Kindergarten Teacher Turned Offensive Guru: Meet Coach David Yost
In the shuffle from Kliff Kingsbury to Matt Wells, the Texas Tech Red Raiders got a brand new offensive coordinator. His name is David Yost, and yes, he has some fantastic hair.
Yost also has Big 12 experience, Pac 12 experience and was with Wells at Utah State last season.
Yost's offensive style is a combo of styles between all of his stops, including three seasons with former Texas Tech head coach Mike Leach. It's a fast, simple system designed to score points and take care of the football. It's low-risk and high-reward and will translate well to the current talent that Texas Tech has in the building moving forward.
So, we have an idea of who Yost is now. But where does he really come from?
Yost was originally a kindergarten teacher who sent out a mass resume that got him a job at Tiffin University. Tiffin took him to Toledo, then to Missouri, then to Washington State with Mike Leach, then to Oregon before finding Matt Wells at Utah State. And now, he's in Lubbock, Texas.
It's a career that spans 24 years already, and he's still adapting and changing what he wants his offense to be. The plan he brings to Texas Tech features an 11 personnel heavy playbook that will feature a tight end and a running back with three wide receivers. It might look a little different than recent years, but the production should be similar. Yost and the Utah State team averaged 47 points per game in 2018.
Add Alan Bowman, T.J. Vasher, Antoine Wesley, and more into the mix, and it's scary to think of the potential that this system could yield.
Yost is almost the anti-Kliff Kingsbury. In the playbook world with Kingsbury running an intense offensive system, Yost runs an incredibly simple offense. When going fast, it's almost exclusively 11 personnel and a select number of plays that the team is comfortable with. His whole plan on offense is just finding the open guy and throw it to him.
We know family and a simple offense are cornerstones of David Yost, but if he was a three-pronged man, his third leg would definitely his hair.
It's a calling card, he says, after growing out his luscious mane back in the early 2000s. He dyes the locks to keep it bright, and the only rule his wife has it that he can't get another perm. He gets a lot of celebrity lookalike comparisons, with the most obvious being Owen Wilson and Jeff Daniels from his role in Dumb and Dumber.
Yost's mix of job descriptions and conference affiliations will only help him as he rejoins the Big 12 and tries to fill Coach Kingsbury's offensive shadow. It won't look the same, but it should get the job done. Yost is just a different kind of cool.
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