Want to get a discussion kicked off here about option football, "then" vs "now". I'm in the dark days of the off season and I'm jumping out of my skin.
A little background:
I played HS football in the mid-80's with about half a season as a wishbone QB. Triple option was one of our plays. Football at the time was heavily influenced by Oklahoma, Nebraska and many other great triple option offenses.
2 seasons ago, I decided to introduce the triple option as part of our "3 headed monster" approach to offense. I opened a topic here and took some great advice from several of you. Based on feedback, I decided that double option was the way to go for our situation. The "dive" option would be a called play or maybe eventually a pre-snap read. I also really dug in to the play design, reads and philosophy of "old school" option football.
Overall, it was a great success. The main takeaway is that to "option" a defender, you leave him unblocked (giving you an extra blocker to use elsewhere) and attack him with the ball, forcing him to make a decision on the fly. Your reaction to his decision made him wrong every time (in theory). So in a triple option, there are 2 defenders. Defender 1 is presented with Options 1 (dive) and 2 (keep). If he gives us option 2, we move on to Defender 2, who is presented with options 2 (keep) and 3 (pitch).
The main idea behind "optioning" a defender is that you attack him with 2 possible outcomes. "I can play this guy, or I can play that guy", but not both. If it's a DE, you are forcing him to defend the off tackle by the QB, or contain the pitch sweep by the RB, but he is the key to defending either play. He chooses wrong and the offense has success (in theory).
So this year, I am looking at Read Option. I watched a HS teaching it in a clinic and I've watched a lot of Youtube videos, mainly focusing on 1st level reads. Most of what I found gets away from the idea of attacking a single defender with 2 outcomes. In a typical Read Option play using zone right, your HB will be on the left and will attack the right side (sometimes dive/inside, sometimes sweep or anything in between). QB is reading the back side (offensive left) EMLOS and typically watching his hips. If the hips are vertical, give the ball. If they are facing the sideline, keep the ball. You are giving the DE 2 options: Do your job or don't do your job (which I consider a mistake). I don't like this for 2 reasons: 1) I don't like a play design that depends on a defender making a mistake 2) If the DE does his job and you give the ball to the HB, then there is nothing special about that "give" option. You're simply running a dive, sweep, or anything in between.
My answer to this is to attack the left DE with my HB (same scenario as above, but HB lines up on the left and is going to left OT). QB's read is to keep the ball on a sweep unless the DE comes upfield. This puts the DE in conflict and since he's the key defender for off tackle and for sweep, we have success as long as we make the right decision (in theory).
What I want to know is "what happened"? Did Read Option forget about one of the most successful offensive concepts in the history of football? Am I missing something?
Again, hoping to start a discussion and see what y'all think.
Game plan? I got your game plan. We gonna run the bawl some. We gonna throw the bawl some. We gonna play some defense. We gonna run some special teams, but we better not run kick return but one time and we sure as heck better not punt.
In the end, if it's a decision that's made by the player (instead of the coach), then I don't like it. Even in something like a blocking rule progression (such as G/O/D) we still see (even at high school) players who go through their rules progression incorrectly. I'm all about eliminating the potential number of mistakes that players can make and I do this by giving them one singular focus and responsibility. We do that through a singular play call and the singular player assignment in that play call. Then the only variable is my player's execution; not the quality of his "read" and then his execution. Having coached RPO so much at high school over the years and seen coaches upset at players for their "wrong" read or the player making the wrong read, it's not worth (to me) to waste my time on the implementation. The read has to be instantaneous and can change in the blink of the eye, and it's so easy to be "wrong" with a decision. Even at the Power 5 collegiate levels, the use of instant replay exposes QBs who should have kept when they gave, or vice versa. Add to the fact that kids will "keep or give" based on more variables than they should consider; Example: years ago, I allowed my QB (at practice) to call his own plays based on defensive alignments, assignments or adjustments, but then every running play became a sweep to his best friend, or a pass to his best friend. Even if my young QBs could make the simple reads, their ability to do that on a consistent basis varied wildly. How many times have we called a simple running play and instead of the ball-carrier executing the play-call and following (and trusting) his blockers, he decides to "go solo" and either bounce it outside, or cut it back the other way for a big loss? I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. I'm saying why I don't like it.
Now, if you're talking about giving an option "look" that is coach-called, then that's a different discussion completely and I think some really nice plays could come out of such an approach. But that becomes a "coach read" system that's called ahead of the play-snap and based on how defenders are reacting to certain plays. As a Double Wing coach, my offense already allows me this luxury with every play (if I'm experienced enough to read a defense against my offense). And reading that defense tells me when it's time to stop running Power to run a Power-look Counter, or Power-look Wedge, or Power-look Criss Cross. In this way, I'm not interesting in taking advantage of a read-defender or two, but taking advantage of an entire defense. I'll always prefer the latter to the former.
--Dave
"The Greater the Teacher, the More Powerful the Player."
The Mission Statement: "I want to show any young man that he is far tougher than he thinks, that he can accomplish more than what he dreamed and that his work ethic will take him wherever he wants to go."
#BattleReady newhope
So this year, I am looking at Read Option.
You know me better than anyone when it comes to football. I like to dabble. When I wanted to run Flexbone the best advise I got on this Forum from others way smarter then me was if you are a Flexbone team then you must be a Flexbone team when it comes to working with youths.
All in every day all day.
They were correct.
You want to spice up your spread with a running game. That isnt really going to make you happy with Caleb or Dre. One can throw and one can run but neither can do both all that well. I vote you RPO the dickens out of spread with Caleb. Now you are "optioning" the entire Defense. Bubble, Slant, Missile, Fade. That's it. RB Dives vrs the 40 fronts and runs off tackle vs the 50 fronts. Leave the EMOL on the DL unblocked. Now he has to decide....sack or tackle.
You call the give or pass per what you see the EMOL doing. Always throw away from that EMOL so you are fully attacking the same side of the Defense so that you are play actioning the same side of the Defense. This will keep Calebs eyes on the prize as he is not reading jack chit.
THAT will make you happy. 😎
Troy spent a ton of time on option last year. Was it worth it? If you want to run true option do it as a companion play out of your DW. Dre could pull off the footwork day one. 👍
I've actually seen this destroy Defense with my own two eyes.
( Oh well....this ass crappy excuse of a Forum wont attach files or paste anymore. )
Edit...I should add....the reason to RPO to the same side is so that you can add in the deadly QB follows. I got this from Joe and we ran it that year with X and Jaden in the backfield. 6th grade I think? Worked great. His deal was put one side of the Defense is serious conflict rather than just bits and pieces on both sides of the Defense. I liked it. Something to chew on.
What is beautiful, lives forever.
As I have gotten older, I see less and less reason to try and reinvent the wheel. In my younger days, I was all about the number of plays, formations and coming up with "trick 'em" plays. As a matter of fact, a rival coach used to refer to me as "Coach Trick'em." I didn't mind this reference, as it was true. My philosophy was (and still is, but with a different approach), that even when we play against a defense with five Division 1 offers, that it's easier to fool them than it is to block them. And regardless of how good they are, if they don't know where the ball is, it won't matter how many scholarship offers they have.
But it's not that "trick 'em" plays don't work, it's that the games we lost over the years was because we didn't block or tackle as well as our opponent, or we weren't as aggressive as they were. So my focus became "How do I beat a team that's better than ours?" And we have done that. But we beat them through becoming more fundamentally-sound, which is the single, biggest weakness of football at the youth level. Because so many coaches are simply horrible at teaching fundamentals (and horrible at teaching, period), a team that's fundamentally sound can have a Herculean advantage. Most coaches will entirely disagree with my last statement. They still believe that the difference in talent (alone) will make the difference in whether a game is won or lost. And certainly this is true (they are right!) at the professional, collegiate and youth levels where the focus is on talent-acquisition and the teaching of scheme. Talent as the determining factor will always be the case when fundamentals are not the focus.
As I have become more concerned with and focused more of the learned skills of blocking, tackling, aggression, faking and holding on to the ball the better we became and the harder we were to beat. The coaching lessons I learned in my last few years as a header (heading a team with zero college-future players on team that trailed in 7 of our 9 games, yet went 8-1, or going 7-2 with zero college-future players on a team that had had one winning season in the previous 7 years), showed me that while I can't recruit talent, I can teach our players how to block and tackle at a very high level. And in the end, there's NOTHING in football fundamentals that are either impossible to teach or impossible to learn. We aren't asking kids to fly, become invisible, or lift locomotives over their head. We're asking them to learn simple (but not easy) fundamentals like how to block and tackle. It's no more difficult than teaching a kid to walk, to read or how to write. Practically any kid can do this. Heck, I taught a kid who was legally blind how to write, read and count. (I couldn't teach him to walk as he was wheel-chair bound.) The coaches that struggle with kids who "can't" is more of a reflection of themselves as a coach, than it is the talent of the kid. But coaches who understand that are rarer than hen's teeth. 99.9% will always point to the kid as the problem, believe that talent acquisition is the most important asset, and will go on auto-pilot when it comes to finding the best ways to teach applicable fundamentals.
--Dave
"The Greater the Teacher, the More Powerful the Player."
The Mission Statement: "I want to show any young man that he is far tougher than he thinks, that he can accomplish more than what he dreamed and that his work ethic will take him wherever he wants to go."
#BattleReady newhope
( Oh well....this ass crappy excuse of a Forum wont attach files or paste anymore. )
It doesn't do much of anything well, anymore. It's like a paper airplane with no wings. I can certainly understand why it has so little traffic (slow loading times, difficult to navigate menu-board, lousy search engine, impossible to attach files...). However, the biggest reason there's so little traffic here is that it requires intelligent discussion.
--Dave
"The Greater the Teacher, the More Powerful the Player."
The Mission Statement: "I want to show any young man that he is far tougher than he thinks, that he can accomplish more than what he dreamed and that his work ethic will take him wherever he wants to go."
#BattleReady newhope
I like to teach kids about the "cerebral" side of the game as well as the cerebellar. I think they have more fun when they have more responsibility, even if that causes them to goof.
Also, don't sell short the intuitive read. A player may notice something a coach doesn't. Certain intuitive tendencies they need to be coached out of, but not all.
( Oh well....this ass crappy excuse of a Forum wont attach files or paste anymore. )
It doesn't do much of anything well, anymore. It's like a paper airplane with no wings. I can certainly understand why it has so little traffic (slow loading times, difficult to navigate menu-board, lousy search engine, impossible to attach files...). However, the biggest reason there's so little traffic here is that it requires intelligent discussion.
--Dave
If those willing to keep throwing good money at a bad product would stop....Dumcoach would be growing again by now on Fakebook. Its hard to visit this place any more knowing how it used to be in its heyday.
Lar started this Thread hoping to open up a discussion....with 6 people? Sad state of affairs. 10 years ago this place was getting 100 new posts and 10 new topics daily regardless of the time of year. You couldn't keep up if you tried.
What is beautiful, lives forever.
Well Facebook's numbers are about to take a big hit because the guy that invented the Beast is retiring. But that's for another thread...
Fight 'em until Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice -- Dutch Meyer
Bob, we can debate for days about "fun" and how kids have it. I doubt whether the other 10 kids on offense really care whether the 11th kid is getting to have fun by having "more responsibility" of his option read. It was never apparent to me in all of my years of teaching G/O/D that my blockers enjoyed having "more responsibility" of the rule progression than when we defaulted to SAB. Kids have fun when they are successful.
--Dave
"The Greater the Teacher, the More Powerful the Player."
The Mission Statement: "I want to show any young man that he is far tougher than he thinks, that he can accomplish more than what he dreamed and that his work ethic will take him wherever he wants to go."
#BattleReady newhope
All kidding aside, as a youth coach, I wouldn't run a lot of RPO's. I'd never ask a kid to do something that I never could (e.g. I almost never made the right read. I gave it to the FB to pick up four yards because it was the safest choice).
However, your case might be different. You already know how to teach kids how to make the right reads and to work together to know who to block. I remember that because the guy that wanted to outlaw the Beast had no rebuttal when you explained that the Beast was great for offensive line.
Assuming you've got a QB that can make the reads, I like the way you've designed it. If the DE does his job, the Sweep will be there and the down blocks will be easier since the QB is selling the run. If the DE doesn't do his job you've successfully taken him out of the play on a Sweep.
Fight 'em until Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice -- Dutch Meyer
All kidding aside, as a youth coach, I wouldn't run a lot of RPO's. I'd never ask a kid to do something that I never could (e.g. I almost never made the right read. I gave it to the FB to pick up four yards because it was the safest choice).
Assuming you've got a QB that can make the reads, I like the way you've designed it.
When we would sit in the film room, the HC, the OC and the QB still couldn't agree on "the right read" and when/who should have kept or pitched. The arguments were ludicrous in that even in a hindsight 20/20 situation the coaches who knew how to teach it and the QB who knew how to "make reads" still couldn't agree on what was the correct decision.
--Dave
"The Greater the Teacher, the More Powerful the Player."
The Mission Statement: "I want to show any young man that he is far tougher than he thinks, that he can accomplish more than what he dreamed and that his work ethic will take him wherever he wants to go."
#BattleReady newhope
Okay. Let's reset this.
Mahonz: I've made up my mind. Caleb will be fine running a "tweener" sweep. This play will achieve my goal of giving the appearance that our run game out of Gun is potent and dynamic. We'll chip away at it until we're confident enough to use it in a game. Same thing we did with the I I option 2 years ago. RPO? Nah. The pass option will be called based on what we see on the sideline. If Caleb is ready to make the obvious throw, we'll trust him with it. Todd and I can't spend a ton of time on "Gun". So we're not going to build a whole new offense out of this. We are going to be a DW/Beast team that hopefully can throw. Gun is an easy offense that we've installed in 10 minutes with a bunch of different kids.
DP: Not going to try to sell you on the option. Your reasons for not liking it are valid. However, I've seen what I've seen and I know we can make it work.
Terry: No RPO unless our QB shows he's ready to make the read and throw. The pass will be called when we see it from the sideline. If eventually, our QB shows he's ready, we'll let him make that read. As designed, the QB will immediately cock his arm on a keep to freeze the CB, but his intention will be to get 4+ yards on a narrow sweep/wide edge run. Once he's outside the DE, he gets vertical and gets us yards. If the CB starts ignoring the arm cock and attacks the QB, SE will be wide open.
Bob: Appreciate what you're saying. Regardless of what scheme you run or how you coach it, kids make hundreds of decisions in a game.
So back to the original question:
Is today's Read Option (youth, HS, college, pro) ignoring "old school" option principles that made it a very effective offense back in the day?
Game plan? I got your game plan. We gonna run the bawl some. We gonna throw the bawl some. We gonna play some defense. We gonna run some special teams, but we better not run kick return but one time and we sure as heck better not punt.
Gun is an easy offense that we've installed in 10 minutes with a bunch of different kids.
You must have a mouse in your pocket because I've never seen that happen. 😎 Maybe installed 10 minutes per day.
Your Spread will be as time consuming as your DW....or it should be. If not....why bother?
I've committed to be that guy that is going to question everything you do....privately....so that you question everything you do....privately...so you don't fall into that horrific trap you got caught up in last season. That was bad. I felt terrible for you but by the time I realized what was happening it was too late. .
Caleb has cement in his shoes and in his head but can really sling that football. Simplify and take what Joe taught me and at least look at it because you lived it right along with me. Its prefect for cement heads. QB NEVER takes his eye off the prize. Ever. Its actually quite genius.
Thankfully this ass crappy excuse of a Forum still allows film. Double option without ....option. Next play QB stabs and throws a Slant to the same side WO (Will I do believe @ #7). 3x1 formation under center run to the trips side. Put Slade on the 1 side because he will pull the Safety to his side.....if not make them pay.
The other two Receivers are Ebbs and Applesauce. Both very average receivers but great stalk blockers. We were not a passing team that season because of X.
Watch the Linebackers. One even tackles Jaden. The only way cement head gets you 4 yards...ever.... is if his man is tackling Sabino. Caleb running a tweener sweep is 0 to minus two yards. We both know that to be true no matter what Jack does. He ain't Jack. He's Caleb and he will frustrate the heck out of you.
We lived on this play series that season both left and right and you know as well is I do X couldn't hit a house with a football but he could hit Will on this play running a Slant or Sluggo 1 out of 3 times.... which is all we needed to keep the Defense honest.
Jayden, Jayden, Will, Jayden, X, Jayden, X, Jayden, Will, Jaden, X TD. If I remember right all 3 Receivers ran slants on the pass play. The only reason this ULTRA simple play series worked was Jaden was a Beast and had the Defense's undivided attention.
You have a small handful of players that can be that guy for you. Sabino, Levi, Dre, a rookie.....
What is beautiful, lives forever.
Lar
We began dabbling with Joes option follows that 4th grade season before you joined us. You can see how well it worked starting @1:20. This was a drive vs Walkers Team. They had a GREAT Defense. Jackson was the same side WO. He caught 3 TD passes that day. We won by 1 point.
Check out the Counter to the inside Slot. That was Kane. He really knew how to run that play. This series he hits the A gap.
Anyhooos....its May....something to chew on if you want to spend 10 minutes spicing up your Spread. No reads. Eye on the prize....always. You can see Keenan Checking with Me every snap.
Todd was on Staff....he remembers this stuff.
What is beautiful, lives forever.
Caleb has cement in his shoes
You are right on that point, so it doesn't make any sense for him to be our #1 option. I made a change and it dovetails with everything else we're doing.
So no one wants to talk about how modern read option can't hold old school option's jock?
Game plan? I got your game plan. We gonna run the bawl some. We gonna throw the bawl some. We gonna play some defense. We gonna run some special teams, but we better not run kick return but one time and we sure as heck better not punt.
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