Overdue Season Adjustments Make Huge Differences in Youth Football

Every year I do a thorough analysis of my teams and the machine via in-depth film study. This year it was a much deeper study than ever before before and I began doing it even before our season ended. We was in the process of putting together the 2007 Season DVD. We added subtitles to every single snap of each game so you can see what football plays and defensive calls are in place prior to the play begins. I'm also adding sound commentary to emphasise the key points to look for on each snap. Because the season progressed, we found several of groups would send their defensive tackles with their knees, "diving" our wedge play if they felt our linemen were wedge blocking. Just what this did was create a pile that managed to get somewhat more difficult to wedge.

We also found that if the linebackers saw a wedge creating, they would quickly come up to fill the middle and the protective ends would curl around the wedge and try to drag the ball provider down from behind. Our initial response was to have our offensive linemen just keep their legs up and trample over the defensive end zone camera lineman, the defensive linemen rarely like using this diving approach the whole game and can rarely stick to it for long. We were still getting good yardage on our wedge, but not quite what we had obtained previously. 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. Actually this season we proportioned 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. Nevertheless for those teams that would wait to "feel" the wedge before snorkeling, we had a different plan in store for them.

Late this season there were extra a football play that was really simply a small 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 sand wedge to the Right Safeguard. While nether of these is the "sexiest" of football plays, together they averaged almost 9 years per carry this coming year. The particular new hybrid play hit so quick and was so open, it appeared as if our tailback was chance out of a canon.

This is just what we did:

When you've ever seen those Power T teams run the ball, it is an amazing offense. Just like the Single Wing, it is real tough to choose up the ball and they hit the line very quickly out of a compressed formation with 3 backs attacking 3 different parts of attack. On the base play, the fullback attacks the playside get 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 also it strikes so quick, that you have no clue who has the football. To add to this mess, all the ballcarriers and pretend ballcarriers use a "layered" handoff method to hide the basketball and carry their fakes out 20 + yards. When I watch these High School teams play on my DVD player, I have to slower everything down frame by frame to see who the heck has the darn football, I kind of like that especially in youth football..

We chose to incorporate a few of these concepts into one 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 arranged, but use wedge blocking and a fake to our fullback to pull the defense in.

It absolutely was simple to put in, our linemen wedge clogged, something we learned in the first week of practice and use on a number of our existing football plays. The backfield would run our base 16 Power (tailback off tackle strong) with the exception being that our fullback would bogus a 22 wedge run (wedge run at our right guard). The preventing back would execute his normal kickout block of the playside defensive conclusion and the wingback would do his normal close off of the near linebacker like we were holding all used to doing on the 16 power.

There was no need for a pulling guard, as the linebackers were already approaching up hard when they saw any wedge forming and would get lost in the wash. The tailback would run off-tackle to the strong part, 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 basketball, or their stomachs (if faking) and were curved at the waist more than usual. Since this was a blend of 2 football plays we already run, it took all of 1 minute to set up, it stole zero time from our regular football practice schedule.