![]() It was three NFL teams - the Lions, Falcons, and, most successfully, the Oilers - and a number of college programs. The run-and-shoot had its moment in the 1980s and early 1990s. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this insight - it quite literally changed passing offenses forever. If you’re running a curl, you’re running a curl. “Nobody in the NFL allowed their receivers to read coverage. “The concept of reading the coverage, nobody did it,” Jones told CBSSports. One “play” in the run-and-shoot could become, on the fly, the equivalent of 20 or 30 plays in a traditional offense. Some years later, Davis refined Ellison’s insights into a few four-receiver formations and a handful of pass concepts, where each receiver had the freedom to run three, four, five, or sometimes as many as six different adjustments, based on how the defense played. Ellison’s insight was to channel his players’ improvisational instincts into an offense that could be run at any level. The quarterback ran around while his receivers improvised ways to get open. ![]() Instead of huddling and running off-tackle, as his team did, the kids played a free-flowing game. 2 Sometime in the mid-1950s, Ellison stopped to watch a group of kids play backyard football. ![]() The run-and-shoot was developed by Glenn “Tiger” Ellison. ![]() It was an offense he first encountered as a record-breaking quarterback at Portland State while playing for Darrel “Mouse” Davis. Yet Jones’s most important contribution to football will be his association with the run-and-shoot. We were beyond lousy when he arrived & he turned us into champions. What did with the □ program is a miracle. At SMU, he resuscitated a moribund program that had only one winning season in 20 years, and took them to four bowl games in six full seasons. It would be the first of six bowl appearances, including a Sugar Bowl and a 12-1 record in his final campaign. He led a Rainbow Warriors program that had lost 18 games in a row before his arrival to a 9-4 record and a bowl game. A longtime NFL assistant and head coach with the Houston Oilers, Atlanta Falcons, 1 and San Diego Chargers, Jones’s second act was to become one of college football’s best turnaround artists - first with Hawaii and then with SMU. The anticlimactic end to his time at SMU shouldn’t diminish what Jones has accomplished over the course of his career. In 2011, he essentially accepted the job as head coach at Arizona State, only for ASU to back out at the last minute. And Jones’s relationships at SMU had long been tested. Sources within the program had told me that recently Jones hadn’t been much of a presence on the recruiting trail - the lifeblood of any college team. In two games, the Mustangs were outscored 88-6 and outgained 927-341. Jones resigned on Monday, citing “personal issues.” It’s clear something was amiss at SMU. But when that coach is June Jones - and when his resignation means that, for the first time in roughly 30 years, no NFL or major college program will be running the famed run-and-shoot offense - that blip on the radar becomes a historically important football moment. Considering the kind of week we’re having, the news that the head coach of 0-2 SMU had resigned was a minor blip on the radar.
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