Please Don't Run the Pistol

In 2007 I was coaching with the Valley Wolfpack organization in Sumner, Washington. For some reason the Cascade Junior Football League reversed the "normal" nomenclature for football levels. Although I was coaching the 12-14 year olds, our level was the "Pee Wee" (because freshmen just love to be referred to as peewees). The youngest level was the "midgets." I don't really get it, either.

That's not really important. What is important is that, in two of our games, we faced the Puyallup Rough Riders football club, which has a twenty year reputation for success at all levels, and the Puyallup team ran the Pistol offense.

I'm not going to describe the system, or even give you any diagrams to look at because I don't want to distract you from the ultimate message here. Suffice it to say that the Pistol is a Spread-based offensive attack that places the quarterback about four yards deep behind the center, and puts the tailback at I-formation depth (seven yards). From this position, with four wide receivers, the offense can execute a number of option, run, pass, or play action plays.

Here's where things got turned upside down. I was entranced by the Pistol. Not enough to run the damn thing; I'm not that insane, but enough to try to reverse engineer a playbook for it and consider that if I ever chose to run it, this is how I would do so.

I put the playbook online after I finished it. It was an amalgam of research into the history of the Pistol (developed at Nevada in 2005 under head coach Chris Ault, with an ultimate grandfather in the Glenn Warner Single Wing), and the modern Double Wing blocking rules I use for my own offense (which can largely be found in Jerry Vallotton's outstanding book, The Toss.)

And... that's where the midden hit the windmill.

You see, I made the mistake of titling the work The Pistol Offense for Youth Football. To me, Youth Football starts at high school junior varsity and goes down. My Pistol is pretty simple, but it's still a Spread offense, and I have never advocated using the Spread below the high school level.

About three to six times per week, depending on the time of year, I get an email that reads something like this:

Hi Coach Wade. I recently came across your Pistol playbook and it's really swell. I'm a rookie head coach and I was searching the web to find a playbook for my eight and nine year old team. Most of them have never played before, but I think this offense can help us win a championship. Are there any other plays you didn't put in the book that you can send me? How many championships did you win while you were running this?

Um.

In the first place, I clearly point out in the playbook (Page 2) that I have never run the Pistol. One of the things that scares the crap out of me is the thought that a coach who couldn't read the playbook well enough to realize that I only reverse engineered the system from game film is now going to use it to coach a team of rookie players.

In the second place, although I obviously didn't make it clear enough, the Pistol is not for eight, nine, or ten year olds. The absolute rock-bottom youngest age group I'd run the system with is a team of ages 11-12 that was heavy in the older/lighter category. As written, the system is better suited for the midget level of youth football (or the peewee, if you're in the Cascade Junior Football League).

In the third place, rookie head coaches are probably best served sticking with ground-based attacks. It's a lot easier to coach a power/misdirection system like the Single or Double Wing, or a Wing-T or even Power-I, than it is to try to coach the intricacies of pass blocking, coverage reading, and proper route running. Can it be done? Absolutely. A rookie head coach with zero experience could step in with any offense, a decent work ethic, a reasonable study period before the season begins, and comparable talent and be successful-- for a given value of the word "successful." He might go .300. He might even go undefeated if the right elements are in place. That depends on him and his players.

However, the odds are highly, highly stacked against him. Most youth coaches who try to run pass-heavy playbooks get their asses handed to them. It's not uncommon to see them go entire seasons without scoring a single touchdown. They turn the ball over on bad-call interceptions. They don't know how to read defenses themselves to determine a Cover-2, Cover-3, or Cover-1, and they run receivers into waiting defenders or overpressure their quarterbacks with insane demands like reading three receivers in widely disparate sections of the field in two seconds.

Their players get frustrated. They get frustrated, and they drive young people out of football. They themselves get out of coaching too early, without realizing that it wasn't the kids; it was them not knowing what the hell they were doing.

Even the ground-based attacks have a ridiculous number of details. I coached a Double Wing at Tomales High School at the varsity and junior varsity level under the outstanding head coach Leon Feliciano for three years before it ever occurred to me that our offense would get better if the pulling guard ran forward-- through the center's hips-- rather than pulling flat and turning up. That one little adjustment added .6 of a yard to our lifetime average on 24 Toss, the cornerstone of our offensive plays. That doesn't sound like much, but when you run that play 75% of the time, .6 of a yard turns into one more touchdown each half, and one to two more wins each season.

We're not even getting into the fact that if you coach a passing system, you have to coach pass blocking and run blocking, but you can conceivably get away with either not passing at all in a running system (Been there. Done it. Got the trophy.), or using only play action and teaching run blocking on all your passing plays.

Pass blocking is passive. You sit in one position and guard a space on the field, blocking only the defenders that enter it. Run blocking is aggressive. You physically attack a defender with the intent to either knock him on his ass or at the very least physically move him from out of the path of the ball carrier.

Pass blocking can be out-schemed by blitzing much more easily than run blocking can. What does a pass blocker do when threatened by two or more defenders? Who knows? But a run blocker doesn't care that much because he should already be engaged with one of them-- the guy he attacked at the snap.

In the fourth place, there are nine running plays that can be reversed in the playbook I wrote. That's eighteen plays that hit all points of attack: interior, off-tackle, outside; and also provide power, misdirection, and draw action. That doesn't even count the ten passing plays that can be mixed and matched on each side of the field for more than one hundred potential pass pattern combinations off of just a single formation. Writing me to ask for even more plays for this offense shows me that you really haven't studied what's already there.

Does my Pistol work? Yes. I had a coach contact me that was running a Multiple-I system in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2008. He switched to the Pistol in 2009 and scored 38+ in every game for two years straight. I had a high school coach from Long Island, NY email me and tell me he was using my system with his junior varsity, and had adapted his own terminology to fit mine because mine was easier for them to grasp and more modular and expandable.

I had another coach, much more recently, contact me asking if the Pistol was a good fit for him. He was coaching younger players, 11-12 year olds, but they were experienced (he had one player that had never played before, and two players with only one year of experience. Every other player was in his third year or more.) and he himself had been coaching for six or seven years. They'll be using it in the 2011 season and I think they'll do very well.

Properly coached, with the right personnel in place, at an age group that can functionally perform the required skills, the Pistol as I've developed it is very effective. However, this does not mean it is right for you:

• If you're in your first three years of coaching-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If this is your first year as a head coach or offensive coordinator-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If your players are younger than age eleven-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If your team is composed mostly of rookies-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If you're not comfortable with your ability to read a defensive coverage-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.

I believe that anyone can beat the numbers. America is the greatest country on earth because anyone can work hard and achieve success. However, I also believe that intentionally charging headlong into overwhelming odds is more likely to make you dead than make you a hero. Yes, you can be successful running the Pistol as a rookie coach with a team of eight year olds. This does not mean that you should try to do so. The risk of leading that team to an 0-8 season and the frustrations that entails (which will probably be worse for you than for them because... they're eight.) is just not worth the pleasure of calling a tunnel screen at the perfect time.

I get dozens of emails each month about this playbook, and very few of them turn into actual conversations. The first email I receive is above, and my reply usually says, "Coach, I really, really do not recommend what you're about to do. You're not coaching the right age group and your experience level doesn't lend itself to easy success with this offense." That email almost never gets a reply back.

I'm not trying to say that you're a bad coach, or stupid, or anything negative like that. I'm saying that my experienced opinion (which you asked for when you contacted me) leads me to believe that you will have more success with another system. If you've got the experience, and you've got the players, by all means, give the system a shot.

But if it's your first year as a football coach and you're in the junior peewee division... please don't run the Pistol.

~D.