Creating an Eight Man Front to Defend the Spread Offense III

In the first post I touched on various ways that one-high (MOFC) coverages can be utilized in a sound manner to defend the spread offense.  The second post touched on some adjustments you can make via the front and the coverage to attack certain things the offense is attempting to do.  Now, I want to touch on a couple of the finer points of the eight man front such as:

• The Free Safety (FS) and his role in MOFC coverage in the eight man front.
• Simplifying alignment in the eight man front.
• Blitzing in the eight man front.

The Free Safety's Role in MOFC Coverage
The FS in most MOFC defenses has a tough job, especially if the coverage is cover one, or some sort of two-deep rotational coverage.  Robber, and Cover One are not too strenuous on the FS, the reason being, in Robber the FS is pattern reading, and it's basically man, and in Cover One, the FS is free to roam based on the QB's eyes.  However, introduce Rip/Liz Cover Three and you now have the best of both Cover Three and Cover One.  Let's look at the pros cons of each and then display them with Rip/Liz and see what we get...shall we?

Cover One-Pros

• Aligns to and covers virtually everything with guaranteed MOF help.
• Simple, cover your man, run with your man if he goes in motion (you can bump, or motion blitz if you'd like, but again, this is simple man-to-man defense here).
• Provides a stable defense for the MOF, having both a MOF deep player and a MOF shallow player (Rat-in-the-hole). 
• Affords sending up to six defenders on a blitz if using peel coverage rules.

Cover One-Cons

• Run force-the force defender can be "run off" by a receiver he's supposed to cover man-to-man (although catch man alleviates some of this, it is still, nevertheless worrisome).
• Not all 11 eyes on the football.  Zone defense affords 11 eyes watching the football, whereas man defenders cannot always eye the football for the threat of being beaten in pass coverage.
• Outside 1/3's vulnerable to match up issues.  Corners are on an island in Cover One.
• Suspect to picks and rubs, as is any man-to-man defense.
• FS must have very good range.

Cover Three-Pros

• Aligns to everything.
• Very simple to install (should be able to do this in one practice).
• Good run support (dedicated force players at or near the LOS with a solid MOF alley player).

Cover Three- Cons

• Covers nothing.
• Weak in the seams.
• Weak in the curl.
• Weak against flood routes.
• Every offense in the country has several "Cover Three Beaters" installed in their offense day one (which means EVERYONE's seen it).
• FS has to have excellent range.

By utilizing Saban's Cover Three, you end up with the following:

Rip/Liz-Pros

• Aligns to everything.
• Excellent MOF defense with a MOF safety deep and MOF underneath player (ROBOT).
• Can keep same rules for zone blitzing (Number one and two droppers are identical in both Cover Three Rip/Liz and most three deep, three under zone blitz schemes), which alleviates teaching time(multiplicity through simplicity).
• Force players not as apt to be run off by receivers.
• All 11 eyes are on the football at the snap.
• No need to worry about picks and rubs (you're not in man-can run banjo schemes).
• With flat players funneling the number two receiver inside the hash, FS doesn't need to be as "rangy".
• Has the same run support structure as "Country Cover Three".
• Very strong in the seams and curl areas because of the pattern read.
• Works against most "Cover Three Beaters" and is hard for offense to distinguish between Cover Three and Cover One.

Rip/Liz-Cons

• Not as easy an install as "Country Cover Three" or Cover One, due to the pattern reading nature.
• Force players can still be run off somewhat, providing for a "soft edge".
• Corners are still on an island (match up).

Whew!  I know there are some more, but these are just the basics.  What you can see here is you get a lot of bang for your buck with Rip/Liz.  You can still run some Cover One if you need to and it's a great disguise for when you do.  You also can zone blitz from the one-high look and don't have to afford any pre-snap rotation to give away what you are doing (which many QB's are being taught for what to look for pre-snap nowadays). 

The biggest benefit I think is the protection of the seams, and the fact that the FS doesn't have to be a guy that can cover a TON of ground. Sure he has to be able to move, and read on the run, but he doesn't need to be a Major Wright!  The funneling of the number two receivers also helps the FS in the run game.  The FS can get a clearer read because the number two receiver is being pressed and thereby has to make his intentions pretty quickly (am I blocking or running a route) so the FS can get into his run/pass read quicker and is thereby a little better factor against the run than a traditional Cover Three FS.

So, we can see, the addition of a pattern reading Cover Three is the top priority if you are an eight man front and you want to consistently defend what spread teams will do to attack you.  It does not hurt to mix in some Cover One however, which will keep the opposing coach guessing and off track when trying to call certain plays.

Simplifying Alignment in the Eight Man Front
The eight man front is one of the easiest of all defenses to align.   The reason is, it's balanced with five defenders on each side of the ball and a MOF safety.  The thing I recommend, is to take a page out of our split field concept brethern's playbook and play field and boundary.  Let's look at the alignment shown below and I'll explain.

I chose the 3-3 defense for it's simplicity, but you can use the 4-4, 4-2, 5-3 or whatever eight man front you run out there.  However, the simplicity is that the Strong Safety (SS), who is usually the better of the two overhang safeties always goes to the field.  The WS (B in the illustration), would be the weaker of the two, and would be set to the boundary.  In most 3-3's I've seen, most coaches utilize right and left defenders which is super simple.  However, if you wanted to, you can easily set your strength to the field and still be quite sound.  Putting your best players to the field is not a bad idea either.  Here is how the 4-2-5 would align to the same look using field/boundary alignments.

Again, the defenders on the right side of the image are the strong side defenders, and are probably your better football players whereas your lesser player play into the boundary and are on the left side of the illustration above.

The simplicity of aligning the eight man front, affords your players one less thought that must tumble through their testosterone laden minds during the course of a game.  This lack of thinking keeps these players comfortable and playing exactly how we want them to...FAST.

Blitzing in the Eight Man Front
For years most folks new me as a Miami 4-3 guy, and to this day I still love that defense.  The one trouble I always had though, was blitzing out of it.  It may have just been me, but having been introduced to the TCU blitz scheme and after studying tons of 3-3 playbooks over the past few months, I can see there is no simpler front to blitz from than the eight man front.  Again, the balance affords simplicity in alignment, so teams have trouble getting you out of your base alignment.  What this does is affords for less of a chance that a blitzer will have to widen with an adjustment and thereby be caught out of position on the snap of the football.  The "six-in-the-box" concept keeps blitzing simple as well (both the 3-3 and 4-2, as well as some 4-3's keep this principle as well).  What I will show you, is some blitzes I used out of TCU's playbook, that despite us being a MOFC defense, we were still able to execute.



Bullets Away, my favorite!



Smokes

Strong/Wide Dog



Weak/Short Dog



Mob (cop)

As you can see, quite simple really.  All the blitzes listed in TCU's playbook can be run with the same adjustments and calls that TCU uses.  You don't have to limit yourself there either, the 3-3 defense has a myriad of blitzes that can be run from a MOFC defense.  Whatever front you choose to run, will find blitzing is quite easy and not too terribly taxing either.  Another "cheap" blitz from the 4 man front is the zone blitz sending one LB.  The rules for coverage are very simple, with the number three dropper being the only one who really changes from the standard Rip/Liz coverage rules.




Sam "B"



• Corners- Deep 1/3, all of 1 vertical
• OSS- #2 dropper, all of 2 vertical and out.  2 shallow and inside squeeze to the 3 dropper.
• ILB- #3 dropper, cut all crossers.
• FS- Deep 1/3, all of 3 vertical.

There you go!  Very similar to standard Rip/Liz reads and assignments.  Again, this is multiplicity through simplicity, which is a time tested manner for being able to attack your opponent in multiple ways with very little teaching time. 

In conclusion, I think it is VERY possible to be a one-high, MOFC defense and succeed against today's spread attacks.  I think there are multiple reasons for doing so, from anything to poor match ups or solving tricky alignment problems to being able to bring pressure without having to roll coverage are just some of the numerous benefits you get from staying one-high.  Hopefully you've been able to use this and can couple this with some other things I've posted on the site to have a very successful defense in the near future. 

Don't forget to check my other blog, The 12th Man, and as usual you can follow me on Twitter @theduece02. 

Duece

Creating an Eight Man Front to Defend the Spread Offense-II

The drink of all eight man front coaches!

In the first post, I gave you a brief history on the defense my staff and I developed out of the 4-2-5  personnel to defend a schedule, heavily laden with spread offenses.  In this post, I'm going to talk about our match up issues and what we did to alleviate these issues to help with being able to compete against vastly superior athletes.  Now this isn't to say we were successful, however, the ideas that were learned through a season of innovation, I think, are worth sharing.

Force Issues
Rip/Liz cover three is a great adaptation to defending the spread offense, but does have one drawback, and that is that your force player is responsible for the vertical of the number two receiver.  But Duece, that's no different than in any Quarters coverage scheme, so what's the big deal???  The big deal is the Quarters coverage force player is doing this from a depth of eight to 12 yards.  In the eight man front, with a one high safety look, these players are doing their job from an invert depth of five yards off the LOS.  This means that these players, must make their reads very quickly.  The other issue, is that the outside safeties (OSS's) must align in outside leverage on the number two receiver, which means they can be out leveraged to be able to engage in their role as the force player.




SS has a long way to go to force the ball, but must also handle the vertical of #2




The way my staff and I handled this issue, was in a couple of ways.  The first thing we did was not to change anything but the way our defensive line (DL) would play, a topic that we've already talked about, the Two-Gap/One-Gap scheme better known as TGOG.  We would set the three technique to the field, so that the DE to the field side would be a one-gap player, thereby having him come up field hard and "box in" the play. 

This technique serves us well on inside runs that spill outside, however, the jet sweep killed it, and we had to do something else.  I looked high and low, and came up with two solutions, the first was to align the tackles in double 2I techniques, and the ends in five techniques.  Utilizing TGOG principles, this meant the tackles were one gap players and the DE's were two gap players.  By doing this, we were able to move our LB's out to a "hip" alignment stacked behind the DE's which allowed them to "fit" better on outside run plays. 

Now even though the LB is not the force player, by making taking away any reads he has and forcing his "flow to" read to be an automatic C gap fit, the offense is not in a position to block this player very well.  Even if they lead the back, the LB will allow the WS (in the diagram above) to get his read, come off any block that may occur and force.  Ok, I know, what the heck do you do with the inside run game, as those B gaps sure to look inviting.  Remember, utilizing the TGOG principle, makes things seem as though they aren't!

Another thing we did to add confusion was the 3-3 stack front talked about earlier, and we simply had the DE's play the two gap responsiblility and had the two tackles attack the A gaps in tandem based on our call. 

As you can see, the idea was to alleviate the immediate pressure on the force player by putting the LB's in a position to support the C gap immediately.  However, our defense against the run was less than successful that season.  It was not the outside run that hurt us as much as the inside run, and it had little to do with scheme, as we once again saw a weakness in our match ups.  Teams really hurt us with a good running quarterback and running isolation and power run plays.  Desperately seeking a solution, one presented itself via the Huey board in the form of an old defense, made popular by Buddy Ryan...yep, the 46!

Defending the Inside Run
Now, the 46 Nickel was something that was born out of this, but how I actually got in the 46 was very interesting.  At first, the idea was to simply have the tackles align in three techniques and be one gap players as well as letting the DE's align in wide nine techniques and also play a one-gap technique.  The strong side LB would walk down and stand over the nose while the weak side LB stacked behind as shown below:

We did several things out of this.  The first was have the Sam read the hat of the center, and go to the opposite A gap if the center tried to cut him off.    This allowed the Mike to scrape to the play, virtually unblocked.  Coverage wise, the Sam would always drop to the short side of the field if he got a high hat read, and Mike would drop to the wide side of the field.  If the ball was in the MOF, then the Sam dropped left and the Mike to the right.

The other great thing about this was we could rush the Sam, play cover six (three deep three under fire zone) and have the Mike be the three dropper quite easily.  Another less expected result was to bring the Mike, and drop the Sam, all the while playing a fire zone coverage behind it.

Sam rushed based on call (strong/weak/right/left), Mike responsible for A gap away from call

Bringing Mike and dropping Sam yielded some good results!

The fire zone coverage was an easy install because relatively little changed for the underneath droppers.  The only changes were that to the weak side or the short side, these defenders would play pure man to man defense.  On the strong side, or wide side of the defense we used fire zone principles with a true number two dropper (SS) and a number three dropper (Mike/Sam-whoever dropped).  So the final outcome would look like the illustration below:

Because of our athleticism at DE, we eventually went pure cover one for simplicity's sake.  As you can clearly see, you can run the fire zone concept from this look quite easily. 

The three, zero, three alignment freed up our LB's to play the run so much better because it eliminated the double teams that are present when you leave two gaps open instead of one.  Once this was installed teams really struggled to run on us. We did give up some passes across the middle, and we began mixing in some cover one.  We could do this because of the wide DE's as we could use them to force now. 

A lot of folks would argue, "Duece you are no longer really a 4-2 anymore!", to which I would say, no we are, we just had to use some tricks to make things work better for us in areas where we did not match up very well.  I think this is the goal of any good coach, as the idea that you must "stick to the scheme" will eventually get you fired.  Adaptation and teaching are what are traits of all good football coaches.  This ability to "make the parts work" is essential in finding success.  For us, the schemes shown above took a defense that was giving up an average of 450 yards per game of total offense and allowed us to reduce that number to around 240 yards per game.  Still not great, but the schemes helped to stop the bleeding.  I know, scheme isn't everything, but when you are teaching the players correctly, and their God given abilities are failing them, you have to try to find ways around these deficiencies to try and find success.  These schemes did just that.

In the last post, I'm going to discuss the role of the free safety (FS) in making the eight man front successful against the spread.  I hope you find these post insightful as you do your off season homework.  Remember champions are not made overnight!


Duece

Opinions are like A.....

Yep, that's a purple starfish alright...

Eh, well I guess that caught your attention.  Take a look at my newest blog and see what you think.  I didn't want to distract from Football is Life's wealth of information (or BS, whichever you think it is) with opinion posts, so I've created a new blog, The 12th Man!  Check me out, let me know what you think about the layout etc. (like I care) and the opinionated posts will begin here shortly.

Duece

Creating an Eight Man Front to Defend the Spread Offense

Did someone say eight man front?

When I first went to the 4-2-5, my team struggled to grasp the concept, but it wasn't just the concept alone that hurt us.  There are some glaring weaknesses in the "Pattersonian 4-2" that if you are "out-athleted", you simply are setting yourself up for failure.  I will explain further, but after some miserable seven-on-seven outings, I had to do something.  Well, what I'm going to present you is what I came up with, and a bit of it was stolen from our 3-3 brethren, as well as from Brophy's blog on Nick Saban's adaptation of Cover 3 to the spread offense.

I was forced into the 4-2, because like a lot of coaches in struggling situations, we needed answers which correlated to wins.  Now, this story doesn't have a happy ending, however, there are some excellent things to be learned from the trials and tribulations of ANY coach.  So when the switch was made, things looked good on paper, then enter the seven-on-seven league we played in.  Where we got hurt the most was in the curl area to the away side of the coverage.  Blue is a great coverage, however to the away side, you are essentially giving up the curl, and if you play Bronco, you are giving up that out route to the flat due to the leverage issue of the Weak Safety (WS).  Well, after four disappointing games, and four weeks of not seeing any progress, I became enamored with finding a solution.  I needed something simple and quick to install.  Well, I found my answer on the pages of Cripes, Get Back to Fundamentals in the posts on Saban's Rip/Liz adaptation.  So, the following Monday we installed Cover 3, and Mable, and went on to look a whole lot better in seven-on-seven.  After losing our first four games, we ended up winning three out of the last four, to finish three and five for the summer.  The kids liked the new coverage better and I just knew we were going to succeed.  Well, enter the pre-season!

Prior to the start of the season, the goal was to keep the defense simple so the kids could play fast.  Well, our base coverage to any 2 back set was Robber, and then if we got any one back set, we moved on Cover 3.  Trips check would be Mable, and we were going to blitz empty if we got it (we only saw empty five times that year, even though we played seven spread teams).  What I'm going to do in the following paragraphs is explain the coverages we used, and then go through the "rights" and "wrongs" that we did so you can see how we came to an end result which was an eight man front that was sound against the spread. 

Robber
Robber coverage is nothing new, and since I was a Quarters guy, it fit with my mentality of pattern reading.  Trouble is, we only faced two, two back teams that year, and both were at the end of the season.  Sure, we saw some mix of some spread two back, but not much, so Robber was no the first coverage I taught.  Now, the Robber I ran, was the typical Virginia Tech Robber scheme that so many people have become familiar with over the years.  There's been so much written on the topic that for me to write more, would simply fall into the category of "white noise" as there is very little I can bring to the table on the subject that hasn't already been written about.

Cover Three
Cover three, has also been written about a lot, and most know, by now, the links to Brophy's site where he speaks about Saban's adaptation to this age old fundamental coverage.  Most who really know me, know I can't stand cover three.  Anyhow, after reading the beautifully written pages of Brophy's blog I was hooked.  Saban's cover three is everything you love about cover one, and everything you love about cover three, all rolled into one.  I heard one person even comment to Brophy that Saban's cover three was much like a one-high version of Quarters.  This comment really caught my attention, and got my wheels to spinning.  I'm going to re-hash the rules for Saban's cover three, in case anyone missed them.

For the corners, Rip/Liz (what Saban calls his adaptation), is basically like cover one with some zone principles.  The corner's rule is he has all of the number one receiver vertical.  If one is shallow and in or out, he zones off his deep third.  Pretty standard, yet vague enough of a description to be dangerous.  What I added to this to help our corners was to put in a depth of the route, and more specifically a time. If the corner was able to count to three after the snap and the receiver was still running vertical, then he locked on to him man to man (ala cover one).  If the receiver had made a break before this, then the corner would zone off into his deep third.  This gave the corner a feel for the three step game, since you can roughly count to three and be at the third step of the quarterback, and allowed the corner to anticipate whether he was getting a three or five step drop ( I can't tell you the last time I've seen a seven step drop in high school football).  Anyhow, that was really the basis for the coverage for the corners.  Now I did tweak one thing, that if the number one receiver broke off his route in a hitch or out, that the corner could cushion back and think smash and help play under the deep corner route.  This technique helped our outside safeties (OSS) who were sometimes a little outmatched by the opponent's slot receiver.  Ok, speaking of the OSS's, let's move on to their reads and techniques.



Corner reads

The OSS's rules for Rip/Liz were that they were to take the vertical and out by the number two receiver.  Here I had to tweak the term "vertical" a bit more as well.  What I found out worked for us, was that if the receiver took two steps up field, he was vertical.  I know this is slightly different than the corners, but had to be done this way to combat some of the spacing concepts such as all hitches or all slants.  This allowed us to play the short throws much like cover one would, in a basic man-to-man concept.  The OSS was to align in outside leverage so long as he did not cross the top of the numbers if the ball was in the MOF.  This allowed the OSS to maintain leverage on his run assignment of playing force.  If the number two receiver went shallow and inside, then the OSS would break immediately to the flat based on the corners call of what the number one receiver had done (in or out).  If the call was out, the OSS would flatten his drop and look to get in the "window" of the quarterback's vision.  If the call was in, the OSS would "sit down" and hang on the edge of the curl/flat zone boundary line looking for the slant or dig routes.  Again, we can see, Saban's adaptation has taken two of cover three's known weaknesses, the seams, and the curl flat divider and removed them from existence. 

OSS reads/reactions to number two vertical or out

The free safety had the very simple rule of playing the middle third of the field.  What I liked about the coverage is it took a huge strain off the free safety playing those seam routes against four vertical teams.  The free safety did not have to be such a good athlete as a typical MOF safety does, which was our case. 

So, in summary, the Rip/Liz adaptation really helped, and this help immediately showed in seven-on-seven.  However, like anything else, this adaptation had it's disadvantages too, which I will speak of later. 

Video Courtesy of our main man Brophy

Mable
Mable, which is Saban's adaptation of cover three to defend trips, is a very sound way of playing any three by one set you may see.  However, one weakness that stood out in seven-on-seven was that by pushing the linebacker to the trips, he was barely in the box, and really was asking a tall order of one of my inside linebackers to do what his rules were.  The rules are simple, but my adaptation was shown below, in what a friend of mine (Outlaw Josey Wales on the Huey board) called "dogs over".  This concept was one of many I borrowed from the 3-3 Stack guys, and it was simply to move the weak OSS over to the trips side and slide the linebackers one full shade to the weak side of the coverage.  This did two things, first it put our linebacker in man coverage in a situation with a better match up, our linebacker against their running back (which was much better than our linebacker against their number three receiver).  Second, by sliding the linebackers away, and utilizing our Two-Gap/One-Gap defensive line play, we were able to use this weak side linebacker as our force player.  Thirdly, this scheme, which I aptly named "30 backer" (cover three strong and cover zero weak with weak backer force) put our three better athletes on our opponent's three receivers creating the match ups that we wanted. 

"Dogs over" adjustment to trips in the 3-3 stack



"Dogs over" adjustment in the 4-2



Mable's reads are not that tough, and is nothing more than an overloaded zone pushed to the strong side with a man to man concept on the backside.  This is nothing new, and Brophy has detailed this quite a bit in his posts on Mable.  The key to Mable is that the two underneath droppers (the strong and weak safeties) have got to get the number two or number three receiver on a different level if the offense is running four verticals.  Fortunately for us, we didn't see four verticals from trips, and even though we worked the dickens out of it, this concept still concerned me. 

Coverage Summary
As you can see, that is a very simple and small list of coverages.  Much smaller than the standard TCU fare I've talked about in the past.  I'm not knocking TCU, I'm just saying, that it does require some athletes at certain positions to run.  If you don't have these athletes, you don't scrap the defense (although some would), you make the defense fit what you have.  Saban's adaptations have made this possible.  The ability to play an eight man front against spread teams, and especially the spread option teams has been a huge victory for defenses around the country fighting to keep up with spread football.  Sure, are there weaknesses, yes there are, and I will talk about those in the next post.  I'm going to cut this one up into a few posts, so hang in there, these should be some informative posts to those who don't have the athletes to run some of the seven man front coverage schemes!

Duece

More Flexbone Passing

Going with the theme from the last post, here's some drop back stuff that might interest some of you flexbone nuts!  I used to keep things simple and mirror my routes to either side in the flex, however, with the Air Raid craze that has taken over the football landscape, there is a need to evolve the flexbone passing game.  I'm going to show you some simple concepts, both Air Raid and Run and Shoot you can add to your arsenal of weaponry with little teaching time so that your team can still master the triple option.  This concept of teaching time is very important to flexbone coaches, as the attention to the passing game gets lost due to the intricate time needed to spend working and perfecting the reads in the run game.  However, this does not mean you cannot have a good passing game in the flexbone.  I think the concepts you choose need to be limited, very simple, and little to no reads on the part of the QB (he has enough on his plate already). 

Levels
Levels has been written about tons of times (as seen here and here), so I'm not going to go into grave detail on the subject, other than this concept fits the flexbone very well.  Since the flex, is a 2x2 offense in the base formation, the concept is very simple.  There are two sides to the play, the clear out side and the "in" side.  These concepts must be tagged so I would tag the clear out side by simply calling "right" or "left" and that call (ie. Levels Left) would dictate what side of the offense was going to be the clear out side.  To the clear out side, the wide receiver runs a takeoff and the slot will attempt to bust the middle of the coverage wide open.  Here's the key to the success of the play is the clear out side slot's read.  He's the only receiver reading anything, and all he does is "run to daylight".  So if the defense is MOFO (2 high safeties), the slot is going to run a skinny post splitting the safeties.  If the defense is MOFC (1 high safety),  then the slot will run right up the hash mark.  To the "in" side, the inside slot is basically running a five yard "in" route while the wide receiver will run his "in" route at a depth of 10 to 12 yards.  The B back, will release to the call side flats on an arrow route and look for the ball immediately if call side LB blitzes.  Here is the concept drawn up out of the base set:





This would be the route combo vs. MOFO defense



This concept can also be run out of trips as well, with the A and Z backs switching their assignments.  The A back will now clear out the middle of the coverage with the Z back running the five yard "in" route.






Levels from a trips set


NCAA
A real popular route combination is the NCAA route.  As most know, the reason for the naming is because of the commonality of the passing concept in college football.  The NCAA concept is another passing concept that with a few tweaks can be formulated to fit into the flexbone passing game. 

The NCAA routes involve a post, a dig, and two drag routes.  In my mirrored route scheme, I had double post and double drag (shown below) tagged as the "six route".  Any time we wanted to run the NCAA combo, I simply tagged which WR was going to run the dig route.

6 Route

In the play below, I simply called "Y Dig" and you come up with the NCAA concept.

The NCAA concept can also be run from the trips formation as well.  When doing this though, I recommend having the A back convert his route into a wheel route.

Shallow Cross
Shallow cross is another passing concept that works well in the flexbone offense.  This concept is very similar to Levels, but with a few different route combinations.  Again, in 2x2 I recommend tagging the side of the offense that will be running the shallow cross, to keep things from being too confusing for the players.  In the diagram below, you can see the route combinations set up as follows; the Y will run the shallow cross, basically being a drag in front of the LB's.  The slot to the tagged side runs a corner route, 10 yards in depth.  Away from the call side the A back is going to run a five yard "in" route.  The receiver away from the tagged side will run a deep post route.  Shallow cross attacks the bottoms and tops of every zone the defense is playing, thereby making a zone dropping defender's job much more difficult because there is a decision to be made.  Defenders do not like to have choices, they want to react and attack and concepts such as the Shallow cross do not allow defenders to attack, because if they do, then receivers are open.



Shallow Cross from trips

As you can see the concept can be run from either the base set, or the trips set.  Another good "change up" is to switch the assignment of the call side receivers.  Have the Y run a clear out or fade, and have the slot run the crossing route.



Run and Shoot
A lot of people ask me "What routes go best with the flexbone", and my usual answer is "Run and Shoot".  The problem with the shoot is that it is a very time intensive passing attack to install.  Flexbone QB's are not going to have the time to learn the reads and routes that a true RNS QB will have.  However, there are some very good concepts that can be utilized in the drop back passing game (some of these concepts have been discussed before).

I'm not going to elaborate much here as there are some really good reads on RNS passing, what I am going to tell you is that you will not have the time you need to dedicate to truly run RNS passing in it's purest form.  However, you can use the concepts, with some tags to put your team in a position for success with very little coaching time involved.  Check the links below for more RNS passing information.

Understanding the Trickeration

• Streak Package
• Choice Package
• Go Package
• Switch Package

Smart Football's Run and Shoot Articles (Chirs does an excellent job of dumbing down the RNS concepts).

• Part 1-Simple Approach to Run and Shoot
• Part 2- The Seam Read and the Go Concept
• Part 3- The Choice Concept
• Part 4- The Streak

Another concept that works well with the flexbone is spacing.  I won't write much about the spacing concept, as it has been documented quite well over the years as well.  However, I will tell you what I did in the past to make spacing a simple concept that the kids could easily run (this comes from the RNS background of "get open" and is easy to put in).

The zero route in my offense meant exactly that, no route was called and the receivers were to listen for the tags.  Some concepts I ran were comeback, slant, and hitch.  If the zero route was called and then "comeback" was added to it, then the receivers would all run comebacks, as shown below.






Comebacks


Here are the others also:

Hitch

Slant

Out

Looks like we were real original with the names right?!  The coaching point for the flexbone coach using the spacing concept is to teach receivers to move around into open areas once they run their routes (this is not how spacing is taught in "mainstream" passing offenses, there, the receivers run to the voids and make reads on the run much like RNS receivers do).  I only did this the two years I had what I would have considered a "good passer", but it was an easy install, as we had some pretty good wide receivers to go along with our gunslinger that year.

Conclusion
Mirrored routes are great in the flexbone, and an offense can go along way by utilizing this simple concept.  However, if you want more out of your passing game in the flex, I suggest adding one, maybe two of the above concepts.  The reason I would keep that number so low is the fact that any addition to the passing game requires time to install, and any time taken from the run game, in the flexbone, can be dangerous.  Another item to consider is pass protection, as the above concepts are all drop back in nature, the OL will have to protect more than usual.  I think the flexbone OC should have at lease one of these concepts under his arm going into every season (mine was Levels), and then only add some if he feels his team absolutely needs them.

Duece