Oklahoma State hired Houston offensive coordinator Dana Holgerson last week in an attempt to ramp up their passing game, and make their offense more potent overall. While Mike Gundy has already insisted he will retain playcalling duties, Holgerson's addition to the staff raises another interesting question: Will we see a second team running the Air Raid offense in the Big 12? We haven't had two Big 12 teams running the Air Raid since Baylor joined Texas Tech as the second team during an ill-fated attempt at the offense from 2006 to 2007. Baylor's inability to keep Shawn Bell healthy ultimately ruined their chances of long-term success in 2006, and Blake Syzmanski simply wasn't a good enough quarterback to run the offense in 2007.

Having another team run the Air Raid offense would benefit A&M (and other Big 12 teams) because it means we would see this offense more than once a season, when we play Texas Tech. With Tommy Tuberville's decision to hire Neal Brown away from Troy, it is safe to say the Air Raid will continue to be run at Tech. If Oklahoma State goes to an Air Raid passing attack, defenses would actually have an extra week of practice by default against this offense, which would make it easier for them to get used to the concepts, and theoretically, easier to defend.

Holgerson was the offensive coordinator and QB coach at Texas Tech from 2005-2007 before becoming the offensive coordinator at Houston for the past two seasons. At Tech, Holgerson was most likely involved in game prep and gave Mike Leach the view-from-the-sky in the pressbox, because Leach called the plays for the offense. Moving to Houston gave Holgerson a chance to run his own show, and he was incredibly successful there, with the nation's leading offense (563 yards per game), top passing offense (433.7 ypg), and top scoring offense this past season (42.2 ppg). While Holgerson had Case Keenum at QB at Houston, it remains to be seen who will be calling the signals for Oklahoma State in 2010 after the graduation of Zac Robinson. While I don't expect Oklahoma State to run pure Air Raid (with Joe Wickline there, they'll still run the ball a fair amount), I do expect to see some core Air Raid concepts in the passing game, like Mesh, Smash, Shallow Cross, and Y-Stick.

How does this effect A&M? We begin conference play by facing Oklahoma State on October 2. We have two weeks to prepare for the game, with a bye week after facing Florida International. We play Texas Tech at the end of the month, on October 30. We could conceivably be beginning and ending the month facing essentially the same offense. The game plan we use to defeat Oklahoma State on October 2 could be very similar to the game plan we'll use to defeat Texas Tech on October 30. Of course, the reverse is also true; while playing Oklahoma State will help our defense get familiar with the Air Raid concepts before we play Tech, it will also help Tech see how we might choose to defend them. I am a firm believer that familiarity makes things easier on the defense, though, and having another team in the Big 12 South running Air Raid concepts will help our defense learn to contain the offense (and help other Big 12 teams, too).