, Marion had the freedom to get creative. That’s when he really dove into those old-school offenses. He said he got ahold of Navy film from back in the Roger Staubach era and wore it out. Marion quickly realized the scheme could be rebooted with a modern aesthetic.
“I just became obsessed with [that offense],” he said. “And I was just like ‘Man, you can still do all your normal pass concepts and run triple-option and live in that world.’ ”
Before his first season at Waynesboro, Marion took his team to a 7-on-7 camp at the University of Virginia. It was his first chance to show off this offense he had been building and it caught the eye of one observer — Virginia’s head coach at the time.
“We’re beating teams and we were running the offense like we would in a game. We weren’t running it like these 7-on-7 teams do where they’re doing these plays just for 7-on-7. We were running our actual offense — you know, faking the triple option and throwing it deep, going up-tempo and all that stuff. And Coach London told me ‘You’re a hell of a coach. I’m going to hire you one day.’ ”
That day would eventually would come, but Marion had to show that his offense would work outside of the 7-on-7 world. And with him taking over one of the worst teams in one of Pennsylvania’s better leagues, that scheme would have to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
It did. Waynesboro averaged 36.6 points and racked up over 500 yards per game. The team ended the two-decade playoff drought by winning a share of the league title. And it did it with an offense that looked a lot like what we’d see at Howard and, eventually, William & Mary.
The success had validated everything Marion was doing. There was something to this crazy scheme he had put together.
“I thought, when I get a chance in college, this is the offense I’m going to run,” he said.
Now Marion was a league-winning head coach whose star was on the rise. So what do you do now? Sticking around and building on that success is the obvious answer, but Marion had his sights set higher than high school football and he knew he’d have to continue challenging himself in new situations. So after that wildly successful season at Waynesboro, Marion accepted a graduate assistant position at Arizona State to work under his college coach Todd Graham.
He felt like it was a risk: In an instant, he went from the top of a coaching staff to the bottom of another. But being on that staff, and working under offensive coordinator Mike Norvell, now Florida State’s head coach, allowed Marion to fine-tune his offense. He credits Norvell with helping him with the communication aspects of his scheme. That may not seem like a huge deal, but when you’re playing with tempo, it can make or break an offense.
By the time Marion left Tempe, his Frankenstein offense had almost been fully formed. He had taken what he had learned throughout his career in football and put it all together to form a truly unique scheme.
“People say your offense is a spread offense,” Marion said. “It’s not even close to the spread in my mind. It’s a pro-style, triple-option offense. That’s what we’re trying to do. A true West Coast passing game, a triple-option run game and the up-tempo principles of Coach Malzahn.”
It wouldn’t be too long before he’d spring it on the college football world. Marion coached running backs at Oklahoma Baptist for a year before Mike London was hired to turn around the Howard football program. He needed an offensive coordinator. Why not that young coach who had impressed him at the 7-on-7 camp?
Hiring a 20-something offensive coordinator with no play-calling experience at the college level was a bold move, sure, but nobody was questioning it after that first game in Vegas.
****
That first Howard team would average nearly 30 points a game and win seven games. After two years in D.C., London left for the Willam & Mary job and brought Marion along with him to help turnaround one of the worst offenses in all of college football.
With a talent deficiency at the receiver position, Marion’s creativity would be tested once again. He leaned more on run-pass options as a substitute for a quick passing game. And with the reputation of the GoGo growing across the country, more window dressing was needed to prevent defenses from keying in on certain schemes.
“We present different pictures but run the same play. Like Power is Power, Counter is Counter,” he said, meaning that the play designs aren’t necessarily new, they’re just being run from formations that give defenses more complicated assignments because of how many different players might carry the ball. “It’s just limitless from the standpoint of having three guys in the backfield, including the quarterback, who could touch the ball.”
Marion is not exaggerating when he uses the word “limitless.” I’d throw the word “unconventional” in there, as well. At William & Mary, Marion got weird.
Tight ends lined up perpendicular to the line of scrimmage?
Sure.
A train of wide receivers attached to the offensive line?
Why not.
Putting all five eligible receivers to one of the side of the formation?
If it works, it works.
“I think it’s pretty cool that Coach London gave me that freedom,” Marion said. “He didn’t ask me what plays I was calling. He just let me do my deal and allowed me to put some of this stuff into college football and get people’s minds thinking. Everybody lines up in 11 personnel and runs split zone and it’s like, try something different, man.”
Marion isn’t just throwing stuff against the wall and hoping it sticks. There’s a method to all of this schematic madness. The more thinking a defender has to do, the slower he’ll react.
“You have two guys running across the formation and then you have a running back running right at you and you’re just in paralysis. You’re frozen and then the quarterback can come out the back door if he gets the right read. It’s just a different way to capture the eyes of the defense.”
Whatever Marion’s doing is working. Everywhere he goes, the offense gets better. That was certainly the case last season at William & Mary.
Here’s how you know you’re doing something right: When the best offensive minds in the sport start to steal your stuff. Lincoln Riley has developed a GoGo package of his own at Oklahoma.
Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury is also an admirer. Here’s a run against the Bucs that’s straight out of the GoGo playbook.
Kenyan Drake’s long touchdown run in Seattle was another.
“Our offensive line coach [at Hawaii] worked with the Cardinals last year,” Marion told me, “and he said Kliff pulled up a couple of our plays and was like, ‘We’re running this this week.’ That is pretty cool.”
Marion parlayed his success at William & Mary into a job at Hawaii, where he’ll work under Todd Graham once again. In terms of responsibility, it’s a step back, as he’ll be coaching receivers rather than calling plays, but Marion sees it as a necessary step in his coaching journey.
“I had to check a box. I’ve had all these interviews over the last two or three years since we took off at Howard. At first when I was at Howard, it was like, ‘Oh you’re at an HBCU.’ Then when I was at William & Mary, it was ‘Oh, you haven’t been an FBS position coach yet.’ There are just boxes you need to check off like anything when you’re young. They want you to earn your stripes.”
Marion has taken the scenic route to major college football — and maybe if he looked more like Riley, Kingsbury and other young coaches who were fast-tracked to major head coaching jobs (read: White), it would have happened sooner for him — but some good has come out of it.
“Back in the day, when a lot of these concepts were created, they weren’t afraid of losing their jobs. There wasn’t millions of dollars on the line. And I got a chance to do that at some schools where there weren’t really expectations. I had a chance to create something
“You might be pigeonholed or can’t break because you’re doing nothing that makes you different from the next person. And I tell minority coaches all the time, if I’m hiring and I’ve been in football for 30, 40 years, I’m not hiring anybody new if they’re just going to copy my system and not bring anything new to the table … There aren’t really a lot of creative high-level college and NFL coaches because you don’t really get a chance to do that. When you go through the road less traveled, you get a chance to really come up with different things and create something of your own.”
Unfortunately, the pandemic means that, for the time being, Marion’s coaching journey is on a bit of a pause. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be seeing the GoGo this season. Austin Peay came out in a GoGo-inspired look on the very first play of the college football season and scored a touchdown…
Kingsbury was back it again on Sunday…
And even Bill Belichick’s Patriots seem to have jumped on the bandwagon…
Marion may have to wait a bit longer before he gets to run the offense with a team of his own, but with endorsements like that, it’s just a matter of time.
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