Georgia incorporated the pistol set into its offense last season and one thing Aaron Murray said he wants to work on this offseason is his running. Both are good reasons to take a look at this interview with Chris Ault, the father of the pistol (h/t Chase Stuart), about the success San Francisco is having with the pistol this season using Ault’s former quarterback, Colin Caepernick Kaepernick.
Tell me this doesn’t sound like something Bobo could cobble together with existing personnel:
… Everybody thinks the pistol is just a read, but the pistol is a formation. And from that formation, if you’re a power offense, you can run the power. If you’re a counter offense, you can run the counter. It’s not just a read offense. I think the read offers another dimension to it, but it’s really a versatile formation.
Q: How similar is what you did at Nevada to what Chip Kelly is doing at Oregon?
Ault: Chip and those guys, they have the back offset. He’s not behind the quarterback. So their first base play is an outside zone play, a sweep-type action. Whereas our first base play is an inside zone and that sets up the read and the play-action pass off it. Really two different offenses, Chip’s and ours.
Ault believes a little bit of read goes a long way towards helping the play-action, and vice versa.
… I’m not here to tell you that the 49ers should run the read 16, 17 times a game. You can’t do that in the NFL. But I think by running the read play, it’s in your offensive system and you’re going to run it five times, nine times a game, it’s one more thing you’ve got to defend. And then when you throw the play-action pass off it, that’s another thing. So it’s not just one dimension that you’ve got to look at, it’s a couple of things. You see Kaep run that 56-yard touchdown, and you say, great, that’s the read option. And it is great. But I think one of the things that set that up was a couple of the play-action passes out of the pistol.
Gurshall and Murray on the read option three or four times a game. Tantalizing, no?
