Bill Yeomen’s Influence on My Early Option Education
This is an excerpt from my book “Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense: An Evolution of Option Football” – It’s the role Bill Yeomen’s influence had on my early study of Option Football. Yeoman took a mediocre University of Houston Football team & turned it into a scoring machine.
His success influenced Homer Rice, whose system of combining the option & the Dropback pass had a huge influence on me as well. Here’s the excerpt from my book
The Split Back Veer
Bill Yeomen is generally considered the inventor of The Split Back Veer Offense at the University of Houston. The Coogs were coming off a 2-6-1 season in 1964 and managed to score barely 100 points and Coach Yeomen’s seat was heating up. This the third disappointing season for Yeomen. Then with speedster Warren McVea joining the Varsity, Yeomen tweaked the Split T and told the O. line “to get out of the way” and the Triple Option was hatched in the spring of 1965. (Dia. #1 – 2)
So Yeomen’s Split Back Veer took a Double Option and made it a Triple Option and this was the next major development in Option Football. It transformed The Houston Cougars from a cupcake to an Offensive juggernaut. The Coogs started out in 1965 1-4 and scored only 40 points. Yeomen felt his offensive line could not handle the defenses the faced so he went exclusively to his new Veer. His career and College Football changed forever the day Houston upset Ole Miss with a 17-3 victory running the Split Back Veer. The next week UH upset
#8 Kentucky 38-21. They ended the season with a 4-5-1 record. In 1966. UH finished 8-2, and as they say the rest is history. Bill Yeoman went on to a Hall of Fame career & changed football forever. His final record with UH was 160 – 108 –8.
The success of UH got me interested in the Veer as I was starting to think seriously about coaching football. Later in my career I had the pleasure of speaking on Option Football at one of Coach Yeomen’s clinics in Atlanta in 1990, & then spent the entire afternoon using up all the napkins in Atlanta talking ball with The Father of the Veer.
Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense: An Evolution of Option Football is available now at Amazon .
