1/ To all who answered my question ab the college spread run game, I'd argue that RichRod & Urban were the first devotees & developers to have major success with it. RichRod started at wvu in 2001 & Urb at BG also in 2001. It was Urb's unbeaten 2004 Utah team that hit bigtime.

2/ In an interview I heard that season, Urban noted that so much of what they were doing was based on Tom Osborne's offense using inside & outside zone principles, but just from the shotgun. That's how the game almost always evolves-someone borrows something and tweaks it...

3/ the evolution of the "zone read" goes something like this: 1) teams needed a way to control the cutback defender on IZ run plays, 2) the naked bootleg was the first constraint play off IZ, 3) then came "orbit motion". Both of these actions created conflict for backside DE...

4/ SG teams used IZ as a base run play so they also used the naked and orbit actions. The legend goes that one day in pract a RichRod QB accidentally "read" the BSDE rather than just handing the ball off on an IZ play. They started tinkering with that and found that it worked...

5/ this solved the major shortcoming of the naked and orbit actions--both those things were "guesses". If you called naked, and the bsde didnt squeeze the cutback, your qb could get a face full of hard plastic and metal. By reading him from the SG, this problem was solved...