MORGANTOWN — This was what America awoke to on Tuesday morning this past week when it took a peek at the National Football League roundup in no less a newspaper than The New York Times:

Joe Flacco deftly directed Baltimore’s new no-huddle offense, and the Ravens’ defense administered an old-fashioned whipping to the Cincinnati Bengals.

Wait a minute? “New no-huddle offense”? What was new about it? They ran it at West Virginia University last year, and they’ve run it in many versions for a long time now in college football.

Tom Brady, of course, at New England has run another version of the offense for a few years … and now a whole lot of NFL teams have gone to the spread with the same results the colleges have had from it — lots of points being scored.

No fewer than five NFL teams this past weekend scored 40 or more points, a record for opening day.

And they did it with the lessons they had learned watching college coaches design and perfect the spread offense.

When asked if the NFL was moving toward the game that the colleges have been playing and that he is a proponent of, West Virginia University coach Dana Holgorsen didn’t dodge the question as most coaches do, saying they were too busy scheming to stop to watch an NFL game. He was upfront with his answer.

“It looks like it to me,” he said. “You saw the Baltimore Ravens game last night. It looked like a whole lot of up-tempo offense coming from the shotgun with downfield throws and reverses. I would say that the NFL is headed there.”

Indeed, here was Joe Flacco completing 21-29 pass for 299 yards and two touchdowns without an interception, spreading the field with receivers and taking advantage of every mismatch with the Bengals that occurred, at times looking as though there might be as many as five or six mismatches on a play.

History doesn’t always indicate that the professional ranks pay much attention to what is going on at the collegiate level, so different were the games. Oh, the pros were more than happy to snatch up star quality players who were box office because of what they did in college ever since Red Grange came along and went from Illinois to George Halas and the Chicago Bears.

But their idea of football and colleges has always been different.

But that is changing.

“Right now I think you’re seeing it flow from college to the pros,” WVU offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson said. “In the past, I’d say there was more similarity from high school to college; pro football had its own deal. For a while, college was evolving into its own spread attack while the NFL stuck with the traditional ‘ground-and-pound, get-to-the-fourth-quarter and win the football game’ philosophy.”

Why has this phenomenon occurred? Why have the NFL offensive minds decided to change their offensive philosophies and go to the spread?

“It’s the players they’re getting,” Dawson said. “Look at the players they are getting. They are used to playing in that style of offense. The quarterbacks are used to playing in that style.”

Among those who broke it out this week, in addition to Baltimore, was the Washington Redskins with Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III, who had a huge pro debut.

The reason is that coach Mike Shanahan borrowed many of the concepts that Griffin used at Baylor, the biggest concept being that Griffin had his own choice of what to do when he came to the line of scrimmage.

His play would be dictated not by an offensive coordinator, but by what the defense was giving him.

This is how Shanahan explained it:

“We really don’t know what’s going to happen until the defense plays, so we had running plays called, and all of a sudden they gave us certain looks to take the running game away, and we threw a couple of bubbles early,” Shanahan said. “And it’s pretty impressive when a young guy comes in and plays with that composure especially in an environment like this.”

Perhaps what made the Baltimore offensive changes so stunning was that it completely changed the image of a team that had been notoriously conservative on offense under coach John Harbaugh, perhaps the biggest proponent of trying to play mistake-free offensive football and letting a savage defense win the game.

“Think about this, for that guy to do that … he’s probably one of the more conservative coaches over the past few years. It speaks volumes of what their mentality is of our offenses in colleges and the up-tempo nature of our offenses,” Dawson said.

And so it goes.

“I think coaches in the NFL are looking at our up-tempo style of offenses and want to score points. I think fans are getting tired of NFL teams going three and out and playing field position. I think they want a more exciting brand of football,” Dawson concluded.

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com or follow him on Twitter @bhertzel.