Every year I do a thorough analysis of my teams and the system via in-depth film study. This year it was a much deeper study than ever before and I started doing it even before our season ended. I was in the process of putting together the 2007 Season DVD. I added subtitles to every single snap of every game so you can see what بت مجیک plays and defensive calls are in place before the play starts. I’m also adding audio commentary to emphasize the key points to look for on each snap. As the season progressed, we found a number of teams would send their defensive tackles to their knees, “diving” our wedge play if they felt our linemen were wedge blocking. What this did was create a pile that made it a bit more difficult to wedge.
We also found that if the linebackers saw a wedge forming, they would quickly come up to fill the middle and the defensive ends would curl around the wedge and try and drag the ball carrier down from behind. Our initial response was to have our offensive linemen just keep their knees up and trample over the defensive lineman, the defensive linemen rarely like using this diving technique the entire game and will rarely stick to it for long. We were still getting good yardage on our wedge, but not quite what we had gotten in the past. Of course for those teams that would dive every play, we simply ran lots of off-tackle, sweeps, counters, buck wedges and passes and just ran wild. In fact this season we averaged about the same number of points per game (35) with our age 10-11 team as we did the previous year and we were much smaller this season. But for those teams that would wait to “feel” the wedge before diving, we had a different plan in store for them.
Late this season we had added a football play that was really just a slight modification of two football plays we already run. The 16 Power, our tailback power play off-tackle run to the strong side and 22 our Wedge, a fullback wedge to the Right Guard. While nether of these is the “sexiest” of football plays, together they averaged almost 9 years per carry this year. The new hybrid play hit so quick and was so open, it looked like our tailback was shot out of a cannon.
If you’ve ever seen those Power T teams run the ball, it is an amazing offense. Much like the Single Wing, it is real tough to pick up the ball and they hit the line very quickly out of a compressed formation with 3 backs attacking 3 different points of attack. On the base play, the fullback attacks the playside dive or trap hole, the backside halfback attacks the playside off-tackle hole and the quarterback attacks the playside sweep area. The quarterback either gives to the fullback, backside halfback or keeps it on a sweep. Everything is so compressed and it hits so quick, that you have no clue who has the football. To add to this mess, all the ballcarriers and fake ballcarriers use a “layered” handoff method to hide the ball and carry their fakes out 20 + yards. When I watch these High School teams play on my DVD player, I have to slow everything down frame by frame to see who the heck has the darn football, I kind of like that especially in youth football..
We decided to incorporate some of these concepts into a single football play we would use late in our 2007 youth football season. We would take the “double dive” concept from the Power T teams and adapt it to our youth football playbook. We would run our off-tackle play to our tailback out of our base set, but use wedge blocking and a fake to our fullback to draw the defense in.
It was simple to put in, our linemen wedge blocked, something we learned in the first week of practice and use on a number of our existing football plays. Our backfield would run our base 16 Power (tailback off tackle strong) with the exception being that our fullback would fake a 22 wedge run (wedge run at our right guard). The blocking back would execute his normal kickout block of the playside defensive end and the wingback would do his normal seal of the near linebacker like they were all used to doing on the 16 power.
There was no need for a pulling guard, as the linebackers were already coming up hard when they saw any wedge forming and would get lost in the wash. The tailback would run off-tackle to the strong side, inside the blocking backs kickout block and then just outside the wingbacks seal block, just like the 16 Power we usually run. Both our Fullback and Tailback would carry the ball or fake with both forearms completely over the ball, or their stomachs (if faking) and were bent at the waist more than usual. Since this was a combination of 2 football plays we already run, it took all of 1 minute to install, it stole zero time from our regular football practice schedule.
The keys were we had to make it look like a great fullback wedge play, with our fullback hitting it up in there. He had to get lost in the pile and fight for yardage while our blocking back and wingback executed their respective kickout and seal blocks. Of course we would set the new play up by running plenty of our fullback wedge football plays.
In our last big game of the year we played a 7-1 Malcolm team. They had scouted us very thoroughly, plenty of intel from our opponents, film and they come to this site as well where I talk in depth every week about my team and our games. Malcolm had lost just one game and had posted at least 6 shutouts. They had won 7 blowout games, were absolutely enormous, 6-7 “striped” (over 128 pounds) linemen to our 1 striped lineman and were well coached.
