There a ton of examples that prove you don’t need to be different of offense though. That’s what my whole post was about. Can you point to me any significant differences in the way Wake Forest and Alabama run their offenses? Or what about Utah and Ohio State?
Cincinnati, Baylor, Ole Miss, Oklahoma State, Utah, BYU, Pitt, UL Lafayette, Wake Forest, Houston, UTSA, and Kentucky are all ranked in the top 25. What do all of those schools have in common? They’re all running the same offensive concepts from the same formations as Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, etc. None of those schools are recruiting powerhouses, and they all beat multiple teams with more talent than they had even though they weren’t “different” on offense. Georgia, Michigan, and Iowa are probably the most unique offenses in the top 25, and that’s just because they’re running vanilla sets and relying heavily on their run game to the set the tone. You saw what happened when Georgia had to play against a team who shut down their run game, scored on their defense, and forced them to use the spread concepts that are most common in today’s college game. They got smoked.
The formations and the concepts aren’t what makes a successful offense. The only thing that matters is the execution. You can run the same exact play 80 times in a game, and if everyone executed their job perfectly that play would work every single time. But because eventually a defense would catch on to that, you have to change things up. That’s where your route trees, your blocking schemes, your QB progressions, and running lanes come from.
The biggest difference between Alabama’s offense and Georgia Tech’s offense isn’t the concepts, it’s the execution. Same thing with Pitt and Georgia Tech, or Wake Forest and Alabama. Their players are doing a better job of executing their designed concept than ours are. And Alabama’s do a better job than literally everyone else.
So, you don’t need a unique offense that’s only good because most teams don’t know how to prepare for it, all you need is an offense that properly executes it’s plays more times than not. How can that be accomplished? Well, you could just get better players that will be better at executing a design and can improvise when needed ie: Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame, etc. Or you can coach lesser players to always be in the right spot and always do what they need to do to complete a design ie: Pitt, Wake Forest, Utah, Baylor, Kentucky, etc.