Get ready for a new fast no-huddle offense for Rutgers football

There’s no guarantee that the Rutgers football offense will see improvement in 2020 -- or whenever the next season will be, but, at the very least, it will look different.

Offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson, who came aboard in January, will implement an up-tempo, no-huddle spread offense that’s exciting out of the shotgun.

“(It’ll) hopefully (be) a good one. My last couple years we've had really great success so I'm looking forward to continuing that,” Gleeson said on a video chat Tuesday. “We want to be fast. That sounds like a coach platitude but to me it's a little deeper than that. We want to be a fast no huddle offense. If you can envision the best press basketball team that you guys have ever watched, that's kind of how we want to do our business. So, we'll be operating primarily out of shotgun, but you'll see an aggressiveness and the way that our guys line up and address the next snap that should be different. It should be something like wow, these guys are going at a pretty good clip. We want to snap the ball around every 15 seconds. It's kind of our timestamp for no huddle football. So the no huddle operation is the first layer of fast.”

In order to make the offense work efficiently, Gleeson and the entire Rutgers staff will need fast, well-conditioned players who can make opposing defenses work.

“We literally want fast people,” he said. “So you guys have covered a ton of sports. Our playing surface is enormous. We have 110 yards of vertical space at most and we have 53-and-a-third yards of width. Basketball, they have fast people, but they don't have that much space, so if we can get some guys that move from point A to point B we will be in great shape.”

Gleeson also wants smart players who have the ability to adjust and be quick thinkers.

“And then the last thing that I say is if you take Usain Bolt and you put them on a football field, even though he's a fast person, he's not going to play very fast. I feel like being at Rutgers under coach (Greg) Schiano, we've always been on the cutting edge of how to teach human beings. So he's studied the brain extensively, he understands how we're going to coach in sound bites not sentences, and I really want to teach the game of football that in such a manner that we win the battle of fast thinking. So we want to be fast no huddle, we want fast people, and we want to be fast thinkers. Those are the layers of fast.”

In addition to wanting to play fast and get out in the open space, the players still have to be tough and physical.

“I got in trouble last year saying East Coast physicality and in the middle of the country they didn't really take kindly to that phrase, but we definitely want to be a physical football team. Every guy that comes to practice and visits will see us tackling. They'll see the way that our guys block in the perimeter,” Gleeson said. “They'll see the way that we finish the ball on the back end. The old adage is the guys that don't fumble are usually ones that finish their runs the best. So, their guys should be going backwards and our guys should be going forward on our tape consistently. That kind of makes up fast and physical.”

As always, the players will not only have to be and play fast and physical, but they have to be able to hang on to the ball and not turn it over.

“The third pillar is the ball. I know you guys like statistics like I do, but in the Big Ten in the last four years, if you don't turn it over, you win 71 percent of the time,” Gleeson said. “If you turn it over once you win 57 percent of the time. So we've got to address the fact that the ball is the program. And we know it's directly tied to winning percentage. So if we're fast, we're physical, you take care of the ball, we're gonna be a Sean Gleeson offense. But more importantly we're gonna be a Rutgers offense.”

Gleeson has been in charge of fantastic offenses at multiple spots in his young career.

As the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State in 2019, the Cowboys’ scored 32.5 points-per-game and had 453.9 yards-per-game, which ranked 22nd in the country. They had 2,985 rushing yards and 2,916 passing yards, ranking 17th in the nation with 229.6 rushing yards-per-game.

Running back Chuba Hubbard was the Big 12 Offensive POY, All-American, and Doak Walker Award finalist as well in 2019 under Gleeson while quarterback Spencer Sanders was the Big 12 Offensive Freshman of the Year and wide receiver Tylan Wallace was picked to the All-Big 12 Second Team.

As the offensive player-caller at Princeton just a few minutes away from Piscataway, the Tigers won three Ivy League championships in six years and averaged 36.9 points-per-game. Princeton went a perfect 10-0 in 2018, leading the FCS in scoring offense (47.0). It ranked second in the country with 536.8 yards-per-game, sixth in rushing offense with 295.5 yards-per-game, second with a 53.4 conversion percentage on third-downs, and seventh in passing efficiency with a mark of 161.26. The Tigers’ 470 total points scored set a new league record.

Multiple quarterbacks under his watch -- with different styles -- earned Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year honors (dual threat John Lovett in 2018 and pro-style passer Chad Kanoff in 2017) and 18 total members of the offense in 2017 and 2018 garnered All-Ivy League honors.

At Rutgers, Gleeson’s scheme will be a mixture of what he used at both Princeton and Oklahoma State.

“There were a lot of really good football coaches and a lot of passionate people about football. I think your offense is a lot of times influenced by where you played, who you've coached with and then what you've studied so my one year there definitely had an imprint on my coaching career,” he said. “We'll have some things in the offense that schematically were a part of what (Ok. State) did, but like I said, every year is a new challenge and you have to figure out your personnel so whether it was things from Princeton, or things from Oklahoma State if they're a bad match for our personnel we're not going to do it.”

Rutgers is searching for a starting quarterback between the likes of Artur Sitkowski, Johnny Langan, Cole Snyder, and Evan Simon and it was without the benefit of spring practice due to COVID-19.

Gleeson and the entire staff have been on tons of video meetings with each other and with the players doing installs, but there’s no substitute for being out on the field. Once the Scarlet Knights are able to practice, the players should be moving around swiftly all the time.

“I think practice is our secret sauce. That's kind of been the case everywhere I've been. The tempo at which we practice aggressively, there's going to be nobody collecting rain on their shoulder pads,” Gleeson said. “In practice, there's gonna be a lot of movement so you guys should notice that when you come visit. We don't have that environment for evaluation right now, so it's obviously different. We've done everything that we can to bring practice to these guys within the rules. I told the wide receiver group, we've studied long and hard at how much movement they undergo over the course of practice. It's about four miles of running during a no huddle practice. Everything that we've done over the web is great, but that's four miles of your body confirming everything that you just learned. So, that would have been 15 chances to do that in the spring and we've lost out on that. So, whether it's the quarterbacks, which I know is the nature of your question, we're all kind of missing around four miles of movement with our bodies to confirm what our minds have learned, so we've got to do our best cultivating that within the rules to try to get them to kind of do what we want them to do and then when they when they get back.

“I think the next question that everyone's gonna be asking themselves is, we got to make sure that we don't waste any time. We haven't had a chance to practice, so we can't take a week or two figuring out how to practice. We have to be ready once we get back and that's going to help in the quarterback evaluation. That's gonna help obviously once we roll into the season these guys start taking live bullets.”

Follow Chris Nalwasky on Twitter @ChrisWasky.