Agreed. Getting athletes isn’t the problem in the northeast. Polished football players? Sure, that’s more difficult.
We’ve been trained to think that we can’t run a spread because basically every head coach we’ve ever had believes in the archaic run, run, pass pro style offense. The spread has been working just fine at Syracuse.
The "spread" is run in different ways. At Auburn, where Lashlee was the OC working for Gus Malzahn, they ran the zone read spread. It was a run focused offense. West Virginia, under Rich Rodriguez, was a spread that focused on the run. Oregon was more run focused. Then you have the Mike Leach pass focused spreads run at places like Washington St., Texas Tech, Houston. To use a run or pass oriented spread, you need a good QB and you will need a stable of RBs and/or WRs. In addition, if you want to win consistently with the spread, you need a solid defense as the defense could be on the field a lot.
Lashlee, when he came to UConn, wanted the spread to be more pass oriented. Unfortunately, UConn did not have the QB/RBs/WRs to run the spread effectively at the time. Pindell was not a good enough passer to run a pass oriented spread and Lashlee figured that out pretty quickly and replaced him with Shirreffs.
It took year 3 for Babers to have a good season, but he came to Syracuse as a successful offensive coach, so he was able to recruit good offensive players that fit his system. In my opinion, in today's college football, the head coach should be the offensive mind/coordinator as good offensive coordinators will be lured away quickly. Plus, I think it is easier to find defensive coaches than offensive coaches.