BOULDER, Colo. — Alonzo Dotson has been getting lessons on playing defensive line his whole life. It’s part of his family’s culture. His grandfather, Alphonse, played in the NFL and his uncle, Santana, won a Super Bowl with Green Bay.

He’s been like a sponge, soaking up the football advice they’ve doled out over the years. But lately, that advice is getting less and less relevant.

“I have to tell them, ‘Teams don’t just run the ball anymore,’” Dotson said. “We’ve got these zone reads, a little bit of option, throw-back passes; all kinds of crazy stuff. Relating back to these old guys is kind of complicated.”

Dotson isn’t in the minority when it comes to the complexity of playing defense nowadays.

Each season, the game becomes more complex. The offensive innovations over the last decade left defenses struggling to keep pace.

Take a look at the Big 12 Conference. Teams are scoring points at a rapid rate. Nine Big 12 teams are averaging over 30 points a game and the same number are averaging over 400 yards of total offense a game.

Some of the credit goes to weak non-conference schedules.

But some of it also goes to the complex spread offenses run throughout the league. Each season there are more options to defend. It may have started when Mike Leach brought the four- and five-wide receiver sets to the conference when he was OU’s offensive coordinator in 1999. But the systems have mutated throughout the conference as each offensive coordinator has added his own wrinkles.

“Those guys are like mad scientists drawing up stuff on the blackboard,” Sooner defensive backs coach Bobby Jack Wright said.

Staying up is tough.

OU defensive coordinator Brent Venables recalls his last season at Kansas State in 1998 as a starting point. The Wildcats had one of the best defenses in college football that season. But they only ran two coverages.

“We ran man defense about 90 percent of the time and we saw four-wide (receiver) personnel maybe 5 percent of the time,” he said. “Our change up was cover three (zone defense); that was it.”

OU will probably run four times that many coverages just today.

“Times have changed to say the least,” Venables said.

They have had to.