For the fourth time in 16 years, the Oregon State Beavers are starting a football season with a new coach. On Saturday, they'll meet the University of Utah in Corvallis, and the new man on the spot is Jerry Pettibone, who has made no secret of the fact that he's making wholesale changes at OSU (for details, see the cover of the team's media guide).
Pettibone, who replaced Dave Kragthorpe following last season, has converted the team's pass-oriented offense into an option attack, but not all of his new players have been sold on the idea. Two of the team's top three quarterbacks, plus three wide receivers, transferred to schools which still employ the passing game."It's been a big change for all of the offensive players," says Pettibone.
The defense also has undergone some subtler changes, moving from a 50 package to a 4-3 alignment.
"They've had to learn as many new things as the offensive players," says Pettibone.
At this point, OSU is willing to try anything, even if it means a return to old-fashioned option football in the era of the passing game. The Beavers were 1-10 last season, which apparently prompted the firing of Kragthrope with still three years remaining on his contract. How quickly things change. Only a year earlier, Kragthorpe was named Pac 10 Coach of the Year, having led OSU to a 4-7-1 record and victories over Stanford, UCLA and Cal. By OSU standards, this was a brilliant season. The Beavers - who are to the Pac 10 what UTEP is to the Western Athletic Conference - haven't won more than four games in a season in 20 years. During that time they finished last or next to last in the Pac 10 standings 16 times.
Kragthorpe (record: 17-48-2) bettered and outlasted (six years) his two predecessors, Craig Fertig (8-36-1) and Joe Avezzano (6-47-2), but still wasn't able to survive. Now Pettibone gets a try.
The mark of Pettibone's teams has been the spread option attack, which he operated successfully at Northern Illinois. Under Pettibone, NIU won last year's NCAA rushing championship, totaling 3,791 yards on the ground, 344.6 per game. During his six years at NIU, the Huskies ranked sixth nationally in rushing and compiled a record of 32-21-1.
Pettibone has brought converted the Beavers to a combination wishbone/run and shoot offense, which is a drastic change from Kragthorpe's imitation-BYU attack. For the unitiated, OSU diagrammed the four formations the team will run from this season on the cover of its media guide.
The most immediate question is how quickly can the Beavers adjust to an option offense, especially after new NCAA rules limited them to just 15 spring practice sessions.
"I was disappointed that we had to go under the new rule this year," says Pettibone, "because I really felt the team was at the point that if we could have practiced another week, we would have made a great deal more improvement."
Practice time isn't Pettibone's only problem. In Saturday's opener, he'll start two freshmen and five sophomores, including two of his three starting running backs - redshirt freshman J.J. Young and sophomore Chad Paulson, a converted defensive back. Of the team's nine running backs, only one of them - junior fullback James Jones - has ever carried the football in a college game (Jones gained 427 yards on 127 carries in 1990). Ten freshman are listed in OSU's two-deep depth chart.
Then there's the quarterback, Ed Brown, who was third string last year and has never played in an option offense.
"He's not the pro-type wishbone player you'd like to have, but he's a good solid player," says Pettibone.
Brown, a senior who has never started a college game, has thrown 70 passes during his career, completing 31 of them for 356 yards, 3 interceptions and 4 touchdowns. He also has run for 142 yards on 33 carries.
The Beavers return 15 starters from last year's team, including four in the offensive line. But such experience might count for little given the many changes they've had to digest during the off-season.