SI - After a horrific second game loss, Miles adopts RPO at Kansas

SI - He’d later say that it was, in fact, a significant win, one that parallels the 2001 victory over Oklahoma. No Miles-coached team has ever been a bigger underdog than that one. The next season, the Cowboys were a 25-point dog in a game against Texas (they lost). Seventeen years passed before odds makers made a Miles team such a longshot again. It came Friday night at Boston College. In explaining the win, Miles delivers a Miles-ism, a nonsensical quote that is clearly missing multiple nouns. “We didn’t want to be a team that could not,” Miles says. “We wanted to be a team that could.” Above anything else, he attributes his team’s performance to quarterback Carter Stanley. “He came to life, understood his responsibilities and did some special things,” Miles says.

What the coach does not reveal, until specifically asked, is his team’s reinventive offensive approach. The Jayhawks abandoned the traditional offense used in its first two games and incorporated spread concepts equipped with the latest trend in college football: the run-pass option. Wait just a minute. Is Les Miles, the run-heavy, old-school, fullback-led football coach, really running the RPO? “It’s not the entire thing you do. It’s a part of your offense, but…” he pauses, “yeah.”

After the game, Stanley said Kansas offensive consultant Brent Dearmon brought the scheme with him when he joined the staff in January from a past that includes stops at the NAIA and Division II levels and an analyst role for Gus Malzahn at Auburn. Coaches have implemented the system in “bits and pieces,” Miles says. “Feel like we’re probably really just scratching the surface of what it is and how to operate it.” The scheme might be the most significant factor in the win, but there’s much more to it. Defensive coordinator D.J. Eliot’s unit pitched a second-half shutout, and KU backs Khalil Herbert and Pooka Williams combined to run for 308 yards. The Jayhawks reeled off 20 unanswered points against a team that has qualified for a bowl in five of the last six years.


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