The team had practiced all preseason, all off-season with a running offense, implementing the veer, the triple-option and any other type of run play you can imagine.

So when Purdue quarterback Joey Elliott took the field as a quarterback for Harrison (Ind.) High School his sophomore year in 2002, he figured he’d be handing off a lot and learned almost 100 plays of pure run and pitch without much throw and catch.

The plan lasted a half.

“After that first game, that triple option stuff wasn’t working,” Elliott said. “After the first half of the first game, against Terre Haute North, it’s funny I remember this, he said ‘Scratch all that.’

“We threw the ball every down. It was a bit weird but things worked out.”

Well, kind of. Harrison has never been a football juggernaut and is a place where a 4-6 season isn’t exactly terrible. That game, too, marks the last time Elliott played in a ball-control offense or anything that didn’t resemble throwing the ball all over the place. From his last three seasons at Harrison to his first four at Purdue as a backup quarterback under Joe Tiller, teams he played on threw all the time.

Then Tiller retired, Danny Hope took over as head coach and brought in Gary Nord as his offensive coordinator. With it came a new style of offense - a balanced one.

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“It’ll be a little adjustment,” wide receiver Keith Smith said. “But I pride myself on my blocking ability and the receivers we have now are very hard-nosed. We don’t mind blocks. That’ll be a good part for us and it’ll be fun.”

Interesting word choice, considering Tiller’s offense was among the most fun to watch in the country when it ran well under Drew Brees, Kyle Orton and Curtis Painter. And the adjustment might be more difficult for the guy following all of them - Elliott.

Since his team veered from the veer in high school, he averaged throwing the ball at least 50 times a game when he played. Then he sat and watched Painter become an NFL prospect over four seasons. And at Harrison, Elliott said most of the wins they had were from behind, when he had to throw his team to a win.

And when Harrison would go into the two-minute offense, he’d call all the plays. Being a quarterback, he'd be biased to calling pass instead of run.

Hope isn’t totally abandoning what had taken Purdue from a laughingstock in the Big Ten to a successful program. He said at media day there will be similarities between what Purdue did under Tiller and what they’ll do with their new Hope, it’ll be tough to see how similar the two offenses will really be if Hope plans on using the run out of the shotgun like he did at Eastern Kentucky.

“We’ll spread the field with multiple formations and throw the ball quite a bit,” Hope said. “One of the things I had the opportunity to do the last couple years that I was at Eastern Kentucky as the head football coach was really to research more of the shotgun run game.

“I think that can be a real shot in the arm for our program in 2009 if we can have a formal running attack along with the great passing attack that we’ve had in the past at Purdue.”

So while it might not look too different from a formation standpoint in shotgun, it’ll definitely be a philosophy shift for one of the most distinct offenses in the Big Ten and in the country. The change will benefit Jaycen Taylor, who is one of the most underrated runners in the Big Ten, and Elliott thinks it could help him, too.

But it will take some getting used to. Unless Purdue does what Elliott’s high school team did in 2002 or what Notre Dame did in 2007 - burn down the whole thing less than a game in and go with what worked before.

“If they end up wanting my arm to carry the offense, it we have to, then we will,” Elliott said. “But right now we want to have a balanced offense, eat some clock, get into some short situations, control the ball and that will work in our favor.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for annarbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558 or at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com.