How a Forgotten Offensive Guru Changed College Football

Late last month, the University of Houston retired football jersey No. 7 to honor former star quarterbacks David Klingler and Case Keenum. Klingler, who starred for the Cougars in the early 1990s, didn't attend the ceremony. He was busy watching his son play high school football.

Still, Klinger says, he's grateful that his alma mater remembered him. And as Houston continues to reemerge as nationally relevant football program under coach Tom Herman—the Cougars were ranked No. 6 in the Associated Press poll earlier this fall, their highest position since Klinger led the program to No. 3 in 1990—there's someone else who deserves remembering, too.

Back then, with coach John Jenkins in charge, Houston was college football's most intriguing and polarizing team. Most coaches believed that defense and running the ball won games; Jenkins laughed at that notion. Instead, his Cougars ran a no-huddle offense and lined up with four receivers on most plays, compiling eye-popping passing statistics and forcing defenses to cover the entire field.

As precursors to the passing masterminds and spread formations that have transformed contemporary college football, Jenkins and his Houston teams are forgotten disruptors—a coach and a system that were way, way ahead of their time.

"I think the game's more fun for players now than it was 20 or 30 years ago," says Hal Mumme, a longtime college coach and offensive guru who learned from Jenkins. "And John Jenkins was a big part of changing those attitudes."

Jenkins only spent six years at Houston: three as offensive coordinator, and three as head coach. He resigned under pressure, and hasn't coached in college again. But he had a lasting impact on the sport.

Consider: Houston's 1989 offense, which was led by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Andre Ware, still holds the NCAA record for passing yards and total yards per game and is second in points per game. One year later, Klingler set several NCAA marks that remain today, including passing yards per game and touchdowns per game. Ware and Klingler, both of whom ran option offenses in high school, became first round NFL draft picks in large part due to their success in Jenkins's offense.

"It's taken college football 20-some odd years to catch up to what we were doing back then," Klingler says. "And in some ways, they still haven't. That just tells you how much of an offensive genius John Jenkins was."

Jenkins first became interested in X's and O's as a student at the University of Arkansas. He earned a varsity letter in 1971 as the backup quarterback to Joe Ferguson, who started 171 games in a 17-year NFL career. The Razorbacks patterned their offense after the one popularized by longtime professional and college coach Sid Gillman, one of the first men to embrace the passing game.

Still, Jenkins tried to take things a step further. One of his professors gave him a book called "Run-and-Shoot Football: Offense of the Future" written by a high school coach in Ohio named Glenn "Tiger" Ellison. Motivated by Ellison's teachings, Jenkins was eager to share his theories with anyone who would listen.

"Any free time I had from classes, I would be over in the coaches' offices looking at film and talking to different coaches about play design and stuff and just pestering the heck out of those guys," says Jenkins, 64, now a scout for the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts. "Quite often I would bring in plays that I would've drawn up on pizza boxes or brown paper grocery sacks. My offensive coordinator always got a kick out of that."

After graduating from Arkansas in 1974, Jenkins coached at high schools in Arkansas and Texas; coached defensive backs under Lou Holtz back at Arkansas; coached linebackers at Mississippi State; and in 1983 accepted a special teams position with the Houston Gamblers of the United States Football League.

That's where the fun began. Under offensive coordinator Darrel "Mouse" Davis, the Gamblers ran a "Run N Shoot" offense and led the league in scoring, putting up more than 34 points per game in 1984. When Davis left in the offseason to coach the Denver Gold, Jenkins took his place—and opened up the Gamblers' offense even more, using four-receiver sets and the running back in the passing game.

This was the first time in nearly a decade that Jenkins had coached offense. He says that was an advantage, not a handicap. "Any conversation that you have about offensive football, unless you have a full, full grasp and understanding of all the intricate details of defense, then your conversation's useless," he says. "Unless you know what's happening to you on defense, then you're just rolling dice and you're playing a guessing game."

During the 1985 season opener, Gamblers quarterback Jim Kelly threw for an American professional football record 574 yards and helped Houston overcome a 20-point, fourth quarter deficit to pull off an improbable 34-33 victory over the Los Angeles Express (whose quarterback was future Hall of Famer Steve Young).

Kelly, a future Hall of Famer himself, led the USFL with 4,623 yards passing and 39 touchdowns that season, while the Gamblers scored a league-high 30.2 points per game. "John's one of those guys that I will never forget," Kelly says. "He has a special place in my heart."

Kelly recalls a coach who was obsessed with detail: receiver routes, quarterback footwork, the job of every defender on every play. He remembers Jenkins as enthusiastic, quick to smile, a man who called everyone "hoss."

Oh, and Jenkins was also something of a fashion rebel—at least by the uniform, windbreaker n' khakis standards of today's coaches. "John's work ethic on coaching and what he believes in was right at the top, along with his fashion of clothes he wore," Kelly says. "He had bright red pants, the platinum shoes, the white, blond hair."

The USFL folded after Kelly's breakout year, so Jenkins followed Gamblers head coach Jack Pardee to the University of Houston. The Cougars were coming off a 1-10 season during which they averaged 11.4 points per game, No. 103 out of 105 Division I-A teams.

At first, the Cougars had some trouble adjusting from former coach Bill Yeoman's conventional, ground-pounding option offense to Jenkins' wide-open attack. In his second season, Jenkins cracked the code. The Cougars scored 39.5 points per game, third-best in the country, and finished 9-3 while walloping Texas 66-15. It was the most points the Longhorns had allowed to a Southwest Conference opponent, breaking the mark set a year earlier against Houston.

Nevertheless, the football world remained skeptical of Jenkins. Most coaches thought running the ball was the way to win, and whether or not they said it out loud, they subscribed to the philosophy of legendary former Texas coach Darrell Royal, who famously said that three things can happen when teams pass—and two of them are bad.

Mumme was different. A Texas high school coach at the time, he looked up to Jenkins and other pass-happy coaches such as Davis, June Jones and LaVell Edwards. All of them were essentially heretics. "They thought we were crazy," Mumme says. "They thought Jenks was crazy, too … If you went to a coaches' clinic and one of those guys was speaking, you could be pretty much assured there wouldn't be anybody in the room except one or two coaches."

In December 1988, the NCAA placed Houston on three years of probation for recruiting violations that occurred when Yeoman was the team's coach. The Cougars were banned from playing on television during the 1989 season and prohibited from competing in bowl games in 1989 and 1990.

Despite the sanctions and lack of televised games, however, the national media could not ignore the Cougars and Ware, their junior quarterback from nearby Galveston. Ware set an NCAA record for passing yards in a half (517) in Houston's 95-21 victory over SMU in 1989. He didn't slow down much from there, setting then-records for most passing yards (4,699), total yards (4,661) and completions (365) in a season.

Ware became the first African-American quarterback—and also the first player from a program on probation—to win the Heisman trophy.

"There would be times I would come to the line of scrimmage and I would wink and smile at a defensive back and let him know that I'm getting ready to come right at you," Ware says. "That's just how much confidence we had in what we were doing."

Houston's 1989 team still holds Football Bowl Subdivision records for passing yards (511.3) and total yards (624.9) per game and is second all-time with 53.5 points per game. That season, the Cougars finished 9-2 and lost their two games by a combined 10 points. "Not to sound arrogant, but we were so good at (offense) that we just called the plays from the sideline," Ware says. "There was a point coach Jenkins would use a bull horn to call the plays. We didn't care if the defense knew what we were doing. We would just out-execute you even if we told you the play."

Sure enough, the Cougars rarely watched film of their opponents. Instead, Jenkins spent hours teaching his offensive players how to recognize defensive coverages and fronts and respond to the various alignments that defenses implemented. They also focused on perfecting their skills. During each practice, the quarterbacks threw 300 to 450 passes, all of which were charted and analyzed. It helped prepare them for games when the Cougars were determined to throw as often as possible.

"John Jenkins used to tell us, 'Every running play is a wasted opportunity to score,'" Klingler says. "He really did a great job of teaching this. If we had 70 snaps on offense and we only threw seven or eight touchdowns, then we failed on over 60 plays … He's over there driving us to be better. We're still scoring 65, 70 points in a game and all we see is a bunch of failure where we didn't do our job."

In January of 1990, Pardee was hired by the NFL's Houston Oilers. Jenkins took over as the Cougars' head coach, and even though the Detroit Lions selected Ware with the No. 7 pick in the NFL draft, his offense didn't miss a beat.

The Cougars started the 1990 season 8-0 and rose to No. 3 in the national rankings. They then lost to Texas, but rebounded with an 84-21 victory over Eastern Washington that saw Klingler throw an NCAA-record 11 touchdown passes.

After the game, Eastern Washington coach Dick Zornes complained about Houston running up the score. He wasn't alone. Thing was, neither Jenkins nor his players gave much of a damn. Most of them hadn't been recruited by high-profile Southwest Conference programs such as Texas and Texas A&M, so they were determined to prove their opponents wrong.

Klingler, who finished the 1990 season by throwing for an NCAA-record 716 yards against Arizona State in Japan, says the Cougars only had two running plays in their playbook: a trap and a draw. They wanted to throw the ball nearly every down.

"We were gonna score until there was no time left on the clock and if you didn't like it, then stop it, particularly when it's a conference game," Klingler says. "This isn't fun, fair, positive. This isn't some big, mean high school playing against a bunch of little sixth graders."

Klingler set NCAA records for passing yards (5,140) and touchdowns (54) in a season and placed fifth in the 1990 Heisman Trophy voting. If he had declared for the 1991 NFL draft, he likely would've been the top overall pick—he turned down basketball scholarship offers from Stanford, Pittsburgh, Kansas and other schools to play college football, and Jenkins considers Klingler and longtime NFL and USFL running back Herschel Walker as the two best athletes he ever coached.

Instead, Klingler returned to school and entered the 1991 season as the Heisman co-favorite along with BYU quarterback Ty Detmer, who won the award in 1990. Klingler appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated's college football preview issue holding a lit stick of dynamite. The cover read: "Bombs Away!"

That same issue featured an article on Jenkins, in which two unnamed coaches—one from the Big Eight and one from the Southeastern Conference—criticized Jenkins for his perceived arrogance and running up the score. "For somebody who is really a pretty good guy," Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum told Sports Illustrated writer Curry Kirkpatrick in the article, "John has managed to piss off coaches all over the country."

Was that a factor in Houston's subsequent slump? Was karma? It's hard to say. The Cougars were thumped by No. 2 Miami 40-10 early in the 1991 season, losing three straight games to fall out of the national rankings. An inexperienced offensive line was unable to consistently protect Klingler, whose numbers dipped across the board.

After the Cincinnati Bengals selected Klingler with the No. 6 pick in the 1992 NFL draft, his younger brother, Jimmy Klingler, took over as Houston's starter. He threw for 3,818 yards and 32 touchdowns, but the Cougars again struggled to pass protect. Meanwhile, their defense allowed more than 35 points per game, the fourth-worst average in Division 1-A.

Houston finished 4-7. The next spring, Jenkins resigned under pressure after a former assistant coach alleged that he paid for a recruit's summer tuition at a community college. The assistant also claimed the Cougars had longer practices than the NCAA allowed.

To this day, Jenkins denies the allegations. "I had such great love for the place and a desire to remain there," he says. "To this day, I still love the University of Houston. I love the Houston Cougars and wish them nothing but the best. That was a big, big part of my life."

Since leaving Houston, Jenkins has bounced around. He has spent most of his time coaching and scouting in the Canadian Football League, but also has coached in the Arena Football League and a few small professional leagues that have folded.

"My coaching background reads pretty much like that old Clint Eastwood movie, High Plains Drifter, where he rides into town and paints it red and shoots up the town and then he rides off to another place," he says.

While Jenkins is happy with his current role with the Argonauts, he still thinks about returning to college coaching. How, he wonders, would his offense look now? "If anybody would ever hire him today, it would be the same discussions," Klingler says. "They'd be scoring 95 points against people and everybody would be offended about how he was running up the score. It would be right back to the same thing because he's just that good."

That said, what if? could be the wrong question. Maybe Jenkins doesn't have to wonder; maybe he just has to look around. Ware, who is now an ESPN college football analyst, said coaches often ask him about his Houston days. When he called the Missouri-Kentucky game on Oct. 29, he noticed Missouri ran some of the same formations and routes that the Cougars did in the late 1980s and 1990s.

"It's still very prevalent out there, some of the stuff that we did," Ware says. "It's grown. It started as a plant and sprung its own limbs, and now you see what it is today. I think we were the foundation of what you see a lot, not only in college but in some NFL stadiums on Sundays."

Indeed. When Oakland Raiders quarterback Derek Carr threw for 513 yards in a game last month—nearly breaking Kelly's pro football record—the retired quarterback received a text from his old USFL coach.

"He said, 'Yo, gunslinger, I was a little leery of [Carr] breaking our record' or something like that," Kelly says. "I just laughed. I love John. He's just a hoot. He's a good ol' boy."

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