The spread offense is an offensive scheme in gridiron football that typically places the quarterback in the shotgun formation, and "spreads" the offense horizontally using three-, four-, and even five-receiver sets. Used at every level of the game including professional (NFL, CFL), college (NCAA, NAIA, U Sports), and high school programs across the US and Canada, spread offenses often employ a no-huddle approach. Some implementations of the spread also feature wide splits between the offensive linemen.

Spread offenses can emphasize the pass or the run, with the common attribute that they force the defense to cover the entire field from sideline to sideline. Many spread teams use the read option running play to put pressure on both sides of the defense. Similar to the run and shoot offense, passing-oriented spread offenses often leverage vertical (down field) passing routes to spread the defense vertically, which opens up multiple vertical seams for both the running and passing game.

The grandfather of the spread offense is Rusty Russell, a graduate of Howard Payne University, in Brownwood, Texas, and coach of Fort Worth's Masonic Home and School for orphaned boys. Russell began coaching Masonic Home in 1927, and due to the fact that his teams were often over-matched physically by other schools, they were called the "Mighty Mites". While there, he deployed the earliest form of a spread offense to great success. Russell's team is the subject of a book by author Jim Dent entitled, Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football.

In 1952 Texas Christian University (TCU) coach Leo "Dutch" Meyer wrote a book entitled Spread Formation Football, detailing his ideas about football formations, in which the first sentence was, "Spread formations are not new to football." But Meyer's book introduced the spread to the college game, inspiring Don Coryell among others. In his book, Meyer encapsulated some of the lessons learned during his almost two decades coaching legendary football players like Sammy Baugh and Davey O’Brien at TCU. By lining his receivers and occasionally his backs outside the “box” surrounding the quarterback and the center at the line of scrimmage in a formation that has come to be known as the “Meyer Spread,” also known as the double wing formation, Meyer discovered that it forced defenses to respond by spreading their players. That in turn created natural holes in the line and seams in the defensive secondary. Spreading out the defense reduced the need for power blocking by undersized linemen.

But, as Bart Wright notes in his 2013 book Football Revolution: The Rise of the Spread Offense and How It Transformed College Football, Meyer's spread “slowed the defensive rush to the ball....” While some later football historians and coaches have confused the Meyer Spread, which relied on great quarterbacks like Baugh and O’Brien to pass around 17 times a game on average, with more contemporary spread offenses, Wright concludes that it is “preposterous that Meyer’s offense was any sort of antecedent” to the modern spread offense invented by Jack Neumeier around 1970 (see below).

The spread's first evolution came about in 1956 when former NIU Huskies head coach Howard Fletcher adapted Meyer's spread with the shotgun formation to create what he termed the "Shotgun Spread" a more pass-oriented version. Under Fletcher's newly created offense, quarterback George Bork led the nation in total offense and passing in 1962 and 1963. Bork became the first man in college football history to pass for 3,000 yards in a season in 1963 while guiding the Huskies to a victory in the Mineral Water Bowl and the NCAA College Division National Championship.

However, few coaches around the country followed events in the NCAA College Division and, therefore, few coaches were aware of Fletcher's offense as run-oriented offenses continued to dominate football at every level of play throughout the 1960s. The football played at the dawn of the 1970s generally featured hard running, ball control football, accented occasionally on third and long by a pass out of a stationary pocket. Football coaches have always tended to be a relatively conservative group, and most of them subscribed in 1970 to the aphorism generally attributed to Darrell Royal, then head coach at the University of Texas: “… three things can happen to you whenever you throw the football, and two of ‘em are bad. You can catch the ball, you can throw it incomplete, or have it intercepted.” Consistent with that sentiment, the Green Bay Packers power sweep, the University of Southern California power I formation and Student Body Right, the Texas Wishbone, the Veer triple option and other variations of ball control, option-oriented rushing offenses that pounded the ball down the field dominated coaches’ playbooks at the end of the 1960s.

A more enduring iteration of the spread offense originated with legendary high school coach Jack Neumeier and his 1970 Granada Hills High School Highlanders Los Angeles City Championship football team. Few examples of coaches with successful, innovative passing offenses existed at any level of competition in late 1969. In his 2010 history, Blood, Sweat and Chalk: The Ultimate Football Playbook: How The Great Coaches Built Today’s Game, documenting the development of the game of football dating back to Pop Warner's invention of the single wing in the early 1900s, Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated credits Neumeier with the invention in 1970 of the modern spread offense, also frequently referred to as the one-back spread or by the phrase "basketball on grass" first utilized by Neumeier in late 1969, which dominates football at every level of play today.