DENNIS ERICKSON An Update on the One-Back Offense University of Miami 1992 tis @ pleasure to be here today. We have just finished recruiting, and most of you know that is a pain in the neck. I had an interesting experience with recruiting this past year. My son is a junior quarterback at one of the high schools in Miami. 1 ot to go see him play the second game of the year up at Vero Beach this fall. My son is about 6'2" and weighs 160 pounds. He is built like his mother. | got 0 see him play, as itis legal for me to see my son play. They were playing Vero Beach and they had a number 88 on defense that was just kiling my son on every play. He was just beating the living crap out of my son. He was sacking him and throwing him all over the place. My son came home that night and told me | had to recruit that number 88 from Vero Beach. We ended up signing that player a few days ‘ago. Now, the only problem | have with this story is this. My son was 6'2" before that game, but was only’5'10" after that game. What | want to do ‘today is to tell you what we do basically. | am not going to hide anything that we do. f you have any questions, let me know. We are always leaming from each other in football. | wil share what" we do offensively with our passing game. | will cover how our offense originated and ‘what we are doing with it now. Our offense is very, very simple. People think we tun a complicated offense, but that is not true, They see us tun motion and a lot of other things, but what we do is very simple. We run a lot of diferent formations, but run only a few plays. When | was an assistant at San Diego State, | worked with Jack Elway. This is how our offense got started. Originally, we were a veer team. We would get in split backs and we would run the inside veer ot the outside veer, the base dive, and all of that offense. in our passing game, we would get in split backs and run one of the backs in motion to either the split end or the flanker, and we would run either a slant or an up route with that back. That was a basic part of our offense. We could get in a double set or a trips set and. run the same things. in our running game, we would send a man in motion and if the defense would bounce a linebacker out to cover him, we would run the base dive play. That is how the offense got started. | went to the University of idaho and we ran the same offense. Then | went to Washington State and we ran the split backs, and the one-back set, and the same basic offense. We would teach our offense from the split backs for the original part of the offense, and then we would run the one-back set for most of the game. So we made a survey and found in practice that we lined up in a two-back set with & rman in motion about 60 percent of the time. Then when we played in a game, 80 percent of our offense was from a one-back set. We just made a decision about five years ago to go stiiclly with a ‘one-back attack, We have been very successful with this set. One of the. reasons we have been successful is the fact that we can run the football out of this set: ‘The first area | want to talk about is our short passing game. First, | will talk about our formations to start.out with, The first formation we start out in is our doubles right. We call the slot man our tailback, A lot of teams call him the H back. can be a different type of player at the TB position. We like 104aSesaan soo S = aitay a receiver at that poston. You can play 3 ring back at this postion and switch to the ig set from this formation. You can put an extra “git end in that position, which a lot of people do ‘ah their running game. You can send the man in motion, and you can do a lot of other things with fim. This is doubles formation. Doubles right We use this formation basically in the middle of the football field. We like to balance things up. f we have a tendency, that is what itis. ‘The next formation is what we call twins. We call ‘twins right ot twins left. itis very simple. Now we do bring a tight end in. However, to make it simple for us in our terminology, we just call him TB. The formation tells us we will have @ TB at the tight end opposite the Y tight end. If we wanted to run a particular option patiem to that end, we would just ‘all tailback option. This means we are running the exact same plays out of that formation. 1 COROCO0O +2 FB “oO ‘Twins right Our next formation is our trey right formation. tt is very simple. The way we cover the splits is lke this, f we are on the hash mark, we will split Z ouiside the numbers. We take the tailback and split him between the tight end and our Z back. Of course, he can cut his split down according to the Toute he is running. We give him that flexibility. The X end is five yards from the sideline, into the. short side. f we ate in the middle of the field from a double or twin set, we will split X and Z seven yards from the sideline. The tailback is split three yards outside the tackle and two yards deep. Again, that will vary according to the route you run. So, trey formation is used a great deal of the time. Trey right The formation we use more than any other formation is our trips. That is a hash mark formation for us. f we are on the hash, we will get into trips. ‘Again, the TB is split three yards and two yards deep. ‘The X man is outside the numbers on the hash, and Z splits the difference between the TB and X man. 9 ° on 009 92 9 Trips right ‘The next formation is trips open. tis exactly the ‘same formation with this exception: Now we bring in another receiver. If you have a tight end that has good athletic ability, you can flex him from the line ‘on tips open. ‘Trips open right This formation looks like a passing set. We have four wideouts in the game. However, we have had more success running the ball out of this set than anything. Here we can spread everyone out and you get a chance to run the football. 105‘A formation that we added this year is what we call spread right or spread left Is just tips with the back out of the backfield. We can move the back outside or we can bring in another receiver. We split him out five yards ftom the sideline. 9 oo cog 22 q 8 ‘Spread right This set has been good to us. Those of you who have watched us play know thet we motion that back outside @ lot. So this has-helped us a great deal. What we cid this year was just to line the man Up outside from the huddle. It gave us the same effect if we had put him in motion to the outside. Our deep back or tailback is lined up with his heels set at six to six-and-a-half yards deep. You can. move him to any depth depending on his speed. He is just an | formation tailback. We like the man deep because we do a lot of reads and counter action. We like the deep back deep enough to enable him to read the play as it develops. ‘The next thing we do is to run what we call et motion. To us, jet motion is receiver motion. if we wanted to get into doubles right, we would line up in trips right and send the Z man in motion to the other side to form our doubles right. We would call doubles right — jet. This tells us we are going to line up in trips and Z is going to motion to doubles. v , oogees A Jet motion. If we are going to motion the-tailback, we call it zoom motion. If we wanted to get into tey right, we would call-trey right ~ zoom. We would line up in doubles and zoom our TB over to get to trey ight tt is very simple. oonoeog 2 8 2 9 ‘Zoom motion ‘The thing | like about our offense is this: We are giving them different looks all of the time. We are: tunning the same plays out of every formation. Next, | want to talk about the philosophy of our passing game with the one-back offense, We want to spread the field with formations and motion. With ‘our formations, we want to spread the defense all over the field. What it really does is this: It forces the defense to dedare if they are in man-to-man or zone coverage. tt is very simple. If the linebacker bounces outside to cover the tailback in the slot and it is an outside linebacker, they will probably be playing zone. If they keep the man inside and bring the free safety over, it probably will be some type of blitz, it is a lot easier to see things from our formations. It has really helped us with our audible. and in attacking the biitz. When the defense sees ew ‘one-back, right away they will come after you We want to stretch the defense. Again, we do that with the formations. We want to stretch the defense as far as we can. We want to create mismatches. This is what | mean by that. We want to take a linebacker that is responsible for the run and get him out on our tailback. Our best player usually is our tailback. This is our man in the slot. He is our best receiver. If you are going to play zone coverage against us, you will have to take a linebacker outside and put him on the tailback, and that is a mismatch. If you want to. play nickel or dime, which we do not see much in high school, that is a mismatch as far as we are concemed. We want to create positive run situations. | really believe this is the key. You can see the Redskins and 106c © other good teams doing this. When you spread the = defense all over the field, they have problems playing the running game, For example, if we were in doubles and we were playing against a 4-3 or an ‘eagle look, then the linebacker on the tailback has some problems. If they take him outside and put him on the tailback, then we can run the ball inside, if they leave him inside, we can go outside. it creates some real problems for the defense. Let's talk about throwing on cove. In our offense, we have to throw on cover either to the tailback in the slot orto the tight end. it depends on how they defense you. When we take our tailback and put him outside, i the defense does not bring a linebacker outside to cover us, then we ate going to.rise up and throw the ball to the seam to the tailback. We will run motion out of the backfield, particularly wher! we are in doubles where we have no backs. When teams adjust to play the man in motion, they may leave the tight end or tailback open. You have to be able to throw the ball to the uncovered man. By forcing defensive adjustments it helps us in our protection and with our running game by bringing the linebackers outside. Another thing—by spreading the formations across the field, it hurts the blitz. Ifthe linebacker is inside and the free safety is cheating up, you can see it. f you split him far enough, you can recognize it ifthe linebacker is coming, he will be inside. If you «an see it, you can check off toa better play. | would rather check against the blitz. That is the obvious thing to do. like to check to the hitch, or the out, or the slant route. If you can see it, you want to be able to check to the open route. Naturally, you must be able to protect from the different formations. We spend a lot of time working against the blitz, We block it really well. We protect it from tackle to tackle. if someone comes free, they are going to come from the outside. We want to be very simple in our protection, We do not do a lot of things against the blitz. The best route in football, in my opinion, is the sixyard hitch route. It is the easiest route to throw and the simplest to execute, and yet people do not throw it enough. We threw the hitch about 70 times and competed it about 60 times. We threw it in citical situations. You have to have a game plan, We take a three-step drop and throw the hitch route Until they do something to stop us. If they come up and bump us, we will throw the fade route. if they roll up and play zone against us, we will change from the hitch, But when they do that, it opens up ther things inside. If we want to throw the hitch against the biit, we wil. Also, we can throw an out to our tailback, and we can throw the big play. We make adjustments on what we do a great deal of the time. We use a lot of hand signals. We play in stadiums where you can't hear the audible, We can always check from tackle to tackle: The quarterback can walk down and tell the tade what the check is, but the guys outside can't see the check. That is the reason we signal the routes with cour hands. Again, itis a matter of who has the chalk fast. We feel the defense can never be right. We feel we are going to have the opportunity to run the right play against the defense. That does not mean it will be executed right all of the time. But because we can see things, we can either check or run what we feel is the best play for us. ‘Another factor that is helpful to our offense is ‘our simplicity. We have five running plays. We run the inside zone play (which is a stretch play), the outside stretch play, the counter trey play, and we run two draw plays. We run the trap draw and we tun a lead draw. That is our running game, We go inside and run against our defense every day for 10 minutes. It is tough. If you can run the ball against our defense, you are pretty damn good. We run the inside zone and the outside zone plays and the counters. That is all we run, We become very good at running those plays, and we have become very effective running the football as a result of this fact. ur offense, other than the short passing game, is very simple. We run the five- and sever-step drop passing game. The short passing game is a big part of that offense. We run play-action passes off the stretch plays and off the counters. That is basicaly ‘our offense, Do we have any questions so far? 107 ailLe’s talk about our one-back quick series without motion. We probably run this more than anything else in our passing game. The thing we do is to use it against the blitz a lot, but we also use it against the zone. We run three-man routes. We protect with six people all the time. We can protect with seven people if we have to. We are ahvays protected. Our tight end, tailback, and fullback, if they are not called in the route, will check and then release and run their patterns. Basically, we keep our fullback in most of the time. On our X,Y, Z calls we go doubles right - 90 X. ‘This tells us the tight end is staying in. We have two hitch routes called outside. The tight end is blocking to the X side and the tailback is releasing on a zone route. If we call 90 Z, the fullback goes to the tight end'side and we keep the tailback in and the ¥ man releases into the route. On tips, it is the same thing. if we have 90 X called, the tight end stays in and blocks. We do a lot of different things as far as running a lot of different routes are concerned, but itis very simple as far as protection is concemed. ‘There are certain calls that are good against blitz and bluff. We see the defense come up and bluff the blitz, and then they will come out of it, or they will continue with the blitz. We try to develop a package within our system that is good against btz and the zone that they come out of. Most ofthe teams, when they are going to blitz you, will play a three-deep zone. That is the easiest thing to get to. It is too hard to:oll and get position. So what we want to do is to check to something that is good against man and, also, good against the three-deep zone. Some teams are going to come out and play blitz and then go to cover 2 of cover 5, If that happens, then we want something that is good against both of those. Again, our maximum protection is our three-step drop, the hitch, the slant, the out, etc. As I said, we want to protect from tackle to tackle. Let me talk about protection. If we make an X call, the fullback is going to that side and we are keeping the tight end in. Against 2 50 defense, ths is whet we do: The tackles key the men over them, The center and two guards key the three men inside. if there is a stunt on inside, then they are responsible for those three men. itis zone blocking Our back is going to block the end man on the fine of scrimmage. Vs. 5-2 defense Against the eagle defense, we have to check the Mike linebacker if we know it is man. Our guard and tackle must work together. As long as there is @ threat of a blitz inside, the two must be able to handle it sagosd ‘Vs, eagle defense On our normal splits, we take a two-foot split. If we are going to face a team that likes to blitz alot, we will cut our splits down foot to foot. Against San Diego State this year, we went foot to foot because they played us with that bear defense where they like to line up in the double eagle look every down. We went foot to foot and tumed everything down inside, and they could not get their linebacker through because there was no place fo run them through. So if we play a tear that likes to bit lot, then we wil cut our spits down. tis all according to the game plan. Against the 4-3 defense, it is the same thing, The only difference is the nose man. He is now moved over to the weak guard. We are going to base block We keep the tight end in to block. The center and the strong guard make sure they takecare of the Mike linebacker. We are just going to zone protect and set. If the Mike linebacker runs a bitz, we would block him with the center or guard depending on what the nose does. s 606 W EN oOo oo = 4-3 defense We do not see the eight-man front much, but 1 do know you see it in high school. itis a good defense. The thing against our offense is that it takes ‘away the eight-man front. Ifit is a 4-4 type look and you have the tailback outside, someone has to get ‘outside and cover him. Again, we would block the 44 the same. If the Will linebacker is out on the double, we would protect the guard. Here the guard and tackle block base. The center comes weak against the 4-4 defense. The strong guard and strong tackle take care ofthe stack on thelr side. The tight end is staying in to block. MoS 606 B w EW 00 35 4-4 defense If itis going to be man coverage, then they have to get a safety over there. When you have eight people rushing and you have the threat of four or five receivers, they must get out and cover the Teceivers, What you have to do is to identify the defense and get the protection you want. | draw up all of the philosophy and all of the good things and then | make the offensive line coach block the plays. That is the hardest position to teach, itis hard to find good blockers. They take a lot of cap from everyone about their blocking. This next route is as good a play as there is. We call it 90 X and 90 Z. People do not run it very much. Itis just a six-yard hitch route. We have our receivers, in a two-point stance. | do not care which foot they have back, whichever they feel comfortable with. ‘Our flanker, tailback, and our split end are in a two- point stance. The reason we do that is so we can see things better. Some coaches think you can come off the ball better in a three-point stance, and that may be true. However, we must be able to see things, so we have the receivers standing up. We try to teach all of our routes from the hitch to the streak, to the cur, to the 14-yard out, to the post. We try to teach them off one move. We try to get them to come off the line of scrimmage straight at the defender with a slight outside release. We ‘want fo stem up the football field and try. to make the defense think streak. This is very important. On the hitch route, as the receiver makes his outside release and comes up the field, he is pushing the comer to make him think streak. We run the route at six yards, The receiver just runs the six-yard hitch ‘and tums back fo the quarterback. The key to the route is this: The receiver must come off the line and make the defender think fade and net hitch. After he has established the defender, he can come back tothe sicyatd hitch, We want the defender to think streak every time we run a route. He comes off as hard as he can, and the quarterback takes a three-step drop and hits the hitch. [have done some experimenting and | have let the quarterbacks do what is the most comfortable for them on the three-step drop. It does not matter if it is right, left, right, and throw, or if they just back ‘out of there. The thing | like about backing out and coming one, two, three, is the fact that you can throw to both sides. Throwing to your left as you come back is easier said than done, We like the ‘quarterback to back out so they can go to either side immediately. We do not just want them to back out when they are going to the left. They must back out all of the time if they are going to back out when they want to go left. You can get the ball off a litle better to your left if you back out. 109‘One coaching point that we use throwing to the lefts this: As the quarterback comes back, its one, two, and as the quarterback plants the third foot, we tty to teach them to point the toe up the football field. This will open up the quarterback. We stress this: one, two, boom, three, and the quarterback is, open as he throws. ifthe quarterback can get his toe pointed, he can get his hips open and get into the pass. The key to throwing the hitch route is that you must know what coverage the defense is playing. If itis mar’ coverage, and you are going to throw the hitch, then you can look at the defender and pick up the receiver. The defender will be looking at the receiver and will not see the quarterback. If it is zone coverage and the quarterback looks at the receiver on the third step, then we are in trouble. We tell our quarterback against the zone to look the play off and then to come back the other way on the third step. It is something you must spend time on. if we have 90 X called, they are going to come to the line of scrimmage and the quarterback has @ choice. He is going to throw where the cushion is. ‘Against Florida State, we ran this play. tt was a great game. It was fourth down and six to go down deep, going in to win the game. We ended up scoring and ‘won the game. This is what we ran on that fourth cdown play. We ran 90 X. The receiver came out and looked one way, went the othet way, and made the key catch. That kept the drive going and we scored to win the game. The other thirig we do is to run a sbxyard hitch with the outside man. He comes off the ball and tries to get to the outside shoulder of the defender. We will read what is happening outside. If itis a two- deep roll-up cover, then we tum the hitch into a fade route. If the comer rolls, the teceiver comes off and tuns the fade and tries to get into the void area. If ‘the defense is playing bump-and-mun, we run the fade as well. (On our 91, we run the out route. We do not throw that route very much. We feel we get the same thing when we run the hitch, and it is an easier throw than the out. The only time we will run the sixyard out route is when they are playing us deep inside, We do the same thing that we did on the hitch. We come out and make the defense think we are throwing the fade route, We are going to take an outside release, and drive them off the ball six yards, and then break off the inside foot and cut outside, We do not teach a speed cut on this play. We do on the dropback game, but not on the out. We do the same thing with the tailback. He runs his release, but he is going to hook up at six yards. We do not throw this pass very much because the hitch takes care of what we want. The route we do throw a great deal isthe slant, We have some combinations that we run with the slant. We try to teach the slant the same way as the hitch. We want to take an outside release up the field. When the receiver gets to six yards deep, he is going to break it to the inside on the slant. also, with this route, we do run a fiat route. We run the slant ‘on both sides of the ball. We run it against both man and zone. We go into the huddle and this is what we call: double right — 92 X — tailback flat. We have a two- man route on one side, and a single route on the ‘other side. We have maximum protection. All we do is to read the play. We teach the flat route to our tailback. We run the flats against the blitz. We used to teach the tailback to get width and depth, and flat tun away from the man and get his head back and look at the quarterback. What happened is this: As the tailback would come off and worked to get depth, as he looked at the quarterback, he would only get a depth of about two or three yards, So now ‘when we teach the flat route, this isthe rule we give the receivers: He is going to drive it up the field two steps first, and then he is going to work for width and depth. By doing this, we can get the man upfield and can get the depth we want. IF we were going to face a team that was going to play us in a three-deep—let's say they were going to blitz against us but they were going to play a three-deep, we would run 92 X — tailback flat. That would be a-teal key route for us going into the geme. The reason for this is that we have a simple Key. We are going to key the outside linebacker inFORSSK SSR RSE Sa SHO DOE SEE ee ee ee ee eee this case. The X end drives up the field six yards and "as the stant. We key the Will linebacker on the fat. | Fthe Wil linebacker jumps the slant, the tailback i his fiat. f the Wil linebacker does not go with the X end, we hit him on the slant. We hit right now, = fhe jumps the route, the quarterback waits for the tailback to clear the area on the flat. He waits for the «tailback to dear the area between the Will linebacker “and the outside linebacker, That is where we throw the ball to him. You can also throw the ball to the tight end side. = ifyou have a great tight end, or if you were in two tight ends with twins, you can do the same thing. Now the tight end runs the flat foute and the flanker runs the slant. If it is man coverage and the linebacker jumps in to blitz and the free safety jumps us late, we have a good combination against the blitz, We should have it protected, and we should be able to run the slant or the flat. We try to put those two routes together when we are facing a ‘team that likes to run that coverage. ‘The other route we run a lot with the tight end is the fade. We run it with a combination with the ‘tailback. We teach the fade the same as we talked about before. We want to take an outside release, come off the football, avoid contact, and then run like a son of a gun if it is man coverage. If it is bump- and-tun, we will get the ball to him. If we have a fade called and it is a roll-up, two-deep zone, | want to widen the comer as | start out. That comer has been taught not to let the receiver outside. He is going to try to jam inside and close everything into the safety inside. As the receiver, you are not going to get outside, but you are going to try to get outside. "We want to widen the comer. If it is impossible to get outside, and the comer jams the ‘man, at least he can widen the play so he will be away from the safety a little. The combination we run with that coverage is 98 X~ toilback out. tis a combination with the fade and the out route with the tailback. We teach this at si yards. Our tailback is going to come off the football, take an outside release, and he is going to Work up the field for six yards, and then break on his ‘out route. He is going to climb to six yards and then break out. He must push it up the field hard for six yards, and then break it out Itis a route we throw a lot. Again, if itis against a two-deep zone, you must have a plan. f itis a two-deep zone and we have a 95 X ~ tailback out called, the X man takes an Outside release and drives up the field. The tailback is going to come off the ball and break up for six yards and then break out. Now our key is the comer against two-deep. If we were going to see a lot of two-deep coverage, we would check to this. We want to get to the Will linebackers outside. Let me talk about trips for a second, We line up con the hash. It is hard to throw the hitch from the hash, but we do throw it. If we call 92 X— tailback, ‘we can run it out of trips. It is the same thing. Now we have a double slant. if you were facing three- deep, we tun a slant with X and Z. The read key ‘would be the strong safety in this case. Ifthe strong safety jumps the flat route, then you have X coming inside on a zone. He can't be in a big hurry to get there because he has to worry about Z coming in on a slant. So you will have a hole in there to throw the ball o X ifthe strong safety jumps the fiat. It is the same thing in doubles. fit were to the wide side of the field, we would cut the split down a litle. To finish up, what we do out of our trips set isto run what we call our 93 X ~ talback out route. This is two fade routes and the siyard out cut, just 25 ‘we talked about in doubles. You can run this route against any coverage. We get maximum protection on the call. itis cover 3, we are going to key the strong safety. We are going to run a hard streak out at the split end. The flanker is going to take an outside release and try to avoid contact with the strong safety. He is keying the strong safety. He dives up the field six yards and breaks outside. if the strong safety comes off the flanker, itis very simple. If the strong safety comes off to play this Toute, he gears himself down and comes open in the hole. He does not want to get jammed inside. f the strong safety is jamming the heck out of Z, we wil take the sixyard out route. utWe do not see much cover 2. We do see a lot of cover 5. This is with the free safety playing over the top and the comer playing the other hall, We see quite a bit ofthat, where they will go ahead and roll up. We are trying to affect the comer, but we are keying the strong safety. | want to get into our spread formation and talk about some of the things we have added to our offense. You can run the spread formation a lot of different ways. This. spring, we are going to experiment running it out of the shotgun. It is really an interesting concept. Everything we do out of our spread formation is what'we do out of our 90 passing game. Before, what we would always do when we were in tips would be to run what we call 93 - Y up. We would run the deep back in motion within thtee yards of the sideline, and turn up the field under control. Our tight end would take an outside release looking for the football. Our tailback would run what we call an option route, depending on how the defense reacted. Our X receiver would run up the field as hard as he could. There are a lot of options on the play, so bear with me. ff the comer turns inside to help, then X wants to stop outside and just stand there. He is 16 to 17 yards deep. The flanker takes an outside release and runs as hard as he can up the football field on the seam route. Once he dea's the strong safety at about 15 yards up the field, he wants to see what is happening back inside with the free safety. If he can take it over the top, he takes it deep. ifthe free safety is really deep over the middle, then he hooks it over the middle. It is hard to see it all, but the receives have an option to read the defense. We have told our quarterback to key the man that moves when we go in motion. We want to know who moves with motion. if the quarterback can see the defensive man that moves, he can adjust and find the open man. We want to get 2 mismatch with our tailback on the linebacker. That was our base route. What the defense would do against us on this play was to motion itz us. As soon as our back went in motion, they would move the free safety over late and then bring the outside linebacker on the bli, We did not have enough men to block him, or we did not have enough time to get rid of the bal. The way we adjusted to this was with a hot route. if we saw the motion blitz, the quarterback had to get rid of the ball on the second step to the hot man. It worked, and it has been very good for Us. However, we decided we would be better off if ‘we just lined him up outside to start with, instead of sending him in motion, because we could accomplish the same thing. So now we are going to line up in the formation. ‘We just call it 93 — Y up. Now we know when they are going to blitz. Now they have to come out and cover us over the entire field, When we saw the bit, we could keep our tight end or tailback in, depending on where the blitz was coming from, and pick up the blitz. So the thing we do on this now is to go spread right ~ 93 - Y up. Now the defense has to make a decision. If they are going to play cover 3, the quarterback sees the three-deep so he checks to the sixyard hitch route, If the defense comes up and bumps the receiver, we go ahead and run the streak. We release the tight end up the field and run the X on the hitch and stil have the ‘option route on the backside. ifthe free safety is going to play deep thirds, we just take our three steps and throw the ball. The thing we are going to do this spring is this: We ate going to put the quarterback back four yards deep in a shotgun. We only want him back four yards deep. We are going to run our spread out of this formation becouse we fee it will be easier for the quarterback to see what is going on. We did this the last three games of the year and had some success with it The reason we have never run the shotgun before was because of an experience { had when | was coaching at Idaho, We put the shotgun fotmation in at Idaho and were going in for a score. 12We were on the 40 yard line and called the shotgun. The center snapped the ball 30 yards over the Gpterbadk’s head and we never did score. | have rot sciewed with the shotgun formation since. So mry staff has talked me into running the shotgun fopnation again. Let me assure you, as soon as that als snapped over the quarterback’s head, our quaterback wil get his butt back up under the cente, eainst the blitz, we are going to make a left or fight call depending on where the blitz is coming fom. If we are in spread right and the defense is playing man and the free safety is playing to the backside, they can bring three men to that side. They can't bring three to the strongside because someone has to cover the tight end. In our last three games, our quarterback would make a left or right call and we would turn the front the way the call is made. If the tight end checks and stays in, we make an X call, If the defense is bringing the Will linebacker, we check it that way and keep our tailback in and tum to where the blitz is coming from. By doing this, we are able to see the blitz coming. Now, our quarterback can come up and make a check on the play. One thing that helped us on the blocking was to cut down on our splits in the line. In the time | have left, | will show you some combinations of things that we do out of this. | will just put up the routes and let you see what we run. First is a 96 — Y stop. We are running a six-yard hitch, and a comes, and we have the same things with the ‘option routes on the backside. They are running the option route, the post comer, and the hitch. Depending on the defense, we will take the hitch as long as they will give it to us. You can see where ‘your mismatches are and you can get it protected. This is why | am excited about going to the shotgun this spring, because you can even see this better. ‘The other thing we do is spread right - 93 Y up ~ fullback option, On this play, we bring the back to Within six yards of the sideline. He can break it undemeath, take it up the field, or break it outside, ing on how they played him. If the defense Plays a linebacker on the tight end, we let him run an option route, and we get a mismatch on the play just like we would have the tailback run the option route. The key is mismatch and pass protection. The defense can blitz you in this set, but you can see the blitz coming and must be prepared for it all of the time. You have to spend time working against the blitz. We have two or three other things we run out of the spread formation. The thing about running the shotgun is the fact that you have your quarterback a fitle deeper and he can see better. We have just been taking a three-step drop and throwing the bal quick as we came off the line of scrimmage. One of our coaches said our quarterback was too short to see over the line on the three-step drop. So we plan to put him back at four yards on the shotgun, so he can see the receivers and get the ball to them. I like the combination of running 96 — ¥ hitch, ‘and then doing what you want on the backside. Now you always have the hitch route, aiid you have the comer. You can run tailback option with it. The ‘other things we run are Z in and X under on the badside. We get a lot of double coverage on the tailback because he is so good. We get a lot of inside-outside coverage on the tailback, and it leaves us with a one-on-one outside. This is where we like to run Z in, because we know the defense is playing man, and the tailback is going to dear the area out We are going to run Z in at 10 yards and just bring it inside. If he can see the defense, he has some ‘options he can deal with. We do the same thing with X under. There ate a lot of things you can do because there are a lot of routes. What | would like to do is to show some film of our protection and our pass routes. You will have to bear with me as we get the flm going, Ths film is of plays from last yeat. We put all of the good plays in with the bad plays so you can see the things we ‘encounter with the defense. (One point | feel may help you in throwing the fade route had always been told that to throw the fade route, you should throw the ball high and deep to the outside shoulder, so the man could adjust to catch the football outside and away from the man 3that is running with the receiver. { heard this from Zeke Bratkowski, who was a great quarterback for many years. He coaches with the Philadelphia Eagles now. He was at our clinic last year and this is what he told us: “You should teach the quarterback to throw the fade to the inside" The reason he said that is because most of the time, if the quarterback throws the ball on the outside of the receiver, the ball is out Of bounds or it isso far outside, itis a very dificult catch. The thing about throwing the ball le that helped us alot is this: If the ballis thrown inside, the receiver can accelerate and go get the football. t made a big difference in us throwing the = long ball this past year. We threw the fade pass alot = better than we ever have. ‘Men, | appreciate your attention. | will be glad to answer questions. We do not have anything to hide: { will tell you what we are going to do. ! am excited about the shotgun and the spread formations we ‘are going to look at this spring. You are welcome to come visit with us. Just give us a call at the office to let us know when you are coming, Thank you very much. 4