Romario Johnson looks off to the sideline as the rest of the offense gets set. The coaches are signaling to Johnson with an array of arm movements, not a play but a playlist. In Rams’ coach Terrance Banks’ spread offense the quarterback is the key to the offense’s success. Johnson gets the options from the coaches, and it’s up to him to read the defense’s coverage and choose the best play.

“So many times coaches think that we’re coaching against the other team when in reality we’re coaching against your kids and you’re coaching against my kids. You’re going on their reactions, I’m going on the reactions of your team,” Banks said. “What we’ll try to do, we try to allow our quarterback to go through those check marks in real time as opposed to having to say, ‘Ok. If you do this, then the next play is gonna be this.’ Most coaches know what’s coming next, so we give our quarterback those options every time. We give him that playlist and let him look at everything and decide what’s best this play.”

The concept of Banks’ offense is to empower the quarterback and allow him to make the right decision as to which play to call. When you see Newton’s lineup, nine times out of ten they’re going to be in the shotgun. Banks doesn’t necessarily see his offense as a spread attack. He sees the offense as a triple option offense, except in the shotgun.

“I keep trying to tell folks we’re a triple option team, we’re just in the gun,” Banks said. “Their alignment dictates what we do. If they put seven in the box, their alignment is gonna dictate not to run it. If their linebackers start bouncing here and there, then we’ll try to do whatever they give us. Whatever they give us we gonna take.”

Banks’ offense in relation to college football is similar to UCLA’s offensive system, which is a mixture of Oregon and Auburn. Banks is a descendant of the wing-T and the flexbone, both of which he ran at previous jobs.

“Before I was a spread coach I had the opportunity to coach in the wing-T and in the flexbone. The wing-T teaches you a series of football and the flexbone teaches you that you’ll always have a triple option, you read what the defense gives you. So that’s just enhanced from the spread, because I think it allows our quarterback to see the game better,” Banks said. “So basically, we have a series of plays that we run that flows together when we come to the line of scrimmage. We take what the defense gives us and we have four base plays, and they’re all different type of runs and different type of passes.”

“I think that I was always a spread guy at heart. One thing that we did my first year in the wing-T, although we were a wing-T team I had a receiver that caught 75 passes so we still threw the ball a lot.”

Banks says they have a big playbook, and that the team runs all the plays in the spring and in the summer. Then when the season starts Banks condenses the playbook and adapts to his personnel for the upcoming year.

“What we do is we kinda go and we condense it and say, ‘What can we do well this year?’ that’s the only thing we’ll stick to,” Banks said.

He added that the plays don’t really change that much, just the presentation.