Under wraps until now, Central Michigan is ready to show off 'power spread' offense
Central Michigan has greatly altered its offense over the course of the last nine months, and will look quite different for a number of reasons, starting Saturday vs. New Mexico.
When he arrives as the visitor at an opponents stadium, Matt Drinkall makes a beeline for the garbage can.
Not because he has anything to put in it, but because of what he might pull out.
“I go to stadiums, you know, the first thing I do?” Drinkall said. “I go through every single garbage can and dumpster. Every single one of them. You know why? You know how many GAs just throw away the stuff that's really important? All of them. All these big schools have 5,000 workers. Hard to track all of them. I've been doing that my whole career, man."
What is paranoia to most, through the eyes of a football coach, might just come across as exhaustive and creative. Anything to mitigate risk or create an advantage is worth a shot. And while it might not seem that prying eyes and listening ears in Albuquerque would be honed in on Central Michigan football’s offensive evolution from 2025 to 2026, CMU’s head coach certainly isn’t taking any chances.
As the Chippewas have changed the offense to better embody what Drinkall and Co. want the product to be over the offseason, Mitten Football agreed to withhold certain details of these on-field changes in exchange for the opportunity to discuss and understand the offense deeper, to generate this report. This ethical tradeoff is something Mitten Football aims to be transparent about, and felt was worthwhile given it pertained to on-field schematics, which aren’t of major absolute news value.
In short, we waited to publish until shortly before kickoff in Central Michigan’s season opener in order to bring this (hopefully) more insightful, comprehensive report on the what, why and how of Central Michigan’s evolved offense.
“25 minutes before kick,” Drinkall said. “Because that's when everyone goes back into the locker room and everyone checks their phones. That's like a real thing. You check lines, you check everything to see if someone found out something at the last minute."
The deal with CMU’s 'power spread' offense
Drinkall isn’t a mad scientist, but can sometimes have the air of one when talking about the various influences he wants to pull from for the Central Michigan offense.
“So, sort of, Kyle Shanahan, mixed with Rich Rod — sort of. And Chip Kelly-ish,” Drinkall says, pointing to various schemes the Chippewas might emulate. “And then Gus Malzahn — probably like Rich Rod and Gus Malzahn.”
Drinkall brings his own influences to the party, too. He played at Iowa and made his mark coaching at the FBS level at Army. But don’t look for too many wingbone or flexbone looks from the Chippewas this fall.
Andrew Graham
Andrew Graham
Instead, expect a blend of run concepts borrowing from some of the aforementioned schematic trees. Drinkall explained that a good facsimile for what the offense will look like for Central Michigan is what the 49ers and Shanahan like to do, but just run out of the shotgun, exclusively so, and with the college zone-read staples folded in.
Add in modern RPOs that effectively make that a triple option play — and perhaps a shovel will get tagged on, looking more like the traditional triple — and
“So there's a lot of those elements, like, reads and isolation plays that are not necessarily, like, what you would think of,” Drinkall said.
And that departure from a very heavy under-center style from last year is something Drinkall tried to use to his advantage ahead of the season.
While CMU has been practicing heavily out of the shotgun, the tape from 2025 showed an offense that played slow, fistfight-in-a-phonebooth football. Drinkall jokes about how the constraints he put on the offense and coordinator Jim Chapin would make him want to choke out the head coach, were he in the same position. Such a heavy tendency can be used to some advantage, at least as far as subterfuge is concerned.
After CMU’s first scrimmage, Drinkall made sure the CMU social team included a photo of a quarterback under shotgun in the I formation in a post-scrimmage post.
Scrimmage Scenes.#FireUpChips pic.twitter.com/Arhvg6x1c3
— Central Michigan Football (@CMU_Football) August 22, 2026
Much akin to the Shanahan 49ers, particularly the vintage that made the Super Bowl in 2019, the Chippewas are open to being flexible and funky with who lines up where, and how they get the ball to playmakers.
To wit, in the aforementioned scrimmage, fullback Rusty VanWetzinga split out into the slot, ran a seam and got wide open for a 38-yard gain inside the five.
Receivers, along with lining up in tight, wing alignments, are being consistently advantaged with motion presnap and incorporation into the run game. That’s where some of the tagged pitches for some option plays — which functionally makes it the triple — could come from.
The Chippewas are also trying to be positionally versatile within these looks. Tight ends will line up in numerous spots, running backs will get into versatile positions, too, as Central seeks to get varied and unpredictable on offense.
“We want fast guys to be fast guys,” Chapin said. “And so we would put those guys in a position where they're touching the football. And so sometimes that's not a drop back pass, but there's a bunch of other ways that we can get those guys touches and so we expect to do that.”
A big animating factor in this mode of play for Central Michigan is how Drinkall can recruit at the G6 level, specifically at two positions: Offensive tackle and quarterback.
More specifically, the sorts of athletes and skillsets that can play a more conventional offense, so to speak, are being recruited by the biggest, richest, bluest-of-blood programs.
Central Michigan and its ilk can find and develop really good players, but that means not trying to beat others at a game they’re better suited to win.
“The skill set that we need for those guys to be really effective at tackle is not the same skill set that Ohio State needs those guys to be good at, to go play in the NFL. So the reality of Central Michigan now is if we signed people that are built like Joe Staley and Eric Fisher now, I'm really just recruiting them to play somewhere else.”
At quarterback, Drinkall rattled off a laundry list of college football legends, most of them who never ended up as NFL stars: JT Barrett, Pat White, Nick Marshall,
So when Central Michigan’s offense takes the field tonight, one can know this has been a work in progress over the offseason, an amalgamation of proven schematic trends to put defenses in conflict, all built behind a rugged, old and experienced offensive line.
The coaches have dubbed it a power spread, two rather easy catch-all terms that do encompass what the Chippewas want to do. But really, what CMU plans to try and do on offense this season is maybe its own, new thing: The Central Michigan offense.
