Demetrice Martin has seen this look in Noel Mazzone’s eyes before.
Martin and Mazzone joined the UCLA coaching staff in December 2011. The venerable coordinator installed his offense the following spring.
Six years later, a similar process is unfolding in Tucson. Martin and Mazzone joined the Arizona Wildcats staff in late January. They are halfway through their spring installation. The possibilities are boundless.
“It’s wild looking at him right now,” Martin said. “Until he finds out what his weapons are, where they are and how he can use them, that’s when the real stuff begins.”
So is Mazzone kind of a mad scientist at this point, using spring practice as a lab to conduct personnel experiments?
“He’s a little kooky when it comes to this stuff,” Martin said. “No telling what you’ll get.”
That’s hyperbole, of course. Mazzone has a system and a plan. It’s just that the latter isn’t fully formed yet and probably won’t be until the week leading into the Sept. 1 opener against BYU.
Mazzone, who’s also Arizona’s quarterbacks coach, said the Wildcats are “pretty much” running the same offense he has directed for “the last eight or nine years,” encompassing his time at Arizona State, UCLA and Texas A&M. He summed it up as follows: “Tempo, create some space for our athletes and try to get it in their hands.”
But Mazzone also said — in lockstep with UA coach Kevin Sumlin — that the offense will be molded to maximize the talent on hand.
“The offense kind of takes on its own personality,” Mazzone, 61, said. “Hopefully, we’re smart enough as coaches to play to the strength of our players.”
Mazzone’s history suggests they will. When 6-foot-7-inch pocket passer Brock Osweiler was ASU’s quarterback in 2011, the Sun Devils threw the ball 58.4 percent of the time. When 6-4 pocket passer Josh Rosen was UCLA’s QB in ’15, the Bruins threw the ball 54.1 percent of the time. (Sacks, which count as rushing plays in the official statistics, are considered passing plays when calculating these ratios.)
In between, when Mazzone had Brett Hundley, the figures flipped. From 2012-14, 52.2 percent of UCLA’s plays were rushes as Mazzone incorporated Hundley’s mobility into the offense.
“What’s ‘balanced’ mean? In my mind, balanced is like, when I want to throw it I can complete it, and when I want to run it I can make yards. That would be a balanced offense,” Mazzone said.
“I don’t think there’s a magic number to that. I’ve had seasons where we’ve thrown for 4,000 yards, and then I’ve had seasons where we’ve had 1,500-, 1,700-yard rushers.”
Mazzone inherits a mobile quarterback in junior Khalil Tate, who’s among the most prolific rushers in college football, regardless of position. Tate ranked fifth in the Pac-12 with 1,411 rushing yards last season despite appearing in only 11 games. His 128.3-yards-per-game average ranked second behind Stanford tailback Bryce Love, the Heisman Trophy runner-up.
Asked whom Tate reminds him of, Mazzone cited Hundley, who rushed for 1,392 yards in his final two seasons at UCLA before becoming a fifth-round pick of the Green Bay Packers. It makes sense. But Tate is a superior athlete, the type you get to coach maybe once in your career, Pac-12 Networks analyst Yogi Roth said.
“You could coach your whole life and not get a guy like Khalil,” said Roth, who compare’s Tate’s athleticism to that of Vince Young, Marcus Mariota and Cam Newton.
Under Mazzone, Tate needs to “become surgical” as a passer, Roth said. “Can he do that?”
It’s a great question. Tate is naturally accurate and completed 62 percent of his passes as a sophomore. But whether it was Rich Rodriguez’s offense or the way plays evolved, Tate didn’t complete many balls in what Roth labels the “intermediate passing game.” Those are throws in the 10-to-18-yard range in the middle of the field that are sometimes the second or third read in a pass play’s progression.
Can Tate do that? Having been around Mazzone and studied his offense for years, Roth believes the veteran coach is the right man to tutor the talented young QB. Mazzone has coached in college and the NFL for nearly 40 years.
Quarterbacks he has helped develop include Osweiler, Hundley, Rosen, Philip Rivers and Jason Campbell.
“Noel is one of the best quarterback-builders I’ve ever seen in college football,” Roth said. “He’s been at every level. He’s been around big and various types of personalities.
“Quarterbacks take up a lot of space in the room. His personality … he’s that guy. If you meet him, you sense it instantaneously. He can talk to anyone. He’s been around the game enough to where he takes it seriously, but it’s not life or death. For quarterbacks, that allows them to play freely.”
Tate flourished under previous position coach Rod Smith and Rodriguez, who had something of a good cop/bad cop dynamic. Special-teams coordinator Jeremy Springer, who worked with Mazzone the past two seasons at Texas A&M, said Mazzone is “not the type of coach who’s going to be all over everybody.”
But Mazzone still demands excellence, and he seems to have a knack for coaxing it out of quarterbacks no matter their playing style or personality type.
He even helped the high-strung Springer, who was a quality-control coach with the Aggies. Thanks to Mazzone, Springer learned to “chill” on occasion.
“Things happen for a reason,” Springer said when asked what he’d learned from Mazzone. “Relax. Don’t feel so anxious about everything.”
The coaching staff as a whole is taking a wait-and-see approach this spring, using the 15 practices to assess the incumbent players before making any firm decisions about schemes and roster construction. Mazzone and Sumlin know what they want in a quarterback. Mazzone’s starting points are passion and energy. Sumlin is seeking someone who’s smart, makes good decisions, can communicate and throws with accuracy.
Like Mazzone, Sumlin has succeeded with a variety of QBs. Case Keenum passed for more than 5,000 yards three times under Sumlin at Houston and never rushed for more than 221. Freelancing Johnny Manziel ran for 1,410 yards and 21 touchdowns when he won the Heisman Trophy as a redshirt freshman at A&M in 2012.
“We’re going to tailor the offense to what a guy can do,” Sumlin said. “We’ve won with different kinds of guys. For where we are right now, we’re pretty flexible offensively.”
