success running the option game out of the wishbone. In 1985, Air Force climbed to #2 in the country, just barely missing the national championship game, under head coach Fisher DeBerry. Army saw success using the wishbone under head coaches Jim Young and Bob Sutton in the 1980s and early 1990s, leading to the school's first four bowl appearances (10–6 win over Michigan State in the 1984 Cherry Bowl; 31–29 win over Illinois in the 1985 Peach Bowl; 29–28 loss to Alabama in the 1988 Sun Bowl; and a 32–29 loss to Auburn in the 1996 Independence Bowl) and the first of the program's two 10-win seasons. Phil Jack Dawson, then head coach of Westbrook High School in Westbrook, Maine, developed an effective defense against the wishbone offense then in use by Texas, called “backbone defense”. Dawson contacted Ara Parseghian, then head coach of the University of Notre Dame, and convinced him to use it against Texas in the 1971 Cotton Bowl Classic. Notre Dame beat Texas 24-11. In the National Football League, during the strike season of 1987, the San Francisco 49ers used the wishbone successfully against the New York Giants to win 41–21. Coach Bill Walsh used the wishbone because of his replacement quarterback's familiarity with a similar formation in college. The Cleveland Browns also utilized the wishbone at the pro level in a 2018 28–16 win over the Atlanta Falcons. While run-based option offenses, including the wishbone, are now used only by a small number of NCAA Division I programs—mainly the service academies—wishbone principles still influence college football to this day. The original architects of the pass-oriented Air Raid offense, Mike Leach and Hal Mumme, explicitly employed wishbone principles in the offense's creation. In a 2018 ESPN story, current Navy head coach Ken Niumatalolo noted that modern spread option offenses also conceptually borrow from the wishbone. Some coaches are convinced that the wishbone could still work in the modern college game. One of them is Switzer, who in the aforementioned ESPN piece specifically named 2016 Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson as a quarterback who would be "perfect in the Wishbone", adding, "There's a lot of them [quarterbacks that could run the formation] out there, with the great speed and quickness that can also throw the football. They're out there by the dozens. They're just playing different positions." In the same piece, Leach said, "Nobody has ever truly