WATCH: Eli Manning, Lincoln Riley ride Sooner Schooner

Eli Manning seems to be enjoying his retirement. 

When he’s not hosting the Monday Night Football telecast with his brother Peyton or trolling various sports media personalities on Twitter, the youngest Manning brother and former Ole Miss and New York Giants great is traveling around the country learning more about the history and tradition that makes college football one of a kind.

On his new show, Eli’s Places, Manning makes pit stops on college campuses and visits with important figures in their programs. This week’s stop is Norman to say hello to Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley and learn more about the Wishbone offense, which former Sooners head coach Barry Switzer heavily popularized in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Coach, college football’s all about different schools running different offenses, and the Sooner teams are no exception,” Manning said to Riley, referencing one of the most consistently dominant offensive attacks of the 2000s, most recently led by quarterbacks such as Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray.

But to understand how the Sooners have recently dominated teams whenever they have the ball, Manning would like to know more about how we got here. Riley welcomes him aboard the Sooner Schooner, a staple of one of the most iconic programs in college football. 

.@EliManning hitches a ride on @LincolnRiley's Sooner Schooner side hustle 😂@ESPNPlus | @OU_Football pic.twitter.com/tKo3X2oIy5

— NFL Films (@NFLFilms) October 6, 2021

In true Manning fashion, the clip is peppered with “dad jokes” from one of the funnier personalities in sports.

History of the Wishbone offense

Emory Bellard, a high school and college football head coach at Texas A&M and Mississippi State, is commonly referred to as the inventor of the Wishbone offense. He is credited with creating the offense while he was the offensive coordinator at Texas in the late 1960s under Darrell Royal.

Named for the formation, which looks like an inverted “Y,” the fullback lines up behind the under-center quarterback and has two additional backs on either side of him. It falls under the category of an option offense, which requires a quarterback who can run and seeks to create confusion and misdirection. 

Texas’ arch rival Oklahoma perfected the offensive style under Switzer, who served as the offensive coordinator from 1966-1972 and the head coach from 1973-1988. The Sooners exceeded 500 points using the offense in both 1971 and 1986 and set numerous rushing records.

The style of offense is largely obsolete at the college level now, although there are still teams running option offenses similar to the Wishbone. Army and Navy run triple-option offenses similar to the famed style, and teams like Coastal Carolina run a hybrid option offense that typically swaps another receiver for a true fullback but which uses the same misdirection concepts as those popularized in Texas and Oklahoma.