Film Look: A Quick Overview of the McNeese Offense

The Cowboys lace them up this Saturday night for their first home game of the 2019 season as they take on the McNeese Cowboys. Normally at this point in the week I would dive into Oklahoma State’s opponent’s defensive or offensive scheme, and pick out a few things to watch for in the upcoming matchup. However for this week, as the Pokes are favored by 37.5 points against an FCS opponent, I’m going to key on one factor from a high-level view on the team from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

First-year head coach of McNeese, Sterlin Gilbert, is a name that probably rings a bell for many OSU fans. He was the co-offensive coordinator at Tulsa in 2015 and coached against the Cowboys as the offensive coordinator of Texas in 2016 for then head UT coach Charlie Strong.

Gilbert is part of the Art Briles coaching tree, as he spent time with Briles at Houston as a GA, coached alongside former Baylor assistant Dino Babers at Eastern Illinois and worked with another Briles assistant, Phillip Montgomery, at Tulsa. That being said, there will be some things that McNeese’s offense does Saturday night that will look all too familiar to Oklahoma State fans.

Veer-and-Shoot

Gilbert’s Cowboys run a variation of Briles’ Veer-and-Shoot offense. Gilbert-led offenses normally rely more on the passing game, similar to a typical spread, air-raid attack. However, in McNeese’s first game last week against the Southern Jaguars, they were very run-heavy, rushing it 52 times compared to 24 pass attempts.

The primary goal of the Briles/Gilbert Veer-and-Shoot is to spread the defense out by having the wideouts split as far as possible to the sideline, allowing the quarterback to more easily read the defense and open things up for both the passing and rushing attack. Below you’ll see an image of Baylor’s wide receiver splits and then one of McNeese from last week against Southern.

In both images you will see the outside receiver to the top of the screen almost on the sideline and the slot receiver outside the hash marks. These splits allow the McNeese offense to isolate certain areas of the Jaguar defense. Southern has to decide whether they will commit to the run and keep their guys in the box, or widen out and leave themselves vulnerable up the middle.

They also like to line up in stacked receiver sets, something we’ve seen Oklahoma State do on offense as well, to throw wrinkles at defensive alignments and create mismatches.  See an example below of the wide receivers to the bottom of the image.

The Veer-and-Shoot uses the pass to set up the run. Against Southern last week, McNeese quarterback Cody Orgeron (son of LSU coach Ed Orgeron) threw an incompletion on second down and then came back with this completion to pick up the first down the very next play.

Once Gilbert has you spread out and he’s using tempo, he will hit you with a running concept like this GT (Guard Tackle) counter shown below.

Conclusion

Along with wide splits and stacked receiver sets, I would also expect to see a lot of wide receiver screens (some running back screens as well) and pick route concepts. In regards to the running game, I saw a lot of Power runs with the guard pulling, the guard/tackle counter shown above, and the use of tight ends and H-backs as lead blockers in McNeese’s matchup with Souther.

Gilbert’s offense isn’t all just about wide splits from the receivers, and you will see some different looks from the other Cowboys, but there will be other instances when the offense looks very familiar for Poke fans who remember the Art Briles offenses of years’ past.