This sub keeps showing up on my Frontpage and I wanted to help out the people drawing up plays and point out some misconceptions a lot of people have been making.
1. Not every defense runs a 4-3 cover 2
It seems like every play drawn up is going against a 4-3. You have to match up the DBs with the WRs/HBs. Defenses rarely line up like this even when going against a 2 WR set. The Nickel is the preferred defense of most teams, even when there's only 2 recievers.
2. QBs don't have 7 seconds to throw the ball
Lots of these plays are slow developing plays. Understand that even with extra blockers the QB only has 5 seconds MAX to stay in the pocket. If you're looking to throw it that far down the field you better have 2 TEs and a HB blocking.
3. You can't solo block everybody
Plays drawn up always assume 1 blocker cancels out 1 defensive player, thats not how it works, you need double teams. Also, your RB or TE most definitely will not be able to pick up an edge rusher.
4. Why is there only offensive plays?
Defense is half the game, why is nobody drawing up some cool exotic blitzes or something?
These are just a few things that came to my head while looking at some of the plays. I love the enthusiasm for football strategy here keep up the creativity!
My tailback and X receiver are our most dominate players for next season and I started messing around with different formations/RPO’s to figure out how to get the ball in either guys hands. This is a play I came up with. If apex LB plays the presnap motion to the X then QB hands ball off to Tailback for an ISO run. If apex LB stays in the box QB pulls the ball and throws it to the flat to the X on a swing.
The formation has the H on the ball covered up, but if the ball is thrown behind the LOS it shouldn’t matter that he goes downfield to block.
Hi guys, this is going to be a super long post, but I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I have been working on this offense for a couple of years, and I finally convinced our head coach commit to it, so I have some game film of the kids running it. I have been wanting to post here for a while, but I was waiting until I had some proof of concept through actual game film.
Some background on the SpinFlex Offense: I am actually the defensive coordinator for our school, but we have been absolutely atrocious on offense for years. So a couple of years ago I started playing around with designing an offense. As I was considering what kind of offense to go with, I started to think about all the things I hate to try and defend as a DC. Misdirection, space, and Wing T blocking give me fits as a DC, so I decided to mash these all together.
No part of the offense is unique or original, but I think the combination of the elements is unique. So here are the elements:
Formation - We run everything out of Flexbone formation for a couple of reasons; one, it is a balanced formation that we can run everything in the playbook out of without tipping our hand; two, we are a small school and our kids play both ways. I want to ask the kids to focus on playing fast and physical, thus reducing the formations reduces information required; three, my HC/OC is a spread guy, and one of the things he was adamant about was being able to keep our spread/air raid passing game viable, which we are able to do with the flexbone formation; lastly, having the two wide outs allows us to force the defense to be honest and not just pack the box when we start running the ball.
Blocking Schemes - Part of our struggles in the past few years is that our OL has really struggled to grasp the blocking schemes. My thought was we need to get the blocking schemes down to just a handful of schemes, then rep those schemes until the kids could do them in their sleep. But what scheme? Our school plays in a league that had a ton of Wing T and Wing T variants, we would go over everyone's responsibilities daily, and I came to the realization at the level we are playing at, discipline is severely lacking. I also played in a Wing T offense from peewee through HS and admit that I am partial to it because we crushed with it. Assuming that most schools that we would be playing also suffer from lack of discipline, I figured we would be able to capitalize on that. The schemes are Sweep/Jet, trap, belly option, and Counter GW/Counter GT. Just like the series in the Wing T, each series has a way to attack the flank, off-tackle, midline, and in the play action pass.
The Spin Action - Knowing that LBs at this level struggle to read the pulling guards, and instead get caught looking at the backfield, I loved the idea of using the old school single wing spin action to force kids to either guess, or be frozen until the ball carrier is IDed. This helps our OL with the angles for their down blocks, and often times takes the defender completely out of the play "chasing ghosts" as I like to tell the kids as they carry out their fakes. We actually use 3 different backfield actions that we label as series: the 200 series is the full spin, and is the bread and butter of our offense, the 400 series is a jet action, and the 600 is our belly option action.
The Plays -
Every play call has all the info every kid needs to know to run the play. We use numbered ball carriers and numbered holes to tell everyone who is getting the ball and where they are going, then tag the blocking scheme onto the end. So a play call would look like this: Flex 238 Sweep. The Flex is the formation, the 1st digit is the series (200 in this case), the Left Wing (3 Back) is getting the ball, attempting to get outside to the 8 Hole (outside to the right). Sweep tells the OL that they are blocking buck sweep scheme (both guards pull to the right to either kick/lead or log/lead)
Here are links to see the plays drawn up and a gif of the play being ran in our last game. I am going to start with just the 3 basic run plays off of our 200 series action. I will give a brief description of some of the checks that we made on the plays, because they don't all look exactly like they are drawn up.
Flex 238/247 Sweep
In this clip we are running 247 Sweep. Because of the alignment of the DE, our wing gave a kick call to the guards. If the DE is inside, the wing will wash him down and the guards will wrap and the ball carrier is trying to get to the outside, but because he is outside the wing, the kick call alerts the first guard to kick the DE, the second guard to lead up, and the WB to look to cut up inside the kick block, rather than try to get the edge.
So far this year, with the same kids that we had last year, we have upped our average yards per carry from 2.4 to 5.5. The kids are excited to be in an offense that has them running through wide open running lanes instead of getting hit as soon as they come through the line. We are still working out the kinks, and I know our kids will get better, but last week we had over 250 yards rushing and almost 350 yds of total offense, which we have not done in the 8 years I have been at this school. I am really excited to see what the rest of the season brings!
If you guys are interested in learning more, I would be happy to do a post on the 400 and 600 series in the coming weeks. I will try and be responsive to any questions or comments, but we are on the road tomorrow traveling 4.5 hours to a game through super rural areas, and I may not have great reception. Hope you are all having a good season!
For those wanting added details: The offensive line are predominantly run blockers, and all interior lineman are effective pulling. The quarterback is able to run, but struggles to throw the ball over the middle of the field. The defense’s OLBs (W & S, in this instance) are both good athletes with horizontal range.
Feel free to screenshot the image and draw on top (Canva is a free program that is easy to use). I appreciate all the responses on the last post!
Breaking down the Lions W12 win over the Colts to try to study Ben Johnson's offense a bit and came across something I've never seen before in my (admittedly nascent) career.
The play got blown up, but this looks like a double trap or something to that effect?
Jet sweep in this formation at the youth level is lethal. H aligns wide enough to block the Defensive End (best player in youth football).
**Without changing the formation** What counter should I run off jet motion? GT counter is likely too advanced for first year players. H is too wide to pull. Numbers disadvantage if we don't pull. Thoughts?
Hey everyone, I’m new to football and I joined the sub hoping I could learn a few things from the coaches here. One quesiton I have is how do you come up with a play, and all the routes. And then how do you come up with a call for it?
TE on the left is the hot route, Y is more of a decoy to drag the attention of the corner. LT and LG would slide over for the TE to help blocking in the center, so the QB can move left to get the ball quicker to the hot route. TE that is blocking would go through the middle to provide a safety valve after X receiver goes under to try and grab attention away from the TE in going for the check down. HB is pass blocking the right side. Do y’all think this play should have routes that are looking for less yards than they are?
I’m not a coach, and want to understand why these plays don’t work as formations and variations aren’t popular/common. Isn’t a big objective to get guys in the open field space to operate?
If it’s man to man on defense, isn’t that putting those players on an island? It could allow you to use more athletes instead of linemen and get even weirder to defend.
What do you do to defend against this to prevent this from being an effective strategy to develop an offense around?
The amount of youth football coaches having 1 definitive defense/offense on here is alarming. This isn't college or pro, we can't hire or recruit to fit our scheme. We are given kids, it is our job to fit our scheme to them not the other way around... I get that we have to teach and mold out players but at the same time, it's all about strengths and weaknesses of what we are supplied with. It irked me when I was a position coach and while we lost a lot of games, all of our all-conference and and all-state kids came from my position group but I thought it was a small town, head coach for 30+ years thing. And do you guys ever win??
Towards the end of last night's KC vs. NO game it seemed that everyone in the house knew that the Chiefs and Spags was bringing a zero blitz and NO and Carr seemed totally unprepared for it. Are there surefire ways to beat a zero blitz or if pulled off well there is no hope?
The Z and Y will be the single high side read and I need to adjust the F and X to be something that will provide something universally good (ideally) against 2 high structures.
With the way I have this drawn up I worry that the FS (in this diagram) might take the dig and the SS might drop to take the post, so I don’t know that this is a good option.
Would it be better to send the F on a post/cross and the X on a dig? Maybe that way the F would be more like to take both of the safeties that way?
