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If Nebraska offensive coordinator Tim Beck employs the Pistol formation next fall as much as he did in NU's spring game, he'll find an avid supporter in Colin Kaepernick.

He's admittedly biased. In four years as quarterback at Nevada — where coach Chris Ault invented the sawed-off shotgun formation — Kaepernick ran nearly every play out of the Pistol. He became the first collegiate player to throw for 10,000 yards and rush for 4,000 in a career.

Perhaps the most convincing aspect of Kaepernick's testimony was when he explained the confused, panicked look he'd see in the eyes of defensive players.

“Some teams tried to redo their whole defensive scheme just for our game,” said Kaepernick a week before being picked in the second round of the NFL draft by the San Francisco 49ers. “It makes them play honest football. You can't do things to the Pistol that you can do to other offenses.”

That's because, to its most ardent defenders, the Pistol is a perfect marriage of pro-style and spread principles.

By placing the quarterback in a short shotgun just four yards from the ball — and a running back two or three yards directly behind that — it can function like an I-formation. It can incorporate the zone read. It allows for classic dropback and play-action passing schemes. With the speedy Kaepernick, Nevada even ran some old-school veer plays popularized in the 1970s.

“It's versatile,” Ault said last week. “Whatever you believe in as a coach, you can use it. If you're a power coach, you can run it. If you want to adapt something, you can — and you don't have to change the formation.”

Dozens of high-profile teams — including Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, LSU and especially UCLA — pack a mean Pistol in their playbook. The Huskers used it only occasionally last fall under Shawn Watson. But if last month's Red-White spring game is any indication, that could change.

The Huskers operated out of the Pistol frequently in the Red's 32-29 win over the White. Redshirt freshman quarterback Brion Carnes threw both of his touchdowns out of it. Walk-on Zach Taylor scored a fourth-quarter touchdown out of it. Carnes ran the zone read. Cody Green perfectly executed a speed option pitch to Rex Burkhead.

Beck said he revealed only a fraction of his offense in the spring game. But the real advantage of the Pistol, Kaepernick said, isn't its exoticism, but how it hides an offense's intent on a given play.

“You never have to tip your hand,” he said.

In a traditional shotgun formation, the running back usually has to align to the left or right of the quarterback, who is stationed five to eight yards from the ball. That “hip alignment,” Ault said, is a small but useful clue for the defense.

Although deep shotgun, spread-option teams such as Oregon often hide the direction of a play with fakes, counter actions and multiple backs, defenders still get a clear view of the running back, who may cheat with his steps or even his eyeballs before the play.

In the Pistol, that running back is essentially hidden behind the quarterback. When Ault created the formation in 2005, he noticed his own defensive coaches in a panic. Nevada's linebackers couldn't see a running back's initial steps.

“It slowed them down,” Ault said. “Defenses aren't able to scheme as much when (the running back) is directly behind the quarterback.”

Ault also found that Nevada was still able to use a “north-south” running game, since the back's first step was downhill toward the quarterback — not a lateral or diagonal step usually seen in the traditional shotgun.

The Pistol includes Bill Callahan-era “zone” and “stretch” plays, but also power counters and sweeps, too. One Nevada play, called “Horn,” is an offshoot of Tom Osborne's patented counter-trey, calling for the center and play-side tackle to pull around the tight end while a running back patiently waits for a lane to clear. Last year, Roy Helu scored long touchdowns against Washington and Missouri on a similar-looking play, although the Huskers used center Mike Caputo and guard Ricky Henry to pave the way.

But NU's offensive linemen were sometimes asked to be of two minds in 2010, alternating between smash-mouth power blocking — think of that second-quarter, throwback touchdown drive at UW — and the “influence” techniques used in a deep-zone read offense.

In the Pistol, the Wolf Pack's offensive line could consistently attack its targets instead of nudging them out of the way. As such, their line splits were that of a traditional pro-style offense rather than the chasms seen in spread offenses such as Missouri's and Texas Tech's.

For Ault, the Pistol worked immediately. Nevada improved from 5-7 in 2004 to 9-3 in 2005. As he watched LSU surprise Ohio State with the formation in the 2008 BCS national championship game — “the announcers didn't even know what it was called,” Ault said — he kept adding bells and whistles to the Pistol, retrofitting passing plays from pro-style attacks.

The Wolf Pack have been to five straight bowls. They finished 13-1 last year — with wins over California, BYU, Boise State and Boston College — and boasted the nation's fourth-best offense, averaging 519 yards per game.

Kaepernick's senior numbers — 3,022 yards passing, 1,201 yards rushing, seven yards per carry — were no less eye-popping than Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton's. His best memory of 2010 — other than upsetting, at long last, Boise State — involved hitting Cal's defense for 497 yards in a 52-31 win on ESPN. The Golden Bears — who finished with the nation's No. 18 total defense and held Oregon to 15 points later in the season — were repeatedly gashed by Nevada's running game.

“Oh, they never knew what hit them,” Kaepernick said.

Neither did Texas when UCLA operated out of the Pistol and rushed for 264 yards in a 34-12 upset. Two weeks later, the swift Longhorns held NU's zone-read attack to 125 yards in a 20-13 upset of their own.

Neither did opponents of Arkansas — which in 2010 hired former Nevada offensive coordinator Chris Klenakis to coach its offensive line — when the Razorbacks threw effectively out of the Pistol as part of the nation's No. 4 passing offense.

Watch tape, apparently, and you'll want to run it, too. “The more you watch Nevada, the more you want to put in their offense,” former NFL coach Jon Gruden said during ESPN's second day of NFL draft coverage on Friday. “They shred people.”

Ault isn't sure how many teams now use the Pistol. But coaches at every level want to know more. He told the Reno Gazette-Journal that Texas “inundated” Nevada's offices this spring. He helped then-UCLA offensive coordinator Norm Chow install it in Westwood last spring. The Bruins parted ways with Chow but kept the Pistol, hiring away Ault's running backs coach for a spit-and-polish.

Coach and quarterback think that it works best with the no-huddle pace Nevada uses. Like any offense or formation, it can be stopped. Until last year, Boise State — the Wolf Pack's primary foil — often did just that. In Kaepernick's 2007 collegiate debut, Nebraska's defense, which proved porous later in the season, stuffed the Pistol in a 52-10 win.

It takes time to perfect. Quarterbacks and centers need time to adjust to the “delicate” short shotgun snap, Ault said. It's the first thing Nevada works on at length during spring and fall camps.

“That's the biggest thing — the finesse of the snap,” Ault said.

Like those old wishbone and veer offenses of the 1970s and 1980s, the Pistol's running game moves quickly. The snap reaches the quarterback in a half-second. The running back is already moving quickly toward the line of scrimmage. Kaepernick remembers having to acclimate himself to a lightning-fast veer play — finding the “read” defender and making a decision in half the time Martinez had for NU last year.

“If everybody isn't on the same page — if everybody's not precise with what they're doing — the offense is not going to run,” Kaepernick said.

While the flexibility of the formation is arguably its greatest asset, Kaepernick sees it as a challenge, too. The formation offers such a big umbrella for so many offenses that a quarterback has to keep it straight, especially in a no-huddle attack, which Nebraska seems to be gravitating toward.

To fire this Pistol right, Kaepernick said, a quarterback had better know exactly where to aim.

“As the quarterback, you really have to know what the offense is trying to do,” he said. “Otherwise, you'll run a play you think is OK, but, when it comes down to it — it's not.”

Contact the writer:

402-202-9766, sam.mckewon@owh.com

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