Wisconsin Offensive Coordinator Phil Longo Details His Plans for the Badgers Offense

MADISON, Wis. – Since the news broke of Wisconsin head coach Luke Fickell was hiring Phil Longo to coordinate the Badgers offense, two words have been constantly used by an excited fanbase.

Say them with me, "Air Raid."

Longo has heard it for several years with his success running offenses at Sam Houston State, Ole Miss, and most recently North Carolina that his offense prides itself on throwing the ball consistently and constantly. In truth, no bigger misconception exists in his mind about how he wants to rebuild the Badgers’ offense.

“The words ‘Air Raid’ kind of create a poor perception of what we want to do offensively,” Longo said in his introductory press conference Wednesday. “We’re going to be more diverse maybe than we’ve been here, and we want to throw the ball more effectively and maybe even more (repetition) wise than we’ve done, but you want to be more effective at both.”

North Carolina’s passing game was immensely successful under Longo’s guidance, leading the ACC in passing yards (14,781), passing touchdowns (131), and passer rating (161.6). What gets overlooked with the aerial assault is Longo’s teams run the ball and do it well. Over that same four-year period, the Tar Heels led the ACC with 197.5 rushing yards per game and ranked second in the conference with 102 rushing scores.

Considering Wisconsin’s running game has been its bread and butter for three decades, churning out All-American and all-conference running backs and offensive linemen, Longo won't deviate from a proven commodity.

“I’d be an idiot not to run the football here with the backfield that we have and the offensive line that we have,” said Longo, who adopted the offense after spending three days with the late Mike Leach in a coaching clinic prior to the 1997 season.

“I often liken it to a Ferrari in a race. Each year, you try to find a way to improve the tires or jack up the engine, or shave down the car to make it a little lighter so it's faster. You try to take this vehicle that you have, which is our offense, and you try to make it run and work better than the year before.”

Over the three seasons, it's evident Wisconsin is in dire need of a souped-up engine and a fresh paint job. Since playing in the 2020 Rose Bowl, Wisconsin is 20-13 and has finished 90th, 85th, and 77th in scoring offense and 104th, 87th, and 91st in total offense.

Longo described his offense as stretching defenses horizontally first pre-snap and then stretching them vertically post-snap, allowing them to get their skill players the football so “that we can watch athletes go be athletes.” He believes UW has the personnel to do it, especially at receiver, but needed the quarterback to be able to execute the offense.

Perhaps that’s why no position has been transformed more since Longo was hired than the quarterback room. In a span of 13 days, the Badgers added Oklahoma freshman quarterback Nick Evers through the transfer portal, received a commitment from 2024 four-star Houston quarterback Mabrey Mettauer, and added SMU senior Tanner Mordecai as a graduate transfer.

His ideal Wisconsin quarterback is a taller, lengthy athlete but Longo isn’t married to one style. Sam Howell – a fifth-round pick of the Washington Commanders – was a downhill runner while ACC Player of the Year Drake Maye (who led the team in rushing (698) in addition to having 4,321 passing yards) was more sideline-to-sideline. Longo moved protections and tweaked the offense based on those varying skills.

“It’s a quarterback-driven system,” he said. “Everything starts with the quarterback in any offense, but this one really is predicated on the decision-making that goes on at that position. In our mind, philosophically, the quarterback has to be a tremendous distributor of the football … Balance to us is not 40 runs and 40 passes. Balance to us is distribution to all the weapons in the offense.”

How Wisconsin’s skill weapons get the ball may vary on a yearly basis, music to the ears of fans who became critical of a more predictable approach from Paul Chryst near the end of his tenure. In 2020, North Carolina beat Wake Forest, 59-53, by throwing for 550 yards. Three weeks later, the Tar Heels won at Miami, 62-26, by rushing for 554 yards. Total yards in those games were 742 against the Demon Deacons and 778 against the Hurricanes.

“All we want to do is increase how effective we can be in the passing game so that defenses have to defend the full field and all five skill players,” he said. “That’s really the goal of the Air Raid here at Wisconsin.”

And while the identity of the offense will change, Longo believes the transitional period will be short. He plans to install the entire offense during the spring, doing it all in four days, reinstalling it the following four days, polishing it throughout the remaining spring practices, and having it become instinctual during the summer.

The process works. In 14 years as an offensive coordinator, Longo’s teams have produced a 118-59 (.667) record, won six conference championships, and made nine postseason appearances.

“I'm very confident in what we're going to do,” he said. “I think there's talent here to do it."