Ferd Lewis: Former Hawaii coach Bob Wagner says Air Force offense was pain to defend

Bob Wagner was a defensive coach on the University of Hawaii staff and remembers with clarity the 1980 season the Air Force Academy began its “experiment” with the wishbone offense.

“It was a pain in the ass,” Wagner recalls.

Thirty-nine years later the pain has yet to subside.

The option offense Air Force comes packing for today’s 5 p.m. game at Aloha Stadium has gone through several iterations since the inaugural “fishbone” of then-offensive coordinator Fisher DeBerry, but remains the Falcons’ trademark and has become a staple of military academy football.

The Falcons have run it so well for so long that their two rivals for the Commander-if-Chief’s Trophy, Army and Navy, were subsequently compelled to take up their own versions.

The Western Athletic Conference was an offensive laboratory in the 1970s and ’80 for schools that felt they had to go beyond the offensive convention of the times to win games. Brigham Young’s LaVell Edwards invested in one of the first wide-open passing attacks and Air Force head coach Ken Hatfield went the other direction, the ground-hugging triple option.

Hatfield hired DeBerry from Appalachian State to install what some at the Academy feared would be a disaster in joining the WAC. “ ‘What do you want to do that for?’,” Hatfield remembers athletic director Col. John Cline pointedly asking. “’Everybody says the option isn’t going to work here.’”

When Hatfield insisted, he said, Clune told him, “ ‘Then, we’d all better get our resumes ready.’ ”

The idea was that the Falcons didn’t need the biggest, most highly recruited players — which they had little shot at landing — to win. By employing an offense that most teams rarely came up against, one that relied on quickness, disciplined execution and teamwork while keeping the opponent’s offense off the field, the Falcons could even things up.

As one-time UH assistant Paul Johnson put it when Hawaii was to play Notre Dame, “They’ve got several Parade All-Americans — and we have several guys who have marched in a parade.”

For the Falcons, the move paid off with a winning season in 1982, a share of the conference crown in 1985 and a piece of the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy 17 times in a 21-year span.

When Hatfield went to Arkansas, DeBerry succeeded him in ’84. Troy Calhoun, a quarterback on that ’85 squad and the current head coach, followed DeBerry in 2007.

Along the way, Air Force’s success reverberated in Manoa when Wagner replaced Dick Tomey in 1987. Wagner believed — and athletic director Stan Sheriff agreed — that Hawaii also needed a niche offense.

Wagner knew well the problems that the Air Force offense posed for defenses, but also wanted a passing element, which he saw in the version employed at Georgia Southern, where Johnson was the offensive coordinator.

Curiously, eventually Annapolis and West Point picked from the UH coaching tree to install their versions.

Navy began its run with Johnson as offensive coordinator in 1995 after leaving UH and soon had its first winning season in 14 years. It has since prospered with Ken Niumatalolo, a former Rainbow and disciple of Johnson. Army, which had dabbled some with the option, got serious when it hired Rich Ellerson, a former UH assistant, in 2009, and a year later had its first winning campaign in more than a decade. Then, it hired another ex-UH coach, Jeff Monken, the current coach.

“You can see how (the Falcons) have changed and adapted over the years,” said Wagner, who now follows things from his Hawaii island ranch. “But they are still a pain.”

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.