Basic concepts, breakneck tempo allow Kenton to soar

KENTON, Ohio -- Before the statkeepers had sore wrists, before the national record holder for high school football passing yards was even born and before all the touchdowns and two-point conversions and 48-point a game averages created the need for a newer, fancier calculator, Mike Mauk had another kind of issue with mathematics.

The Kenton Wildcats were losing more than they won. Forget scoring on every possession; they were struggling to score at all.

Mauk had tried different base offenses, different ways of lining up his running backs and trying to find cracks in opposing defenses. Kenton won a total of six games in his first three years on the job, and if he didn't get that fixed he wouldn't be around to coach his two young sons if they ever grew up to be football players.

So, sometime in the late 1980s, Mauk experimented with an offense that didn't rely on the run. It was an idea much more strange than just novel at the time, and Mauk started studying an offense called the run and shoot that a handful of college programs had adopted. He ordered videos, went to coaching clinics and talked to people about why receivers going in motion and changing their routes on the fly might have a future, about how defenses used to defending two and even three running backs at the same time had to change so much against a formation with just one running back.

In 1990, Kenton started a sophomore at quarterback named Britton Crates, and he threw for more than 2,000 yards. The next year, he did it again -- and Kenton had a winning season. He did it again as a senior, finishing his high school career with 7,170 yards passing, an Ohio record at the time, before going on to play at Michigan State.

"I actually found a film -- an old VHS tape -- of 1990, and we were in an empty backfield, five-wide set," said Mauk, now in his 31st season on the job. "I can tell you I didn't know what I was doing then. We didn't know how to do anything with it, but (Crates) could throw it and we thought we were on to something.

"Him throwing for 2,000 yards in a season, that was a huge deal. You'd see it in the newspaper and it jumped off the page. Now, we do that in half a season."

He's not exaggerating.

With much less run than shoot, Kenton finally crashed its way to the Ohio state playoffs in 1998. Two seasons later, Mike Mauk's middle son, Ben, was a sophomore starting quarterback and the run and shoot playbook was crumpled up and thrown in the trash. Literally. Mike Mauk keeps a bunch of pencils at his desk and is always drawing and doodling somethinng, and he drew the beginnings of a five-wide spread system that included a bunch of screens, a few downfield throws and provided a bunch of opportunity for the quarterback to take a signal from the sideline then create on the fly. There would be no huddling, no hint of tapping the brakes.

In both 2001 and 2002, Kenton won the Div. IV state championship. Ben Mauk threw for 550 yards in a single game in 2001 and broke that record with 567 a few weeks later. By the time he was done, he'd set the national record with 17,364 passing yards, 10,000 more than Crates, one of his childhood heroes, had thrown for a decade earlier.

In 2011, Ben Mauk's record got broken. His younger brother, Maty, threw for 18,932 yards in four seasons before heading to the University of Missouri. Last year, then-junior Grant Sherman set a national record with a 684-yard passing game. Two weeks ago, in the playoff opener, Sherman tied his own record with eight touchdown passes, all in the first half.

Tonight, 12-0 Kenton plays for a regional championship. The Wildcats are averaging 436.7 passing yards per game.

Mike Mauk is still doodling, drawing, throwing a few pieces of paper away and saving some for future reference. Also with a pencil and across the desk from his dad each day during first period and lunch is Ben, now Kenton's offensive coordinator and in his first year as a full-time teacher at Kenton High School.

The first rule of Kenton's offense is just to go. The second rule is to go even faster.

The principles remain: Five wide all the time, always in shotgun, never in a huddle. Sometimes, four receivers are bunched to one side. Often, three receivers are on side and two create spacing and look to create mismatched on the other. Quick screens to the perimeter are the running plays and force defenders to tackle in space. Stop routes on the edge force cornerbacks to stay disciplined and the safeties to cover inside receivers running deep. Against multiple deep safety looks, the middle screen and quarterback draw are staples.

Mike Mauk doesn't chart number of snaps or time how quickly his team can get to the line, but it's fast. And he's usually yelling for it be faster.

Summer passing camps and 7-on-7 tournaments aren't just a way for Kenton to tinker and tune up for the season; the way the Wildcats play in those is the way they play.

"A lot of people want to mix in the run, and I won't criticize anybody that does it," Mauk said. "But in my mind, we don't spend a lot of time running the ball because we have to work on the fundamentals of what we're going to do when Friday night comes. We practice throwing it."

The other staple of Kenton's attack is that the Wildcats always go for two points after they score. Always.

"It's not an ego thing, it's not an X-and-O thing," Mauk said. "It's this: We just scored six but we want eight. If we can score and go for two it makes the the other team have to do the same thing if they want to keep up with us.

"The goal is always to score more points than the other team, as many as possible. The number on the scoreboard is the only number that counts. I tell our receivers I don't care how many catches they have or what record book they get in. It's about how many times they catch the ball then cross the goal line."

With 21 straight winning seasons, the mathematics have changed. More people than ever know that Kenton is 65 miles northwest of Columbus, 75 miles south of Toledo and an hour east of the Indiana border. Football fans know the name Mauk.

In a way, all this throwing came from Mike Mauk watching a man who ran the wing-t. He always admired coach Skip Baughman at St. Mary's Memorial "because there were certain things, certain plays they just did so well. And that's what we've tried to do, just be really good at a few things, keep it simple for the kids, and kind of grow it from there."

There are four base concepts to Kenton's passing attack and four quick routes to keep defenses honest.

"It's probably less than 10 plays -- the base plays plus the quick screens," Ben Mauk said. "We don't put too much on their plate because we want our guys playing fast. It's a bunch real simple calls. The goal is to get the plays in and out, get set and go."

Mike Mauk said the emphasis on a faster tempo is probably where the offense has changed the most since 2000, and that the thought of stolen signals or opponents knowing Kenton is running a "smash" or "stop" concept doesn't faze the Kenton coaches a bit.

One signal is as simple as Mike Mauk raising his right hand and pointing to his wife sitting behind him in the stands.

"You might know our signals, but you still have to get lined up and try to play it," he said, "because we're snapping it as fast as we can. Teaching and coaching that, it has to be simple. And over the course of a game, it's going to put a lot of pressure on a defense."

Of all the calls, e-mails and invitations to speak at coaching clinics Mike Mauk has received through the years, one inquiry about what makes this Kenton offense so unique stands out. Last summer, after Kenton traveled to Hoover, Ala., and won a national 7-on-7 tournament by defeating nationally-recognized Byrnes (S.C.) twice, Byrnes coach Bobby Bentley called Mike Mauk with a question.

"How'd you beat us?"

The two coaches talked a little shop, swapped some ideas and discussed those 7-on-7 games and their teams. The website MaxPreps.com, which tracks high school football nationwide, has Kenton, Ohio as the nation's top passing offense through games of Nov. 16. Byrnes is second.

"Kenton's receivers run very good, very precise routes," Bentley said. "We've seen them at a couple 7-on-7 camps. I've been very impressed with their quarterback play."

By now, Kenton is starting 'em young. Even at the youth levels, Kenton teams run the shotgun, five-wide offense. As early as middle school, quarterbacks are taught to diagnose man or zone coverages though the emphasis, Ben Mauk said, remains "on fundamentals, footwork. We're really big with the footwork. Balance and timing equals accuracy."

Naturally, just about everybody wants to be a receiver -- and every year, five of those jobs are available. But Mike Mauk insists that the defensive players are not outcasts, and that the best players each year who aren't quarterbacks play on defense. For a decade now, Kenton has been a full two-platoon team, essentially holding two separate practices, with very few players going both ways. One of this year's stars, Noah Furbush, was a wide receiver two years ago for Maty Mauk and now is a linebacker with a scholarship to Michigan.

"We came to camp with five guys competing for four defensive back spots, and the one who didn't win the job went to receiver," Mike Mauk said. "Our best players play defense. We don't abandon defense. We know it wins, that it's important. We have really unselfish kids. Three of our offensive linemen are former receivers. We have some receivers this year who will play defense next year, and they're looking forward to it.

In last week's regional semifinal, Kenton and Wooster Triway were tied, 6-6, midway through the second quarter. Three quick touchdowns -- and three two-point conversions -- later it was 30-6 by halftime. Triway hung around when it was a football game; Kenton pulled away when it was able to turn it into a track meet.

"We are a spread (offense) team, and there are lots of spread teams now, but first it's the tempo that makes Kenton different," Triway coach Tony Lee said. "They're going to get 80-90 offensive snaps in a game, and at our level most teams don't have guys that can keep up with that. We lived off adrenaline for a while, but they're not only really good, they stay fresh with the two-platoon system and they adjust on the fly.

"We played man coverage with two deep safeties, and they kept running the middle screen until they busted a couple tackles and turned them into big plays. And their defensive backs were fresh and able to break on the ball late in the second quarter, into the second half. You can't simulate that. Nothing they do is really fancy, but they do it really, really well."

At 5'11, Ben Mauk played quarterback at Wake Forest and Cincinnati, his final year in an up-tempo spread under coach Brian Kelly.

He almost never even played at Kenton.

After one of those important but informal throwing sessions in the summer before his freshman year, Ben and one of his buddies "started horsing around, insisting on wrestling each other," Mike Mauk said. His friend went for a playful body slam, but Ben twisted his body to resist.

He landed awkwardly, breaking bones in his foot and losing feelng below his ankle. Screws were inserted, and doctors weren't sure how it would heal. Eventually, the word came back that it wasn't going to get any better, that Ben would have a slight limp for the rest of his life but was free to continue with sports if he wanted to.

"It was an eye opener," Ben Mauk said. "It was just so frustrating at the time because my older brother (Jonathan) was a senior offensive lineman on that team, and we wanted to play together. Jonathan taught me so much about work ethic and being a team player and I wanted to win with him, for him, that year.

Now, Ben laughs.

"My dad hated it, but we had to run the ball that year," he said.

Today, Jonathan Mauk is the head coach at Bible Baptist High School in Savannah. Last year, his team -- running the family offense -- won the South Carolina Independent Schools Association Class A state title and scored 60 points in the state championship game.

Missouri saw Maty Mauk running Kenton's offense and recruited him on a simple premise: "You're already mastering what we want to do." Today, Maty calls home as Missouri goes through weeks of gameplanning and preparation for SEC games and shares tweaks, reads and new screen plays with his dad. Mike Mauk is never too far from his pencil.

This year's Kenton team is averaging 46.3 points per game and has been held under 32 only once since Week One, when Kenton beat Div. V state title contender Coldwater, 22-2. That 2011 team with Maty Mauk scored at least 30 points in its last 14 games and scored 40 or more eight times, averaging 45.6 for the season. Last year, when Kenton narrowly missed the playoffs at 6-4, it still averaged 38.8 points per game.

The 2010 team scored 51.5 points per game and went over 50 in nine of 13 games. The state title team of 2001 averaged 38.3, 48.6 in the playoffs. In 2002, Kenton started 0-2 but still went on to win the state title and score 44.7 for year, 51 per game in the playoffs.

The nation's most prolific high school passing offense tunes up behind the grocery store, just down the road from Kmart and in front of a cluster of apartments.

There are two practice fields behind Kenton High School, and on most days the defense works on one while the offense works on the other. At this time of year, Kenton practices for no more than an hour a day. Twenty or so minutes before practice, Sherman is on the field with four receivers, barking out simple route calls and throwing the same passes he throws in games. There's a little hitch in his delivery, like he's throwing a baseball, but he throws quite a fastball.

And he throws it often.

Each practice starts with the offense working on those quick screens, first to the left and then to the right, with Mike Mauk watching and yelling "faster...FASTER." Ben Mauk insists there's no secret to Kenton's success but that it comes from a "focus on fundamentals, 15 minutes throwing and blocking screens every day. Any team can draw them up. We drill them until we get really good at them."

There are two running plays in the playbook -- actually one play run in different directions. It's called, creatively enough, "left" and "right." Sherman is big, 6'5, and not especially mobile, so Kenton has relied a little more on bringing a receiver into line up at running back more than usual.

With Maty Mauk, the quarterback was the running back. He was the punter, too, kicking on the rare occasion Kenton had to out of the regular offensive formation. This year Kenton has a punter and a punt team that comes on when necessary. This year, Kenton has punted 25 times and scored 77 touchdowns.

Kenton has never kicked a field goal under Mike Mauk.

Never.

"It's not a gimmick or some wild (philosophy)," Mauk said. "A touchdown is six points; a field goal is three. I want six, then I want eight."

In Maty Mauk's final two seasons, Kenton tried an onside kick after every touchdown. Its defense wasn't especially strong, and Mike Mauk said "the best way for most teams to stop us was to keep the offense off the field. With the onside, even if they recovered it, that short field made it harder to keep our offense off the field."  

Kenton isn't onside kicking all the time anymore, but Mike Mauk still likes to go for it on fourth down, even in his own territory. There's no set theory or probability chart, though; he goes for it when he thinks his team will get it, and this season he trusts his defense if it doesn't work.

Lots of teams are running the spread now -- and succeeding -- but Kenton's numbers remain mostly unmatched. The full commitment to the tempo starts with conditioning, quarterback footwork and precise routes. Mike Mauk said defenses are getting better with blitzes and designed coverages because they've seen Kenton's offense and they face a variation of the spread more often now, but still believes tempo and simple adjustments negate even the best defensive X's and O's.

Mauk declines credit for revolutionizing the way so many teams are playing offense and scoffs at the records -- "we've won a bunch of games, and that's what I'm proud of -- but does have one really good story to tell about how far it's come. When Kenton played in its first state title game in 2001, one of the television announcers didn't know his microphone was on. He told his partner that he hoped Kenton didn't win "because if they do, everybody's going to try to run this offense. This isn't football."

Mauk won't share who the announcer was, but assumes he's still following football.