Six defensive players must be aligned no more than one yard off the line of scrimmage and head up on the offensive guards, tackles, and ends. No defender may align on the center, and all other defensive players must be at least five yards from the line of scrimmage. Blitzing is not allowed.
My opinion of these horsesh!t rules is pretty well known. If you want your kid to play football, sign him up for the sport. If you want him to take dancing, find a dancing instructor. Football has rules that have existed in pretty much standard form for over a century now with little adjustment. No group of mommies and daddies sitting in pizza parlor having a "board meeting" for a youth football league is going to improve on this sport when officials who spend their entire lives playing it, coaching it, and refereeing it can't. The NFHS rule book is written by a group of people with about 500 combined years of football knowledge. They know how to seal the gaps when a coach does something borderline unsportsmanlike (Look up the A-ll Offense sometime.), and they can do it competently and efficiently without throwing the rest of the game out of balance.
Not so, mommy leagues, so to help demonstrate the stupid that falls out of these cheesy rule changes, I'm going to show you how to obliterate the standard mandated defenses.
First off, if the defensive alignment that is required looks anything like the description above, you'll score 800 points a game. Here's how: the defense is required to be head up on all players except the center, so take your guards and split them thirty yards to each side. Have them take a knee, and have your tackles align just outside them and do the same. Ends, of course, do the same as well.
Behind the ends, align your two wingbacks. This should leave you with a formation in the middle of the field that looks like this:
Catch on yet? Because of that stupid rule, no defender on the line is allowed to be within thirty yards of the ball at the snap! Do you think any of your players, if given a 30 yard head start, could fail to score in one play? The only two things that could possibly prevent you from scoring are a fumble or if your ball carrier trips over his own feet on the way to the end zone.
I specifically pointed out to have your non-essential players take a knee. This is because I'm a smart ass and I'm pushing it to the ultimate to show the absurdity. In practice, I'd have my players fool with three to six yard gaps between center and guard. It makes the same point without really being quite as sarcastic.
So what will the league do to prevent this from happening again? Well, because leagues like this operate on a knee jerk basis, if they don't kick you out of your coaching position, they'll probably hold an emergency meeting and add a rule that says:
Okay, we have to prevent coaches from taking advantage of the blind spots in our ability to understand the game, so now no member of the offense from tackle to tackle is allowed to split more than one yard.
Fine. I would run just two plays: toss sweep and counter trap. Call the trap about every fifth play. You might put in a pass just to look good, and I’d run about six different formations and four or five motion tags, but that’s all I’d install. You’ll be really good at blocking them because there is still no possibility a defender will ever be in an unexpected position. Bunch up with no splits at all and put the defense shoulder to shoulder. This will make it easier to wall them off. Every sixth or seventh play, chuck the ball deep just to make the defensive coordinator holler out helpful things like, "Watch the pass!"
If you're not catching on yet, I don't care for leagues that try to hamstring my sport. Football is an excellent, detailed, strategic and tactical competition that has been a hundred and sixteen years in the making! A group of parents, at least 50% of which have never played the sport in their lives, is not going to improve on this game.
As I mentioned last week, what they will do is stifle innovation, turn good coaches into lazy ones, bore and demotivate their players, and make a pig's breakfast out of the game we love.
If you have to coach in one of these leagues, get hold of their bastardized rule book as early as possible and start thinking of creative ways to screw with the rules. Remember, the football rule book lists only what you can not do. If it's not expressly forbidden, it's within bounds. (With obvious exceptions. Do not give your car keys to your running back with instructions to "Drive this ball to that goalpost over there at the snap.")
But don't be afraid to have a little fun.
~D.
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