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Could this be why the option was a thing for 20+ years?


I was watching some old college football games on youtube.  Many of the fields were that old, tough astroturf - basically concrete with carpet over it.  And at a few angles, I got to see how sever the crown of the field was.  Some were bad, you could only see the top half of the other team across the way, then I remembered hearing old players talk about how theirs was so bad, you couldn't even see the other players across the field.

I know a crown is for drainage, and it's supposed to be slight, but over time, with no one keeping an eye on it, and these artificial fields sprouting up everywhere, the lack of regulations would lend itself to the idea some crowns were extreme. 

I know the veer  and single-wing were older, but didn't Royal at Texas come up with the triple option?  And from that all these different incarnations came, obviously.  But basically, on many of the plays, it was basically a race to the sideline, wasn't it?  And with all these fields of concrete with severe crowns, wouldn't that make sense? 
On a grass field with a noticeable crown, you simply fix it by moving dirt and laying some more grass on it.  But back then, you weren't going to rip up your paved stadium floor, were you?



So that's the question - was a paved, crowned field surface the reason option football was a thing?

Don Faurot, the head coach of the Missouri Tigers, developed the split-T and unleashed it onto the college football world in 1941.[8] He combined this new formation with the athletes he had at running back and quarterback and created an offensive juggernaut. The Tigers finished the season 8-1, with the sole loss in the season opening out of conference game at #10 Ohio State. They were the Big Six Conference champions, ranked #7 in the AP poll, and accepted the invitation to play #6 Fordham in the 1942 Sugar Bowl.

In 1946, Jim Tatum became the Oklahoma head coach. He installed the split-T offense that he had learned as an assistant coach under Don Faurot at the U.S. Navy's Iowa Pre-Flight school football team during World War II. In his first year, he turned around Oklahoma's losing record and delivered a Big Six Conference championship.[9] In 1947, Tatum left Oklahoma for Maryland, where he saw even more success with the split-T, including a consensus national championship in 1953.[10]

Bud Wilkinson, also a Faurot assistant at Iowa Pre-Flight, was the next Sooners head coach. In 1953, after losing to Notre Dame and tying Pittsburgh, Oklahoma beat arch-rivals Texas, 19–14, and went on to win their next 46 games in a row, setting an NCAA record that stands to this day. Notre Dame book-ended the streak when they again beat Oklahoma in Norman, 7–0 on November 16, 1957.[11]

Tatum and Wilkinson would later face off in the 1954 Orange Bowl, when #1/#1 Maryland and #4/#5 Oklahoma met on the field for the first time. Both teams used the split-T as their base offense. Other top football programs used the split-T during this period as well, including Alabama, Houston, Notre Dame, Texas, Michigan, Penn State, and Ohio State.

While the record books commonly refer to Emory Bellard developing the wishbone formation in 1968 as offensive coordinator at Texas,[2] the wishbone's roots can be traced back to the 1950s. According to Barry Switzer, it was Charles “Spud” Cason, football coach at William Monnig Junior High School of Fort Worth, Texas, who first modified the classic T formation in order “to get a slow fullback into the play quicker.”[3] Cason called the formation “Monnig T”. Bellard learned about Cason's tactics while coaching at Breckenridge High School, a small community west of Fort Worth.
Earlier in his career Bellard saw a similar approach implemented by former Detroit Lions guard Ox Emerson, then head coach at Alice High School near Corpus Christi, Texas. Trying to avoid the frequent pounding of his offensive line, Emerson moved one of the starting guards into the backfield, enabling him to get a running start at the opposing defensive line. Bellard served as Emerson's assistant at that time. During his high school coaching career in the late '50s and early '60s, Bellard adopted the basic approaches of both Cason and Emerson, as he won two 3A Texas state championships Breckenridge in 1958 and 1959 and a 4A state title at San Angelo Central High School in 1966, using a wishbone-like option offense.
In 1967 Bellard was hired by Darrell Royal and became offensive coordinator a year later. The Texas Longhorns only scored 18.6 points per game in a 6–4 season in 1967. After watching Texas A&M—running offensive coordinator Bud Moore and Gene Stallings' option offense—beat Bear Bryant's Alabama team in the 1968 Cotton Bowl Classic, Royal instructed Bellard to design a new three-man back-field triple option offense. Bellard tried to merge his old high school tactics with Stallings' triple option out of the Slot-I formation and Homer Rice's variations of the Veer, an offensive formation created by Bill Yeoman.
Introducing the new offensive scheme at the beginning of the 1968 season, Houston Chronicle sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz stated it looked like a “pulley bone”, while Royal agreed but changed the name to “wishbone”.[4] Royal quickly embraced the idea of the wishbone, though it did not immediately work, as the Longhorns tied their first game running the new offense and went into halftime of their second game against Texas Tech trailing 21–0. This led Royal to make the first of two changes which proved key to the future success of the wishbone. He replaced initial starting quarterback Bill Bradley, who proved to have trouble with the reads and pitches that were key to the new formation, with James Street, who nearly led the Longhorns to a comeback win. Then, while analyzing film from the Texas Tech loss, an assistant noticed that fullback Steve Worster was reaching the line of scrimmage too soon. At the assistant's suggestion, Royal and Bellard then had Worster start a step farther back from the quarterback. According to Bradley, "When we moved Worster back and James took over, we just caught fire."[5] Texas won its next 30 games, leading to two national championships using the formation.[6] In 1971 Royal showed the offense to Bear Bryant, who was so enamored with it that he installed it at Alabama complete with his own touches.
Bellard later left Texas and – using the wishbone – guided Texas A&M and Mississippi State to bowl game appearances in the late 1970s. At Mississippi State Bellard “broke the bone” and introduced the “wing-bone”, moving one of the halfbacks up to a wing formation and frequently sending him in motion. Another variation of the wishbone formation is called the flexbone.
Ironically, the longest running wishbone offense was run not by Texas but by their arch-rivals, the University of Oklahoma, who ran variations of the wishbone well into the mid-1990s. Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer has been credited by some for having “perfected” the use of the wishbone offense and former OU quarterback Jack Mildren is often referred to as "the Godfather of the wishbone" by University of Oklahoma football fans.[7] In 1971, the Oklahoma Sooners wishbone offense set the all-time NCAA single-season rushing record at 472.4 yards per game, a record which still stands to this day.[8]

Sort of like the rumor of ND letting the grass grow  higher for uber-talented teams coming to play in South Bend, huh?  Well if there's any connection, it hadn't occurred to me until yesterday, and it'd be cool if I was right. 

Doing some research yesterday, apparently the old Cowboys Stadium had a big crown.  Just another reason for people to discredit Emmitt Smith, I guess.