The NFL and college football have adopted the same philosophy in recent years.

Spread the field. Employ multiple receiver packages. Throw the ball all over the place.

High school football around here is a little bit different. Local coaches are kickin' it old-school.

Moniteau coach Wade Vogan's philosophy is simple: run, run, run.

“It's not reinventing the game,” Vogan said. “The game's been around for a long time. I'm just 31 years old and I'm not gonna try to reinvent the wheel. There's things that worked in the past for a reason.”

Slippery Rock rushed for more than 8,000 yards in the last two seasons.

“One of the best things about the running game is keeping the ball out of the opponent's hands,” Rockets coach Travis Sarver said. “If they don't have the ball, they can't score. It's something I believe in, being able to establish the run.”

Rockets' senior quarterback/running back Ryan Lauster agrees.

“We like it, especially with all these teams that are so pass-happy and doing all these different things,” he said. “We take pride in being able to just line up and run the ball. That's awesome, especially with the option because three different people can get the ball on any play. That's difficult to prepare for.”

A solid ground game can demoralize an opponent as well.

“A guy throws the ball deep on you, your defender slips and they score on a big play ... OK, they got lucky,” Knoch coach Mike King said. “But if you're pounding at a defense, four or five yards at a clip, churning out first downs and they can't stop you ... that's definitely demoralizing.”

Dave Vestal is entering his first season as Seneca Valley's varsity football coach. He was the head coach at Hopewell from 2001-14.

Vestal plans on running the pistol offense, which is an abbreviated shotgun formation. The base formation includes a halfback to one side of the quarterback. Many times, the quarterback will take the snap and either fake a handoff to the back or actually give it to him.

“We hope to spread teams out and run a lot of zone read stuff. It gives us an advantage in numbers as long as we execute properly. Nobody knows who will be getting the ball until it happens, but you can't be afraid to call it and run it.”

Butler coach Rob Densmore says that just because an offense uses a spread look doesn't mean it's throwing the ball.

“You can run pretty effectively out of a spread,” Densmore said. “There are plenty of ways to weaken a team's run defense.”

Mars has been running the Wing-T offense since Heinauer took over in 1992.

“I think you've seen a lot of high school teams try to become a pass-first offense because of all the passing that's done in college and the NFL,” Heinauer said. “Some people try to imitate that, but you'll find high school teams that try to pass a lot even though they don't have the personnel for it.”

Karns City coach Ed Conto said the Gremlins run the ball because it's basic in nature.

“We only have so much time with our kids,” he said. “Most of our guys play other sports and play on both sides of the ball. There's only so much practice time.”

Union will be running the ball more due to the graduation of quarterback Lane Cicciarelli, who threw for over 2,000 yards last season.

Dugan Gallagher rushed for 850 yards and he's returning. Gavin Guntrum, 6-3, 316 pounds and Terry Semanco, 5-11, 274, will be counted on to create room up front.

“We're going to be I with a three-receiver set,” Louder said. “We are going to run some tight end, because we have some bigger fellas. Daniel Roberts and Casey Confer played football for us last year.”