I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Was that really Lawrence High’s football team?

In their season opener last Friday night against Olathe North, the Lions were lining up with the quarterback five yards behind the center while three receivers were bunched on the wide side of the field.

If the Lions had come out wearing pink uniforms, I might have been more surprised. To witness a Lawrence High football team running a spread formation was a stunner.

Anyone who has been around Lawrence High football over the years knows the Lions are hidebound in tradition.

Their home games begin at 7:30 p.m. – half an hour later than every other school in the state – because that’s when they’ve always started. Their red-and-blank uniforms never feature the smallest nuance of change.

But most of all, from the days when legendary coach Al Woolard was winning so much that the Lions were featured in Life magazine through the glory years of Bill Freeman and Dick Purdy, Lawrence High has run the ball first and asked questions later.

Over the years, the Lions almost always have had a running back who has gained more than 1,000 yards in a season, including Tony Williams last year, Nolan Kellerman the year before and current Kansas University standout Brandon McAnderson a couple of years before that.

The numbers changed, and so did the names, but a Lawrence High 1,000-yard rusher was as inevitable as burned-out lawns in August, as much of a fact of life here in River City as congestion on 23rd Street.

That isn’t to say the Lions won’t have another centerpiece running back again this season – both senior Tyler Hunt and junior Clifton Sims fit the mold – but coach Dirk Wedd has been around long enough to realize it takes more than a talented ball-carrier to have a productive ground attack.

Or as Wedd remarked after the Olathe North game: “We’ve got to get better up front.”

Offensive linemen are the least heralded players on a football team. They are the antithesis of the weather. Nobody talks about them. With one exception. A ball-carrier who has a big game always compliments the linemen, although never by name because there are too many of them and he might leave one out.

Thus Wedd’s decision to change offenses was clearly based on a studied assessment of his personnel – a move at once canny because it gives the Lions their best chance to win and courageous because it abandons the storied staple of Lawrence High football.

For the first time surely since the days of the single wing, a Lawrence High quarterback did not take a single snap from under center last Friday night. Junior Clint Pinnick took every snap from the shotgun formation.

In the first half of the opener, the Lions’ new offense looked terrific, but, in retrospect, that early success could have been attributable to the surprise factor because Olathe North shut it down in the second half.

Although Wedd’s radical move was made out of weakness not strength, spreading the field opens the door to exciting possibilities once the Lions become more accustomed to its intricacies.