A long time ago, before his playbook became the size of the New York City White Pages and visions of four-wide receiver sets kept him awake at night, new Gophers offensive coordinator Mike Dunbar once held the title of defensive coordinator.
Strange but true.
The man who eats, sleeps and drinks offense once collected paychecks devising defensive schemes at Central Washington.
"That was a hundred years ago," he said.
Actually it was from 1980 to 1982, but you get the point. Dunbar, 58, has earned a reputation as an offensive brainiac who has built a career around a system predicated on multiple formations and a spread-the-defense approach. And balance. Can't forget the balance part.
If there is anything Dunbar insists people understand about his version of the spread offense, it's that he loves to run the football. Maybe as much as he loves to throw the ball.
Gophers fans can take one thing to the bank, though. Dunbar's offense bears little resemblance to the run-it-down-their-throat approach of former coach Glen Mason. In Dunbar's offense, nothing is too extreme.
"The whole idea is to create endless possibilities with our personnel," he said.
Class is in session
Any conversation with Dunbar feels like a college lecture. He is a walking, fast-talking offensive professor with white hair and quick wit. He knows offense and loves to talk offense.
Walk into his meeting room and Dunbar is surrounded by piles of paper containing plays. He took two laptops on vacation this summer so that he could spend five hours each morning analyzing film of various offenses.
"Then I went and did whatever my wife wanted me to do," he said, laughing.
Coach Tim Brewster knew he wanted to run the spread offense when he became a first-time head coach, and Dunbar's name kept coming up in conversations with other coaches, including Texas' Mack Brown, Florida's Urban Meyer and West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez.
"The biggest thing about Mike Dunbar to me is that he's just a sage old veteran," Brewster said. "His calmness at calling plays and preparing an offense is really going to allow me a sense of calmness in what I'm trying to do."
The first step in understanding Dunbar's offense is to figure out the proper name for it. The team's media guide refers to it as the "spread coast offense" a hybrid of the West Coast and spread offense. One of Dunbar's assistants came up with that term. Dunbar isn't concerned with titles.
"I told somebody that I'm not sure what the West Coast offense is anymore and I'm not sure what the spread is," Dunbar said. "I guess it's a derivative of West Coast concepts from spread formations with us trying to do a better job of running the football."
Actually, Dunbar's offense has been called many things. Complicated. Quarterback-friendly. Wide open. Exciting. Expletives by defensive coordinators.
His roots in the spread date to his time at Central Washington. He became head coach in 1983 and immediately implemented that offensive system, which he learned from one of the original spread gurus, Dennis Erickson, who was at Idaho then.
gophers/ncaa
resize text 
Newspaper Subscriptions
eEdition
RSS
Newsletters
