Bryan Stinespring enters his 18th year as a full-time member of Virginia Tech’s coaching staff and ninth as offensive coordinator. The Clifton Forge native and father of four sat down with the Hokie Football Annual 2010 to talk Tech football.

HOKIE ANNUAL: Every offseason you make junkets in an effort to improve the offense. You’ve visited schools such as Nebraska and West Virginia and the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, among others. How has that helped you?

BRYAN STINESPRING: Any option that we run is basically some version of what Nebraska ran back in the day with Tommie Frazier and Timmy Crouch. I’d say 75% of our play-action passing game is straight-up Indianapolis Colts, after three straight years of visiting them. The nuances of it fit in with our running game perfectly. Last year we went to West Virginia for some of its spread offense.

HA: Although your offense is described as “multiple.”

BS: That’s just because we’re not in a shotgun formation for every play. Soon as your quarterback gets under center once, they say you’re no longer a spread offense.

HA: And this year Ohio State came to Blacksburg.

BS: We both examined how to best handle a (multidimensional) quarterback. We have Tyrod Taylor, the Buckeyes have Terrelle Pryor. How much are you thinking of him as an additional ball-carrier? It was kind of ironic that both teams had such a definitive difference between their one and two quarterbacks last year. So both teams cut down their quarterbacks’ number of carries dramatically. They’re going to get hit anyway; you could not call a single running play for them, and they’d pull it down and run it five times by their own choosing. But most of the time they’re not running inside where there are a bunch of big guys.

HA: Former Tech assistant Kevin Rogers also visited you this spring. He was here from 2002-05 before leaving to become the Minnesota Vikings’ quarterbacks coach.

BS: We had been planning that for over a year. Kevin and our offensive staff holed up from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for two consecutive days and halfway through the next day. It was probably the best three days we’ve ever spent. Kevin understands our philosophy, the ins-and-outs of the system here at Virginia Tech. And being in the NFL since 2006, he’s accrued additional information. We talked about the things they do that work within our system. It was great because Kevin and I think alike. We both want a balanced attack. So we didn’t put Billy Hite to sleep by just talking about the passing game the whole time.

HA: What is that core offensive philosophy at Virginia Tech?

BS: There hasn’t been a defensive coordinator in America who sits down on Sunday morning and says, ‘We’ve got to stop the pass.’ It’s not their mindset, their demeanor or their attitude. I don’t care if you’re playing Texas Tech; they want to stop the run and make everybody one-dimensional. We’re going to do our best to make sure nobody makes us one-dimensional.

So we want to be able to run the ball effectively, but be balanced, where the run sets up the pass and the pass sets up the run. When you can do both well and be unpredictable.

HA: And with Kevin, you could be more open with him than, say, the Buckeyes staff.

BS: When someone visits us, they’re told three-quarters of what they need to know. Teams study film; there aren’t a lot of secrets. But there’s 25% you’re not going to share, because there are no guarantees you we don’t play Ohio State (in a bowl game). (Then-coach) Frank Solich almost put the brakes on our visits to Nebraska because of that. In the back of your mind, it’s always an issue.

Another concern is when you visit with schools in February, right after recruiting, all of a sudden there are some staff changes. A guy you’ve been visiting with, all of a sudden he’s at a school you play.

HA: With so much talent this year, do you feel the temptation to try to do too much?

BS: If you’re not careful, you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. Ideally you will have enough in your toolbox to constantly give different looks without changing your core concept. So you try, within your system, to window-dress it. You run versions of what you run, but give it to the defense in a multitude of different looks. That’s what we did in the second half against Tennessee, when we ran it (eight) consecutive times. I think 80% of those were the same run, out of different looks.

HA: That might’ve been the most impressive drive of the season.

BS: We scripted it at halftime. We had one gun counter than Ryan (Williams) busted for a long deal, and the rest was an inside zone, smash mouth. But each play had different motions, fakes, looks. You try to be multi-dimensional, without taking away the ability for your team to play fast.

HA: You look very relaxed. This has to be a good time for you after all the criticism, with the message boards and all.

BS: For three years we’ve had to grind. We had to grind because we went into three falls with either not knowing who are offensive line was going to be, or breaking in a new set of receivers, or what we’re doing at quarterback, or what we’re doing at tailback. To go into August 17, 18, 19 and still have those issues, what I’m most proud of—whatever we were ranked those years—110, 103, I should know by heart because I get reminded of them all the time—I’m probably as proud of the coaching staff because there’s not a team we played in the last six games of those years that thought they played the 99th offense.

HA: You don’t have those big personnel questions this year.

BS: We have fewer questions for the first time in four years. There is talent. We have tremendous depth at tailback. We have great possibilities at receiver. There are some playmakers out there. The difference, though, when you break it all down, is that we’re not going into mid-August trying to find answers.

About Chris Colston: An 11-year veteran of the Virginia Tech athletics department as editor of The Hokie Huddler, Chris Colston (Marketing 1981) has written four books on Tech football. (Virginia Tech Vault - 2009; Virginia Tech Sideline - 2003; Turn Up the Wick! - 2000; The Hokies Handbook - 1996). Colston covered the NFL and NBA for USA TODAY from January 2006-December 2009. From 1996-2005 he served as a writer and editor for USA TODAY Sports Weekly. Colston has won numerous awards and has done one-on-one interviews with some of the biggest names in sports, such as Peyton Manning, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. For information on all of Colston's projects, follow him on Twitter: @chriscolston.