Jalen Sauer is just one of several skill players being used as a weapon in Indian Creek’s spread offense.
The gamble didn’t work, but the message was clear.
When Indian Creek’s offense trotted out onto the field against county nemesis Greenwood last Friday, it looked to make an immediate splash — to show that the Braves are going to be a different beast under first-year head coach Casey Gillin. The first play call? A flea-flicker, with senior quarterback Arj Lothe getting the ball back in his hands and chucking it about 40 yards up the right sideline.
The pass was intercepted, but in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t important. The play signaled that Indian Creek was venturing into a (horrible pun incoming) Brave new world under Gillin.
“Coach wanted to take a gamble, and I was all in for it,” Lothe said. “Obviously, it didn’t go in the way we wanted it to, but we definitely bounced back the next drive.”
The Braves edged the Woodmen, 21-20, to end a seven-game series losing streak and get out to a 2-0 start for the first time since 2014, when Gillin’s father Mike guided the Creek through an unbeaten regular season. Though it remains to be seen if this year’s squad can come close to matching that feat, Indian Creek certainly looks a lot more like the pass-happy teams that it fielded under the elder Gillin from 2001-16.
The spread offense is back in Trafalgar.
“You can create a bunch of one-on-one matchups, and you create space,” Casey Gillin said, “and when you create space, that is an issue for defenders, because you’ve got to make an open-field tackle. And then it opens the box up — meaning it opens up the area where the linemen are. I mean, there’s only five (offensive) linemen, usually four D-linemen and two linebackers. So there’s a lot more space in there as well, and the defense has to cover 53 1/3 yards (wide) instead of 20 yards.”
Getting the ball out into space can obviously happen more quickly via the pass than the run, and so the Braves are back to throwing considerably more often. After averaging fewer than 15 pass attempts per game in each of the last four seasons — including a low of 10.6 in 2019, Brett Cooper’s third and final season — Indian Creek has put up 53 passes over the first two games, completing 33 of them.
In addition to spreading the field, the Braves are making themselves even more difficult to defend by spreading the wealth. There isn’t one go-to receiver who’s going to end the season with 100 catches; Lothe is taking what the defense gives him each week. Freshman Jaxon Ramey and junior Jalen Sauer combined for 168 receiving yards in the opener against Batesville, much of that on deep balls; in the Greenwood victory, it was more a steady dose of short tosses over the middle to sophomore Levi Pappas and senior Gerson Coroa, who caught six balls apiece.
Those four, along with sophomore Malachi Mink and junior Lance Butler, give the Braves a wide variety of options.
“Fortunately, against Greenwood, what they gave me was the inside,” Lothe said, “and with Pappas and (Coroa), back to back to back, we kept pounding them inside.”
Gillin’s playbook is a combination of the playbook that his father currently employs at Mooresville, where Casey was the offensive coordinator in 2020 and 2021, and some wrinkles that he’d previously picked up during his time as an assistant coach and then coordinator at his alma mater, the University of Indianapolis.
Though getting his new team to understand all of the concepts and verbiage associated with running the spread remains a work in progress, Gillin estimates that the Braves are about 70% of the way there. He’s impressed with not only how quickly they’ve adapted, but also with their willingness to adapt — several players have been moved into new positions — after running very different systems under previous coaches Cooper and Steve Spinks.
“You go into Mooresville, and my dad already had it set. He’s already had the offensive install in, the kids knew the terminology, so I went into there with guns a-blazing. I was able to use almost every single thing that I could,” Gillin said. “You come to Indian Creek, and over the past five or six years they’ve been typically run-heavy and pretty simple — so the knowledge of the spread, and spreading people out and using the whole football field, 53 1/3 (yards wide) … they just didn’t have that knowledge. The splits of the receivers, how wide this receiver needs to be, just those little things.
“We’re still trying to figure it all out.”
The journey isn’t complete, but Indian Creek’s players are having fun along the way.
“It’s been one of my dreams to be in this type of offense,” Lothe said.
And it’s quickly becoming a nightmare for opposing defenses.
TONIGHT’S GAMES
Center Grove at Louisville Trinity, 7 p.m.
Perry Meridian at Franklin, 7 p.m.
Martinsville at Greenwood, 7 p.m.
Whiteland at Decatur Central, 7 p.m.
Indian Creek at Owen Valley, 7 p.m.
South Decatur at Edinburgh, 7 p.m.
Bishop Chatard at Roncalli, 7 p.m.
