Who: Phil Longo, Wisconsin
Title: Offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach
Previous stop: North Carolina offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach (2019-22)
Why he's important: Let's start here. In the decade and a half covered by the CFBStats.com database, Wisconsin has finished higher than 100th in passing attempts five times. In three of those seasons, the Badgers were 96th (2019), 98th (2013), and 99th (2011). Hardly a relevant difference there. In 2009, Wisconsin tossed the 88th most passes in FBS. That leaves the 2015 season as the one time in post-modern college football where the Badgers truly tried to air it out, if you can count tying for 54th (419 attempts in 13 games) as "airing it out."
Even in 2011, when a future 9-time Pro Bowl quarterback essentially fell in their lap, Wisconsin only let Russell Wilson throw the ball 22 times a game -- in a season where he set the FBS passing efficiency record.
And it's not as if Wisconsin threw the ball more the further back you go from 2009. Barry Alvarez built the program's identity on running the ball behind a beefy offensive line, and the idea of "Wisconsin football" as we know it did not exist before Alvarez.
Enter Phil Longo. Longo's offenses led the ACC in passing yards across his four seasons at North Carolina, led the SEC in passing yards across his two seasons at Ole Miss, and finished 70th, 16th and second in passing across his three seasons at Sam Houston.
Longo inherited a wide receiver room with only seven scholarship players, so he brought in CJ Williams from USC and Bryson Green from Oklahoma State. Will Pauling and Quincy Burroughs came with Luke Fickell from Cincinnati.
“It’s one of the deepest rooms of receivers I’ve had in a long time,” Longo told the AP earlier this month. “I don’t know who the elite guys are yet. That will get established this year, obviously, with how productive they are. But you go down and look at receivers seven, eight and nine, and you’re excited about the future that they could have. That obviously bodes well for us.”
Tanner Mordecai came from SMU to start at quarterback, while Nick Evers (Oklahoma) and Braedyn Locke (Mississippi State) will back him up.
A fifth-year senior, Mordecai has run a variation of Longo's "Dairy Raid" for the entirety of a college career that started at Oklahoma before his stop in Dallas. "It's a different way of calling it, a different way of teaching it, but generally it's the same offense for me," he said. "These guys that were here last year, I can't tell that they hadn't ran it. It's not evident that these guys ran a pro-style offense for the past however many years here."
But let's get three things straight here:
1) Just because the Badgers haven't thrown the ball on a regular basis doesn't mean they can't. If the team up the road in Green Bay can sling the ball all over the frozen tundra in December and January, surely Wisconsin can throw the ball in October and November.
2) Wisconsin still plans to run the ball. This won't be a whole sale change to a Mike Leach version of the Air Raid where every run can be replaced by a pass. Junior running back Braelon Allen totaled 2,510 yards and 25 touchdowns in his first two seasons, and he'll likely run for around 1,200 yards and a dozen touchdowns again this fall.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS: No. 15: Bryan Nardo, Oklahoma State; No. 14: Chad Bumphis, Mississippi State; No. 13: Buster Faulkner, Georgia Tech; No. 12 Chris Jackson, Texas; No. 11: Philip Montgomery, Auburn; No. 10: Josh Gattis: Maryland; No. 9: Lance Guidry, Miami; No. 8: Austin Armstrong, Florida; No. 7: Sean Lewis, Colorado
Ty Chandler rushed for 1,092 yards and 13 touchdowns for Longo at UNC in 2021, and in 2020 the Heels produced two 1,000-yard runners (in only 11 games). The Heels came 67 yards shy of having two 1,000-yard rushers in 2019 as well.
In 2015, Longo's offense led FCS in total yardage, powered by by a running back who posted nearly 1,500 yards. "Playing smash mouth football sounds great to me," Longo said.
2) Flowing into Point 2, the Longo hire isn't about making a change for the sake of change. Fickell tried to hire Longo at Cincinnati in 2017, but Longo opted for the Ole Miss job instead. Longo came away from that experience wanting to work for Fickell again some day, and some day became today.
“The way (Fickell) wants to run a program," Longo said this summer. "The way he deals with players. Philosophically, it’s all very much in line with the way that I would do it. And so that was one thing that attracted me to (think) when this Wisconsin opportunity came up, I couldn’t pass this up.”
Asked at Big Ten media days why he implemented such a drastic change to the offense, Fickell said this:
"I don't think it was anything to do with, hey, let's change what it is that they've done and been really good at and let's bring in somebody that's going to do something different. It's more about people.
"And obviously I learned that growing up in the Midwest from a great former coach as well. It's about people. When you get the right people together, they understand, regardless of who they're labeled to be, whether they're a ground-and-pound guy, whether they're an air raid guy, what is the core values to the things that you do."
As Fickell tells it, Wisconsin AD Chris McIntosh hired him because he's the best man for the job, not because he did or did not play a certain way. Fickell then hired Longo because he was the best man for the job, not because he embraced or rejected Wisconsin's pro-style, smash-mouth style of ball.
And, as Longo says, his Air Raid system will form around the players, the players will not form around the system.
“Perfect example: (at Sam Houston) Jared Johnson was an option quarterback. He could throw the ball but he was also a great runner. So he threw for 32 (touchdowns) and ran for 1,000 because it was something he was good at. The quarterback that replaced him at Sam Houston State through for 5,200 and didn’t run for anything and set the touchdown record with 57," Longo said. "Same exact offense, nothing changed except the emphasis.”