College football spread offenses: Who spreads defenses out the most?

60 solo tackles, no assists.

Each Sunday during the college football season, I go through each FBS box score to pick out oddities, trends, great (or terrible) performances, etc., and I occasionally come across something that startles me.

On September 7 in Lubbock, Texas Tech beat Stephen F. Austin, 61-13, in a mostly unremarkable "decent team whips FCS opponent" affair. Jace Amaro caught eight passes for 142 yards, and Tech's two freshman quarterbacks had a solid game, but for the most part this game was less than memorable.

But SFA's defensive stats caught my eye: The Lumberjacks did not record a single assisted tackle. Not one.

The word "spread" has come to describe about 38 different styles of offense in college football. If you line your tight end up detached from the line, you're a spread. If you utilize mostly four wideouts, you're a spread. Hell, if your quarterback lines up mostly in the shotgun, you're a spread. These all have kernels of truth in them, but at this point, the spread has mostly lost its meaning. Saying a team runs a "spread" offense tells you almost nothing about what kind of offense the team actually runs.

At its heart, though, the spread ethos is about putting playmakers in space and giving them room to make plays. It originally developed as an underdog tactic of sorts, as a way to spread out and harry more talented defenses and hopefully force some mistakes. But there is a certain level of tactical superiority to the idea, and after a while, a lot of the most talented teams in the country began to employ more and more spread tactics.

But who actually spread you out the most in 2013? Whether a team is actually doing it well or not, the spread is designed to create numbers advantages and get the ball-carrier away from a mass of tacklers. That often leads to solo tackles. So which offensive systems led to the most solo tackles?

First, we'll test this method by looking at full-conference results. (I'm also including average Off. and Def. F/+ ratings for each conference, just in case there's some correlation to be made there.)

The correlations here are minimal. The three best conferences in college football were the two at the top of this list and the one third from bottom. The two worst conferences were third from the top and at the very bottom. This seems relatively well-separated from any conversations about quality. It also seems to make general sense; the Big 12 and Pac-12 are indeed home of a lot of the country's most well-known spread offenses, and even though teams like Texas A&M, Auburn, Ole Miss, and Missouri thrived using variations of the spread last season, the SEC is still considered one of the more old-school, pro-style conferences in college football. (Meanwhile ... what happened to you, MAC? I don't even know you anymore.)

So let's go to the team list. Which teams created a style that led to the most solo tackles? No. 1 might surprise you.

Here are the top 15 games in terms of Solo Tackle Rate.

1. Texas Tech vs. SFA: 100%
2. Nevada vs. BYU: 98.6%
3. Ole Miss vs. Texas A&M: 98.2%
4. Temple vs. UConn: 98.0%
5. Kansas State vs. TCU: 98.0%
6. Kansas State vs. Texas Tech: 97.9%
7. Temple vs. Louisville: 97.9%
8. UConn vs. Temple: 97.8%
9. Navy vs. Western Kentucky: 97.6%
10. North Carolina vs. Georgia Tech: 97.4%
11. Texas Tech vs. Oklahoma State: 97.2%
12. Texas Tech vs. Texas State: 96.7%
13. Clemson vs. Syracuse: 96.6%
14. Syracuse vs. Pittsburgh: 96.4%
15. Texas Tech vs. Kansas State: 96.1%

Obviously defensive style could come into play here; a team that plays a soft, wide zone could swarm to the ball and make assisted tackles more than a Michigan State type that puts its defensive backs on islands more frequently. But we're looking at offenses here, so even if you played Michigan State, you only played them once in 12-13 games. That's not going to impact that sample all that much. This measure tells a whole lot more about the offense's design than a given defense's.

For the most part, this list makes sense. You've got spread stalwarts (Texas Tech, Baylor, Indiana, Ole Miss, West Virginia) at or near the top, and you've got teams with grind-it-out identities (Arkansas, Stanford, LSU) at or near the bottom.

But the list is not without surprises. Notre Dame getting that close to the bottom of the list was a bit startling to me -- obviously the Irish aren't a hurry-up, no-huddle specialist, but I would have expected them to finish more toward the middle. Meanwhile, spread stalwart Texas A&M actually had a lower rate of solo tackles than Texas.

The most interesting team on the list might be right at the very top, however. Kansas State was the most spread-'em-out team in the land according to this method. That seems quite strange, at least until you read what Mike Nixon wrote about KSU back in 2012.

No matter what the defenses throw at them, the Wildcats can adjust and exploit the holes of the defense. Mixing in a balance of traditional offset I-formations, single-back two tight end formations, several three-, four-, and five- wide spread variations, and even a dose of the Wildcat, KSU creates endless headaches for opposing coaches.

Even better yet, the Wildcats are extremely balanced in their run/pass splits out of each formation. While some teams become extremely predictable when they line-up in particular formations, KSU seems to do an incredible job of self-scouting to ensure they do not fall into any formation tendencies and become predictable. Whether it’s a strong play-action game out of the offset I-Formation or running a quarterback lead draw out of a shotgun spread formation, the Wildcats make sure opponents are threatened across the board in every formation they show.

The Air Raid gets the attention, but KSU creates a spread ethos in a way that includes a lot of tight ends and fullbacks (and about two good receivers). The Wildcats are incredibly unique, and considering they ranked 14th in Off. F/+ in their first year after Collin Klein left, it appears they know what they're doing.