As you recall from last week, we spoke only about the "Basic" formation and the 4 vertical play as taken from the playbook used by Mike Newsome, at Butler High School in North Carolina. Whatever terminology you use, the play is one of the simplest in football:
There are a lot of ways you can change up this play to keep the defense guessing, and they're all pretty simple from the offensive point of view. As you probably know if you've read my stuff regularly (or at least as regularly as any schedule I've been on for the last seven years or so), I am a huge believer in changing formation without changing my offensive assignments. If you can alter your alignment, without altering where a player goes or what he does after the snap, in a lot of cases the defense has to treat that as a whole new play.
So take a look at what happens when we adjust from "Base California" above to "Trips Right California" below:
What changed for our players? Nuffin'! #1s still run streaks (arrows, go routes... whatever you call them in your specific terminology) outside the numbers, and the inside men still run the same thing inside the hash marks. The only change is that the mostest innerest man now has to cross the formation before angling downfield.
With this in mind, we can use any formation: even Quads, Ace, TE Trips, what have you, and we can still get our receivers into the places they're supposed to be. Further, just like the Pistol playbook, the receiver responsibilities change based only on where their alignment places them: if you're the #2 receiver, then you run the #2 route, always, forever, whenever. If motion makes you the #1, then you run the #1 route.
I'll let you come up with motion tags to adjust this further, but if you're looking for help, the Pistol playbook has some for you.
But if you're ever going to get that pass off, you need to spend some time working on pass blocking. This has taken me a long time to understand, and after some research and study this year I finally discovered that I had backed into an excellent pass protection scheme several years ago.
In 2003 I sat down with every video copy of our offense running a flood pass over the preceding six years, as well as some video of the same play being run by other teams. I came to the conclusion that we needed to run away from one defensive end, and get a back on the other. I was so damn smart I even spent 35 minutes talking about it at the 2004 Double Wing Symposium (DWS-I).
Here's why passing coaches in the audience were yawning: what I was doing was simple slide protection, nothing more.
Here's the basics for how it works. At the collegiate-- and sometimes high school-- level, protection is called based on where the defense is most likely to stunt from. Defenses at those levels generally decide to stunt from the field (the wide side) when they want to be in the quarterback's face and disrupt his vision lanes, and from the boundary when they want to blindside him. According to Mike Archer of NC State, NCAA offenses generally throw to the wide side about 65% of the time. He likes to blitz from that side, and gave me an excellent zone blitz package called "Fargo" ("field").
The offense can slide their protection one way or the other in order to intercept the stunting defenders. This works for the same reason angle blocking works on running plays: you're cutting a defender off and shoving him to the side rather than meeting him head up when he may be stronger than you. (Which is traditional "cup" protection.) If the middle linebacker stunts from the picture below, instead of a center standing still and catching his charge, there's an angling guard (or even tackle) crossing his face automatically to earhole him. Odds are, at the youth level, he won't even see this one coming.
Sliding to the field looks like this:
The way it works is actually pretty simple. All offensive linemen take a sharp, angled step towards the wide side of the field. Their goal is to engage, not the defender aligned on them, but the defender one gap or more to the inside. They're seeking to get their head and upfield shoulder across the defender and "lock" him into the 90-degree angle between their earhole and their shoulder pad. Then, if they just keep driving, even if the man penetrates the line, he's shoved far enough off-course that he can't get to the quarterback before the throw.
Pay attention to the running back. In the play above, we have "Field, Away" as a protection call. This mean our offensive line blocks towards the field, and our running back blocks away from them, to the boundary. His job is to pick up the first man outside the offensive tackle's outside foot. To do this, he needs to start out with an aiming point at the tackle's inside hip. (He can be beaten outside if the defensive end takes a wide path-- we can live with that. However, if he's beaten to the inside gap, he should be beaten-- with a stick-- after the game. Don't really do that.) If the defender arcs wide outside, he can come up underneath and run them upfield. If the defender cuts inside sharp, the running back meets him near the line.
Don't forget that, at the youth level, your running back is one of the top three athletes on your team, and that defensive end is one of the middle guys, talent-wise.
Now, if we want to roll or half-roll into the field to force the defense to commit one way or another, we can make a slightly different blocking call: "Field, towards."
In a towards call, we can assume that the defensive end is coming wider-- he has to in order to escape the playside tackle's block. For this reason we want our running back to take a more arced path to the point of the block, and try to meet the defender with his shoulders square to the line. If the running back can cross the defensive end's face, is springs the perimeter open if the quarterback wants to run with the ball. Again, we've got a stellar athlete on an average one (although wide side ends tend to be higher up on the talent chain than short side ends).
As you can see, with some basic adjustments to the formation and the addition of a couple of blocking calls, we can make our offense much more dangerous.
~D.
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