What will BYU’s offense look like in 2018? Recent hirings offer clues

Provo • What will the BYU football team’s offense look like in 2018?

It is a question that probably won’t be fully answered until the Cougars take the field in the opener Sept. 1 at Arizona, because new offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes has not had the complete reins of an offense before.

Grimes has given a few clues but said nothing specific.

His hiring of former University of Utah assistant coach Aaron Roderick to be the passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach and Weber State’s Fesi Sitake in a yet-to-be-defined offensive role perhaps has been telling.

Roderick mostly ran a spread offense with the quarterback in shotgun formation at Utah, while Sitake ran a more pro-style attack with the quarterback under center the past two years as WSU’s offensive coordinator.

That changed a bit as the recent season wore on and Stefan Cantwell developed into a dual-threat quarterback, Sitake said Tuesday.

“In the playoff game against Southern Utah, we basically went three quarters of spread,” he said. “So we had the flexibility [to] go to spread, but our philosophy was pro-style. … We were able to do more in the gun with [Cantwell]. I would like to say we were well-balanced, but we were in gun mode more than we had been in my previous three years at Weber State.”

Sitake said which position group he will coach at BYU will not be finalized until the 10th assistant coach is announced. That could happen any day.

Sitake said the offensive coaches who have been on board for about 10 days are still in the collaboration phase and talking overall philosophy instead of specifics. The other new addition to the offensive staff is Ryan Pugh, who spent the past two seasons as the offensive line coach at Texas-San Antonio but played and coached under Grimes at three other schools.

“We are of the same mindset that we want to be a very well-balanced offensive team that runs the football first,” Sitake said. “But we want some flair to this offense as well. Coach Grimes has made that clear.

“We haven’t really dived deep into any X’s and O’s. We have talked more about philosophy and our different ideas and concepts. We are coming up with verbiages and so we are still pretty [early] in the process as far as establishing an actual playbook. … Coach Grimes has been really good about opening things up and having a collaborative effort and finding out what the best plan is going to be for us as an offense.”

Another clue: Grimes has made it a priority to stay in close contact with December signee Zach Wilson, a dual-threat quarterback from Corner Canyon High. Wilson and another prep quarterback who also already has enrolled at BYU and is gearing up for spring camp, Stacy Conner of Wylie, Texas, seemingly can run a spread offense better than any current BYU QB with the possible exception of Beau Hoge.

Another dual-threat QB, former Maple Mountain star Jaren Hall, returns from a church mission later this year and will be in the mix as well.

“Hopefully after the spring, we will have a pretty good idea of who the guy is going to be,” Fesi Sitake said. “If a guy gets injured, we want to be confident in who our No. 2, 3 or maybe even 4 might be. There are a lot of bodies right now, but so many things change throughout the course of spring ball.”

Senior Tanner Mangum, who started in eight games in 2017 in Ty Detmer’s pro-style offense, began walking without a protective boot this week after suffering a season-ending Achilles injury Nov. 5 against Fresno State. Mangum won’t participate in spring camp, and his availability for the opener Sept. 1 at Arizona is still in question.

Hoge’s father, former ESPN NFL analyst Merril Hoge, told 1280 The Zone on Monday that his son finally has recovered from injuries that limited his playing time in 2017 and he will be in spring camp.

Merril Hoge revealed that Beau Hoge suffered a concussion the week before the 2015 Las Vegas Bowl when he slipped in the shower and hit his head. Hoge suffered a ligament tear to the big toe on his right foot in the Utah State game a few plays before sustaining another concussion. He returned after Mangum suffered the Achilles injury at Fresno State but reinjured the big toe. Joe Critchlow started the final three games.

The BYU offense “will look like a lot of different things that I have done,” Grimes said. “My goal is to put together the best combination of all the systems that I have been a part of and build a system that is flexible enough to fit exactly what we have this year, but be open enough to do something different if a particular guy is hurt or you have a different guy in that position the following year.”