High School vs College

If you go out and watch ten high school football games, there is a good chance that nine of those games the teams will have more running attempts and yards. Especially going back to pee-wee football, there are a lot less passing attempts than rushing attempts. This is probably because it's fairly easy to teach the quarterback to turn in either direction hand the ball off to the running back. It's a lot harder to teach a 3rd grader to read the defense and deliver the ball in the right place. For that matter, the wide receivers would also have to be taught how to run good routes and catch the ball properly. However at the high school level I'm surprised that there aren't more teams that are pass oriented. Especially when secondaries on high school are pretty bad, if a team has a tall wide receiver the quarterback can just lob it to him and there's a good chance it will be a catch.

Then there's college, in college football 96 out of the 129 teams have more passing yards than rushing yards, that's 74% of teams that are more pass oriented. This shows the big impact that the trend of spread offense has had. More and more teams are switching to a spread offense, these offenses generally have multiple wide receivers and an up-tempo attack. If you want to get a feel of how the spread offenses work, go look up highlights of last year's TCU-Baylor game which ended with a score of 61-58. A good spread offense like the ones that Baylor and TCU have are very hard to stop, because they can use short passes, screen passes, deep passes, and once the defense backs off they can run it up the middle. However the key to these offenses is having difference makers on offense, there needs to be a quick running back, there needs to be fast wide receiver, there needs to be a quarterback with a big arm. The spread offense is based on speed, and exploiting match-ups in space.

I think it comes down to the fact that a good spread or passing offense requires a fair amount of really good players. Whereas almost every high school has that one player who is either really fast or is just a beast who can plow over people when you give him the ball.