Florida State coach Willie Taggart's offense built on explosive plays

The "Gulf Coast Offense" was designed by Florida State coach Willie Taggart when he was at South Florida.

It's designed to spread defenses out, move fast, and deliver explosive plays. It's what Taggart refers to as "Lethal Simplicity."

Oregon's 2017 season is a good look at what happens when Taggart has the right personnel leading the team and what happens when he doesn't.

Unlike most up-tempo offenses, Taggart's offense isn't designed to run a ton of plays. 

Oregon ran 939 plays in 2017 -- and while that may seem like a lot to FSU fans after the Seminoles finished 107th with 808 plays -- it was only 42nd in college football during the 2017 season.

The offense is designed to get the ball into the endzone quickly with explosive plays, and that is something that we did see during 2017 season from Oregon.

The Ducks finished 28th in the country with 73 plays of 20-plus yards.

That includes the six games that starting quarterback Justin Herbert was out with a broken collar bone in the middle of the season, and the bowl game against Boise State that Taggart did not coach.

Before -- and after Herbert's injury -- the Ducks' offense was rolling, and showed just how effective this offense can be.

Oregon had 52 plays of 20 yards or more in the six games with Herbert at the helm. That comes out to 8.7 explosive plays per game.

Oklahoma -- which led the country with 117 plays of more than 20 yards last season -- averaged 8.4 explosive plays per game. No other team averaged more than eight per game.

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Without Herbert, the Ducks were forced to turn to freshman Braxton Burmeister. 

He really struggled in the passing game and Oregon became one-dimensional on offense. Burmeister had four games where he threw for less than 75 yards and finished the season with two touchdowns and six interceptions. 

The Ducks had just 21 explosive plays of 20 or more yards in the seven games without Herbert or Taggart.

Herbert did miss some of the more difficult games during that time -- like Stanford and Washington -- but the numbers with him on the field are still impressive regardless. The Ducks were 5-1 with Herbert at the helm and Taggart calling plays. They were 1-6 without him. 

In 2016, South Florida finished 13th in college football with 85 explosive plays with Quentin Flowers. In 2015 -- the Gulf Coast Offense's first year of existence -- USF was 25th with 77 explosive plays.

The FSU offense was 70th with 57 explosive plays during the 2017 season, though the Seminoles did have to deal with a back-up quarterback for the final 12 games.

FSU has the athletes at running back -- Cam Akers, Khalan Laborn, and Jaques Patrick  should all have very productive seasons for the Seminoles -- to produce the big plays Taggart is looking for, and the wide receiving corps will be much deeper and athletic than a season ago, which will make a big impact.

It will depend on the quarterback -- as nearly every offense in college football outside of Alabama's does -- to make Taggart's offense run the way he wants it to, but it remains to be seen if there's a quarterback on the roster that will be able to do so.