Who is Joe Craddock? Breaking down the Tulane OC as potential Oklahoma Sooners offensive coordinator
The Oklahoma Sooners have fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell after a dismal 2024 season. The search for a new play-caller on offense is firmly underway, and we know what Sooners’ head coach Brent Venables wants his next offense to look like. This article will be part of a series I will be doing breaking down […]
The Oklahoma Sooners have fired offensive coordinator Seth Littrell after a dismal 2024 season. The search for a new play-caller on offense is firmly underway, and we know what Sooners’ head coach Brent Venables wants his next offense to look like.
This article will be part of a series I will be doing breaking down the 15 most-linked coaches to the Sooners’ open OC position. If new names arise, I will adjust and add or subtract new names as time goes on. I’m aiming to get an article on every coach out daily.
Each article will be linked to each other, so as this goes on, you can find a different coach no matter which article you click on for ease of access to transition to other content.
For this piece, I’ll be diving in on current Tulane Green Wave offensive Joe Craddock, who has Tulane as one of the best Group of Five teams in the country and is looking to compete for the G5 CFP bid in a few weeks.
Who is Joe Craddock?
A former quarterback, Joe Craddock played for the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders from 2004-08, where he threw for 2,677 yards and 15 touchdowns as a senior in 2008. With little NFL interest, Craddock went international, playing in the Italian Football League from 2009-10. With the Parma Panthers, he led his team to the Super Bowl Italiano, where he defeated the Catania Elephants 56-26 for the championship. Craddock still holds Parma’s single-season passing records
While he was in Italy, he had to essentially teach the entire offense to the Italian players as just one of three Americans on the team. Teaching the players, as well as local children about football, with such a language barrier in a small Italian town like Parma, is one of the biggest things Craddock cites as a significant jump in his coaching career.
Craddock returned home to Birmingham, Alabama after winning the title to serve as the offensive coordinator of his former high school team, Briarwood Christian. During his tenure there from 2010-11, Briarwood went 25-4 and finished as the state runner-up in 2010. It was his time at Briarwood that saw Craddock be introduced to Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney. A fellow coach at Briarwood had played with Swinney on Alabama’s 1992 national championship team and introduced the pair. The two hit it off, and Swinney offered Craddock to join Clemson’s staff as a player development coach.
Craddock didn’t do much with the Tigers at first. The then-Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris said he “basically started out sweeping the weight room floors”. However, he made an impression on the coaching staff with his acumen and questions. That saw him be promoted to a graduate assistant in 2012, working with the quarterbacks. While in the position, Craddock helped mentor Tajh Boyd and Deshaun Watson with the Tigers, guiding them both to productive seasons and helping the Tigers to a 21-5 record there.
Their success at Clemson helped Chad Morris become hired at SMU. Craddock made such an impact on Morris that Morris would name him the youngest offensive coordinator in FBS history at that point at just 29 years old. Craddock leaped straight from a GA role to a coordinator position, a pretty rare trait, especially for someone so young. Clemson had offered Craddock the role of quarterbacks coach, but being a coordinator was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
It worked out for Craddock. When he got to SMU, the Mustangs were fresh off of a season where they were scoring 11.1 points per game. By his third season, they were averaging almost 40 points per game.
With the Mustangs, Craddock guided quarterback Ben Hicks to numerous SMU passing records, including career passing yards (9,081), TD passes (71), TDs responsible for (74), completions (718), and 300-yard games (12).
Over his three seasons with the Mustangs, Craddock's offense produced a 3,000-yard passer (Ben Hicks, 2017), two 1,000-yard rushers (Xavier Jones, 2017; Braeden West, 2016), and two 1,000-yard receivers (Courtland Sutton, 2017 and 2016; Trey Quinn, 2017).
During the 2017 regular season, Craddock's unit ranked No. 8 in the FBS in scoring offense (40.2 points), No. 13 in total offense (493.8 yards), and No. 16 in passing yards (308 yards). In addition, SMU was one of just two teams in the country that featured a 3,000-yard passer, 1,000-yard rusher, and multiple 1,000-yard receivers in All-Americans Sutton and Quinn.
SMU’s success under Morris saw him hired at Arkansas. Craddock would follow him to Fayetteville as his offensive coordinator once more. Unfortunately, the offense didn’t experience as much success as his previous tenures had. The Razorbacks only won four games in the two seasons Morris and Craddock were there. Though the pair brought in a pair of talented freshmen in their final season in QB KJ Jefferson and Treylon Burks, it was too little too late, and the entire staff was fired.
Craddock returned home to Alabama again, re-finding himself while serving as the tight ends coach for UAB under Bill Clark in 2020 and 2021. There, Craddock was able to reset his mindset, and he flourished with the Blazers. At UAB, he guided Gerrit Prince, who led all tight ends in the nation in yards per reception in 2021 and led the team with 34 receptions and 10 touchdowns. His 699 receiving yards ranked second. In UAB’s C-USA championship season, Craddock’s tight end room finished with half of the Blazers’ receiving touchdowns.
At the end of the 2021 season, as Craddock was preparing for a bowl game against BYU, he received a phone call from his agent, Clint Dowdle. Dowdle also represented Jon Sumrall, who had just been hired as the head coach of the Troy Trojans, and Sumrall was looking for an offensive coordinator. The pair talked and immediately clicked, with Craddock describing him as “awesome” and a “genuine guy who breathes toughness and physicality”.
Jon Sumrall, a hot name in coaching circles for a major Power 4 gig himself, was impressed with what Craddock’s offenses looked like when he had coached against them.
“His diversity of what he’s been around really sold me on him,” Sumrall said. “Having coached against him, I saw he knew what he was doing schematically. He was detailed and had big-picture stuff. He made a lot of sense for me when I took the job at Troy, and I’ve been very pleased with how he’s pushed things along.”
Craddock became the Trojans offensive coordinator and immediately breathed life into the offense. The Trojans became one of the most explosive offenses in college football, ranking fourth with nine passes of 50-plus yards and five passes of 60-plus yards. Troy was 24th in passes of 20-plus yards (54) and 16th in passes of 30-plus yards (24).
He followed that success up with another terrific season in 2023. Last season, Troy’s offense under Craddock ranked fourth in the nation with nine passes of 50-plus yards and five passes of 60-pass yards.
When Sumrall was hired to replace Willie Fritz at Tulane, Craddock followed, and the offense has flourished despite plenty of turnover. The Green Wave are eighth in scoring this season, averaging 40.5 points per game despite playing Kansas State and Oklahoma. Tulane is also 14th in 3rd down conversion rate.
Craddock has Tulane at 17th in the country in EPA/Play and 30th in yards per play. The results out of the passing game are impressive. Tulane sits seventh in EPA/Pass, 10th in Yards/Pass, and 15th in passing success rate.
What is Joe Craddock's Scheme?
Joe Craddock is one of the most intriguing offensive coordinators in college football due to his history of development and the fact that no one runs an offense quite like his. Unlike a lot of teams who are either unimaginative Air Raid schemes or RPO-driven spread offenses, Craddock runs an actual pro-style offense. In his own words:
“We will run a pro style offense with some college wrinkles. Always as a coach you have to understand, it’s about the players. Don’t force a square peg in a round hole, you have to adapt to the best players you have. I like to use a tight end, but we maybe have only one or two guys that can play the position the way I’d like. For that reason, you’ll see less 12 personnel than we have run in the past and likely more 11 and 10 in base sets. We will figure out who we got in the spring. Once we know who our best players are, we will adapt….I want to be an outside zone type team. We are going to run the football. Expect some no huddle and some speed huddle with a fast break out. We will change up the cadence and employ a lot of motion and shifts.”
Craddock was true to his word and Tulane’s offense has really fit his vision. The Green Wave sits eighth in SportSourceAnalytics Offensive Rating score. When you look at the offense itself, it’s very reminiscent of one that you would expect to see in the NFL. In a previous article, I compared it to what Sean McVay is running with the Los Angeles Rams and what Kevin O’Connell is running with the Minnesota Vikings.
Formationally, Tulane runs plenty of the pistol set, coming in at almost 40% of their total snaps. They mix in under center as well, with the rest living in shotgun. They hit opposing defenses with a ton of different formations and personnel grouping. This season, Tulane has taken a snap in 10 different personnel looks, with their main grouping 12 personnel (1 running back, 2 tight end). They deploy them in a variety of ways as well, with multiple formations ranging from 3×1 to 3×2 to 4×1 and 2×2.
Like most good offenses, Tulane will run the ball to set up the pass. They run plenty of play-action, with a 52.6% rate, and they are not afraid to throw deep off of it. Quarterback Darian Mensah has one of the highest average depth of targets in the country with an 11.1 depth despite having over 100 more dropbacks than half of the players listed ahead of him.
As I said earlier, what makes this offense pretty pro-style is the use of motion and their run game. Tulane has a whopping 70.5% shift/motion rate, the eighth-most in the country.
Their run game is also pretty diverse. Craddock initially wanted to be a heavy outside zone team, and while they do run it a fair amount of the time, it’s their third-highest repped run behind Power and Man (Duo). Tulane has four different run concepts with over 45 attempts this season, and they average over four yards a carry on all of them. Amazingly, Power is their most run concept on the ground and yet they are averaging an incredible 8.1 yards per carry out of it.
The thing that impresses me the most is Craddock’s ability and willingness to adapt his system to his players and isn’t afraid to shift towards what is working instead of what he wants to run. He “wants” to be an outside zone coach, but Tulane this season is a gap-oriented offense and it’s been their bread and butter all season.
In fact, it was that adaptability that drew both Ty Thompson and Mario Williams to the Tulane offense this offseason.
“You always have to adapt to what you’ve got. That’s what we’re working on right now, trying to figure out what our guys can be successful at. If you’re trying to run a scheme that your players aren’t good at, you are not going to be very successful.”
This pro-style identity that Craddock has built his offense as is a pretty intriguing one for NFL development as well. A lot of the concepts that Craddock calls and the amount of responsibility he places on quarterbacks are things that other college schemes simply do not ask their quarterback to do, rather, they opt to take things away from the quarterback.
And finally, this is an offense that just doesn’t make a lot of mental mistakes. Oklahoma has been plagued by turnovers all season. Tulane? Tied for sixth in the country with just five (two fumbles, three interceptions, two of them were against Oklahoma) this season.
They score the fifth-most in the red zone. 18 of their 38 tackles for loss allowed came against Kansas State and Oklahoma. On the season, they’ve allowed 11 sacks (and three of those were from R Mason Thomas). They have been so successful at the marginal things and avoiding negative plays all season long.
Is Joe Craddock a Fit with the Oklahoma Sooners?
There aren’t many concerns about Craddock fitting in with Brent Venables. He worked with Venables and Sooners’ defensive coordinator Zac Alley while at Clemson, and Venables carries a mentality similar to Jon Sumrall's in terms of culture, physicality, and what he wants out of an offense.
The main worry, if you can call it that, would be his fit with the rest of the staff, particularly with offensive line coach Bill Bedenbaugh. I don’t envision this being a problem, given their respective flexibility and shared vision of an offense. Craddock has worked with multiple different offensive line coaches, and Bedenbaugh is widely respected in coaching circles. There could be some transition with mixing in the pistol and under center, but Lincoln Riley ran pistol looks with Bedenbaugh for many years. Even if it doesn’t work right away, we’ve already seen Craddock be able to pivot his system away to what does work and whatever makes his players better prepared.
The biggest concern I would have is just how bad his tenure with Arkansas went. However, what he runs now is a completely different style of offense than what he was running at Arkansas, and the Razorbacks were in the dumps talent-wise. At Arkansas, the offense was very shotgun-heavy and was primarily based on inside zone, following the typical Chad Morris-style of spread offense.
Craddock admitted when he was on his own at UAB that he re-calibrated and he took a step back to evaluate his own process. Once he got away from Chad Morris, the offense truly became his own to what we see today.
Because of his tenure at Arkansas, I’m sure many will point to how his offense doesn’t work in the SEC. Yet, it’s a similar style to that of Georgia and Texas. I think it’s working out for those two teams so far.
While we don’t yet know just how good of a recruiter Craddock is, he has a pretty solid group of quarterbacks attached to his resume, with names like Tajh Boyd, Deshaun Watson, Ben Hicks, KJ Jefferson, Gunnar Watson, and now Darian Mensah, and was able to lure former five-star Ty Thompson to Tulane this past offseason. While that’s obviously not as enticing as a resume of a Kalen DeBoer or Lincoln Riley, Craddock has recruited and coached talented and productive passers at all of his stops, which gives me hope about his ability to do so with a program like Oklahoma.
Joe Craddock Summary
Overall, Joe Craddock’s offense is one that I would imagine Brent Venables would be pretty pleased with, given their ability to control the ball and generate explosive plays in the passing game. The two have worked together previously at Clemson, and Tulane’s offense was able to generate explosive plays on Oklahoma’s defense, even if they did ultimately lose the game.
There will be concerns about his ability to handle a much bigger opportunity than coaching well at SMU, Troy, and Tulane, but those are going to be concerns about almost any coach the Sooners hire, as they are pretty unlikely to hire any blue-blood offensive coordinator.
Given his ability to teach and develop players, as well as his proven schematic flexibility, it’s no surprise Craddock has become such a hot name for the Sooners’ offensive coordinator job.
