Garrett Riley has brought an offensive system to Clemson that’s foreign not only to the Tigers’ players but also much of Dabo Swinney’s coaching staff.

For one assistant, though, the installation of Riley’s air-raid system is almost like speaking his native language again.

“I’m super fired up that we get to do this at Clemson and we get to see this offense at Clemson with the talent that we’ve got,” said Kyle Richardson, who doubles as the Tigers’ tight ends coach and passing-game coordinator.

Richardson hasn’t dabbled much in the air raid in recent years since it’s not the system that Tony Elliott nor Brandon Streeter ran with the Tigers during their stints as Clemson’s offensive play callers. But prior to joining Swinney’s staff in 2016, Richardson was immersed in it.

He is going on his 14th year involved in some version of the air raid after being introduced to it as a young coach in the Georgia prep ranks in the early 2000s. Then an assistant at North Gwinnett High School, Richardson’s head coach wanted to install the offense there, so he sent Richardson to Louisiana to learn it straight from the source, Hal Mumme, then the head coach at Southeastern Louisiana who’s widely considered one of the founders of the air raid.

Richardson then joined Mumme’s staff as a receivers coach before he was hired as the offensive coordinator at Northwestern High in Rock Hill, where he implemented a system that not many high schools in South Carolina were running at the time. Richardson was promoted to head coach at Northwestern in 2011, and behind some notable talent – alums Cordarelle Patterson and Mason Rudolph are still playing in the NFL – the Trojans’ air raid put up prolific numbers as Northwestern won two state titles in Richardson’s last three seasons at the helm, including a 15-0 campaign in 2015.

“It was funny,” Richardson said. “I was new to the state, and now I’m bringing in this weird system. We’re going to do things a little bit different, and I got made fun of by a lot of coaches in the state. And then a couple of years later, we weren’t getting made fun of anymore for running what we were running.”

Richardson took a hiatus from the system when he started at Clemson in an off-field capacity. Under Elliott and Jeff Scott, Clemson’s former co-offensive coordinator, the Tigers ran a spread scheme with balance and elements of a pro-style system built in. That largely continued under Brandon Streeter last season when Richardson was promoted to an on-field assistant following Elliott’s departure to be Virginia’s head coach.

But Richardson never stopped wondering what could be if that system was ever tweaked considering the level at which the Tigers have recruited during Swinney’s tenure. At the end of each season, Richardson said, he would study the offenses that finished in the top 10 nationally from a statistical standpoint to see if he could find any common threads.

Richardson said a couple popped up: Service academies synonymous with option offenses and programs such as Texas Tech and Oklahoma that have long been running some version of the air raid. In other words, they were offenses that mastered their identities, which has Richardson confident that Clemson’s offense can eventually do the same under Riley when blending the scheme and the caliber of athlete on the roster.

“When you look at those (offenses) – even, to an extent, Baylor years ago when they were running a version of it — I always envisioned, ‘Man, with the players we have here, if we could run a version of this system, we could shoot up to that,'” Richardson said. “As soon as I heard Garrett was coming, obviously I was excited, but the flip side of it was, for years, I wanted to get back to that. And I didn’t have to leave Clemson to get back to that, which is even better.”

Transitioning to an air-raid offense doesn’t mean Clemson is going to abandon the run. Riley has alluded to the fact that balance is needed to maximize his offense’s potential, and he’s shown that at his previous stops, including TCU, where the Horned Frogs had a 1,300-yard rusher last season.

But there have been signs this spring that times are changing for the Tigers’ offense. During practices, for example, it’s not uncommon to see multiple quarterbacks throwing passes simultaneously. Skill positions players even throw balls to each other on the side trying to get used to how much more often the ball figures to be in the air starting next season.

That’s not a new sight, though, for Richardson, who said Riley’s version of the air raid is almost identical to the one he ran at Northwestern.

“It’s not about the plays. It’s about how you practice it,” Richardson said. “You’ve got to practice it a certain way. You’ve got to meet a certain way. You’ve got to have a mentality a certain way, as a coach, to get out there and do some of the things you’re going to do. … “You have to 100% commit to this system, how it’s run, practiced, the whole nine.”

From what he’s observed so far, Richardson said he’s seen that buy-in from the top down.

“When Garrett was coming and bringing it, I knew that, hey, you can’t go half and half,” Richardson said. “You can’t be 75(%) and 25. And you can’t piece together the best part of what Garrrett does to the best part of what Clemson did in the past or whatever. And (Swinney) has done an awesome job with that. You’ve got the keys. This is why I brought you here. Teach it to these guys, and let’s go. And let’s get our confidence back. Let’s’ get our swagger back. And it’s just been fun to see the kids respond.”

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