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

We also found that if the linebackers saw a wedge creating, they would quickly come up to fill the middle and the protecting ends would curl around the wedge and attempt to drag the ball provider down from behind. The initial response was to have our offensive linemen just keep their hipod knees up and trample over the defensive lineman, the defensive linemen rarely like using this diving approach the whole game and will hardly ever stick to it for long. We were still getting good yardage on our wedge, but not quite what we had gotten previously. Of course for those teams that would dive every play, we simply ran lots of off-tackle, sweeps, counters, money wedges and passes and just ran wild. In fact this season we proportioned comparable number of details per game (35) with our age 10-11 team as we did the prior year and we were much smaller this season. Nevertheless for those teams that would wait to "feel" the wedge before diving, we had a different plan waiting for them.

Past due this season there were additional a football play that was really only a small modification of two sports plays we already run. The 16 Power, our tailback power play off-tackle run to the strong side and 22 our Wedge, a fullback sand wedge to the Right Protect. While nether of these is the "sexiest" of football plays, together they averaged almost 9 years per carry this season. Typically the new hybrid play strike so quick and was so open, it seemed like our tailback was shot out of a cannon.

This is just what we did:

If you've ever seen those Power T teams run the ball, it is an amazing offense. Just like the Single Wing, it is real tough to decide on up the ball and they hit the queue very quickly out of a compressed formation with 3 backs attacking 3 different parts of attack. On the base play, the fullback attacks the playside dive or trap hole, the backside halfback attacks the playside off-tackle hole and the quarterback attacks the playside sweep area. Typically the quarterback either gives to the fullback, backside halfback or keeps it on a sweep. Everything is so compressed and it hits so quick, you have no clue who has the football. To add to this mess, all the ballcarriers and fake ballcarriers use a "layered" handoff method to hide the basketball and carry their fakes out 20 + meters. When I watch these High School teams play on my DVD player, I have to slow everything down frame by frame to see who the heck has the darn football, I kind of like that particularly in youth football..

We made a decision to incorporate a few of these concepts into one football play we would use late in our 2007 youth football season. We would make "double dive" concept from the Power T teams and adapt it to our youth football playbook. All of us would run our off-tackle play to our tailback out there of our base arranged, but use wedge obstructing and a fake to our fullback to attract the defense in.

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

There was no need for a pulling guard, as the linebackers were already arriving up hard when they saw any wedge forming and would get lost in the wash. Typically the tailback would run off-tackle to the strong part, inside the blocking shells kickout block and then just outside the wingbacks seal block, just like the 16 Power we usually run. Both our Fullback and Tailback would carry the ball or fake with both forearms completely over the basketball, or their stomachs (if faking) and were curved at the waist more than usual. Since this was a combo of 2 football plays we already run, it was a little while until all of 1 minute to setup, it stole zero time from our regular football practice schedule.