DC--I think you ve made my upcoming season

There's about 2 feet of snow outside and it's zero degrees out so I don't have much to do now but answer this post. So expect a long, detailed response. The reason you don't see "system" offenses very much at the youth level is two fold. First, people who develop systems are usually getting paid to do it - i.e. they are paid coaches. It's their job. These same coaches develop systems that correspond to the level they're coaching at which is usually no lower than high school, because that's where paid, competitive coaching stops. Now you'd think that would include middle school or 7th and 8th grade coaches because they're paid, but they're not paid very well and the level of coaching from one school to the next is not very competitive. This is because most teachers are unionized and the football coaching position goes to the teacher in the building with the most seniority that wants the job and not necessarily to the most qualified person. Once they take the job, you can't get rid of them for losing. They have the job for as long as they want it and a lot of them only want the job for the Christmas bonus - so they want it for a long, long time regardless of their ability. It can result in some pretty "unequal" games between a competitive coach and a non-competitive one and the disparity can go on between them for years. So there is not much real competition (There are middle school leagues that don't even have playoffs) unless two or more opposing coach choose to make it so. That lack of competition produces lack of progress in producing systems below the HS level. Now there's always an exception to the rule, such as our own Steve Calande who works at winning but, if you'll notice, he's selling his tapes. Nothing wrong with that. More power to him. But he uses the tape sales to supplement his income so that he becomes closer to a paid, competitive coach. Without paid, competitive coaches, the rest of us don't get systems (There would be no Calande tapes). Another example is Jack Reed. He direct sells his GAM defense over the net. It's a good book. But he's getting paid to produce it. Still another example is the DW offense. It's a great offense but we youth coaches never would have seen it or thought of it if it weren't for a paid, competitive high school coach named Markham who was trying to teach football to a group of knuckleheads in Finland. From him, we learned to teach our own knuckleheads over here. So when you wonder why there are no youth systems available (or so few), the answer is simple. There's no money in it. So that raises the question of why my playbook exists? My playbook exists because I'm in a paid, competitive system. It's just that I'm not the one getting paid in it. My principal opponent uses paid, competitive coaches. How high are they paid? From $ 30,000-60,000 a year plus vehicle. How competitive? When a coaching vacancy comes up, they fly in three high school head coaches from all over the country and let them compete for the opening. A committee selects the winner. If they don't win, they get fired. Thus, with that team in my league, I'm in a paid, competitive system. Again, I'm just not the one getting paid. Instead, I'm on the receiving end of those paid, competitive coaches who must beat me or lose their jobs. The result is that I have a choice. I can opt to battle it out for second place and concede first place to them, or I can try and beat them. Now I happen to be a very competitive person who can't stand to lose - whether it's in the stock market, the football field, or a simple game of "Risk". If I can't win at the game, I'll stop playing it. But if I stop playing it, that's an admission of defeat - And I can't stand to lose. So I had to develop an unpaid, competitive system in order to compete with a paid, competitive system. The system had to meet the following requirements 1) Meet the skills, size, speed, and mental abilities of my players and 2) Go unbalanced. The first requirement is so that I don't have to change my offense every year to accomodate players of different skills and so that I can easily substitute on the field. There's a spot in my offense for every size and shaped kid imaginable, including the mentally handicapped. The second, "going unbalanced", is the "Theory of Defensive football". The Theory of Defensive football says the defense will always win. Why? Because the offense has only ten blockers against the defense's eleven defenders. One defender is always unblocked on every play. If that unblocked defender is of equal speed and ability to the ballcarrier, the ballcarrier will be tackled for little or no gain, even if all the other ten blockers make their blocks. The system gets even worse if the offense's QB is not a blocker or running, passing threat but simply hands the ball off. Now you only have nine blockers to take out eleven defenders. Again, the defense wins (This is the basis for Reed's GAM). You counter the Theory of Defense by going unbalanced. It doesn't matter if you run the ball or pass the ball, unbalancing wins. We've all seen the pass play where three receivers line up on one side and all run downfield, taking three defenders with them. Then a fourth receiver sneaks in behind the other three, takes the pass, and runs a mile. That's an unbalanced play. There are four pass receivers versus three pass defenders. So what we learn from this is to have one or more offensive players at the point of attack than the defense has defenders. You do this by unbalancing your formation. In order to "unbalance" your formation, you must start out "balanced". That is you must have an equal number of players on each side of the center. This FORCES the defense to do the same thing (Or you just run to their weak side from your balanced set). If you look at my base formation, it is balanced:

     O       O  O  0  O  O   O
                   O             O
               O   O

You now unbalance the formation to run your play. You have four choices of how to unbalance the formation. My playbook uses all four of them. If your opponent is untrained, or only semi-trained, on how to deal with unbalanced looks, you can line up unbalanced and hike the ball one second later. These are the "Over" calls and you have six different ways to unbalance your formation, pre-snap, by alignment (It doesn't say it in my playbook, but the "Over" player is always the LAST player to leave the huddle, thereby reducing the defense's response time.). It's rather like Notre Dame switching from the "T" to the "Box" (The difference is that I can confuse the defense six different ways instead of just two.). If they don't move with you, you win. Just run the unbalanced side and you should have success since it will take a lot of work by the defense to learn to respond to all six formations). The second way to unbalance pre-snap is by motion. My playbook can let you unbalance your formation three different ways by using motion. You can motion the HB to the opposite side of the field, the WB, or motion the QB out from under center. Again, if they don't move with you, you win. Just run to the unbalanced side (The defense must now learn to adjust to six different "over" calls plus three different motion calls or nine different situations, all of which they have about 3 seconds or less to react to.). The third way to unbalance my formation is after the snap. That is done by pulling the backside guard playside. This is very, very difficult for youth defenses to follow and it is pretty much 80% of the success of the DW offense (Remove the pulling guards from the DW and see what's left.). The fourth way is to simply give the ball to the backside back and let him run playside ("36" and "38 Power" or "45" and "47"). A lot of teams do this but, if you'll notice, I usually call these as "tosses", thereby gaining even more blockers playside. So the initial idea is to 1) Make the defense line up the way you want them to, which is balanced, and then 2) Go unbalanced with at least one player so that you have as many blockers playside as they have defenders and, finally, 3) Go unbalanced more ways than the defense can learn how to defend. In the latter, for example, if a defense worked its brains out to learn how to follow our pulling guards, they'd find we only pull guards on half of our plays, therefore giving the defense a bad read 50% of the time. If those 50% of your plays break for big gains, you win.

However, no matter what we do, we always only have ten blockers on eleven defenders. To solve that problem, on every running play we leave the backside DE unblocked. From his position he isn't going to make the tackle playside anyway or, if he does, we need to equip our running back with a faster wheelchair. By not blocking the backside DE, who takes himself out of every play, we have ten blockers on their ten remaining defenders. The Theory of Defense is now broken. We have a blocker on every defender.

Now I don't mention the Theory of Defense in my playbook because all the solutions to the Theory of Defense are built right into the playbook on every single play without you ever needing to know the theory. Just call your play and you defeat the Theory of Defense automatically, every down. I've done it all for you without you, or your team, having to learn a darn thing.

But I expect what impressed you most (Since you can't be impressed with how it beats the Theory of Defense because I never mention how it does that) was reading chapter one. You can't find that material in a library or on the net. That section deals with the secrets of winning football. Contrary to the image of the sport, paid competitive coaches do not share their secrets. They wouldn't be competitive for very long if they did that - And then they wouldn't have their jobs. They say they do and they write books and sell videos claiming they do but what they really do is share what won't hurt them. Once Wyatt and Valloton had figured out Markham's system, it was no longer a secret. Wyatt and Valloton were marketing it. Markham didn't pick up the phone and call Wyatt and tell him how it worked. He wasn't sharing. And when Wyatt did "share" what he'd gotten from Markham, he charged $ 300 a tape for it and Valloton was charging the price of his book. So they were selling, not sharing. Yet even for your $ 300, Wyatt didn't share everything. People have learned from watching his tapes that he had another set of blocking rules that weren't being described on the tape. Coaches don't share everything they know if they are paid professonals. I have three wing T books by the famed "Tubby" Raymond and Ted Kempski and not once do they explain what the split end's job is. Go over to Bucksweep.com and go through all their posts on the wing T and you won't find it there either. It's an unshared secret. The offense is 64 years old and reason for the assignment is still not in print. The reasoning is simple. They don't want their opponents to know why he's out there. Other coaches share information but then do it in a way that prevents it from being useful. Counting the "box" is a great example. Coaches talk about "8 men in the box" or "9 in the box" - And there is no such thing. That's not how the system works at all. That's just how the coaches that were using it decided to share it - by providing useless information to their opponents. They must be laughing their heads off as defensive coaches across the country try and count the "box" before the snap. "One, two, three, four -(snap) - Dang! Try again! One! Two Three! Dang! Try again!" But in chapter one I actually tell how you actually do "count the box" and I add what the "box" really is - because the "box" that was shared with other coaches is not really the "box" at all. It's just more deliberate misinformation. Then there is information that is not provided simply because it is assumed that everyone knows it. Every college coach knows how to "fit" his offensive formation to the field. It was when offensive coaches learned how to "fit" their formations to the field that defensive coaches had to junk the "monster" defense. Let's look at the "short T" formation currently being discussed. That formation does not fit the field. Put the formation on a hashmark and it allows the defense to play with 12 defenders (The 12th defender is the sideline). It doesn't fit the field. It's why you don't see too many "short T" teams. Now place my formation on the hashmark, call "flip" if on the left hashmark or "base" if on the right. Now the defense can't use the "12th defender" because we can run a 6 yard gain to the sideline by power blocking the DE if he's in a "9". The "short T" can't do that. So the defense can play a tight "9" on the sideline and wait for the off tackle play. Yet my formation forces them into a loose "8" in order to avoid the downblock and the 6 yard gain. So now we run off tackle and get the 6 yard gain. One way or the other, we're gonna get our 6 yards. The "short T" can't get the 6 yards either way because that "9" is going to be one aggressive football player. He's going to close the hole down and play outside shoulder of the kickout man. Now the defense just plays a monster over the "sniffer" and the party's over. If the defense were to try and play a "monster" against my formation, that would be a mistake because they'd be unbalanced and we'd be balanced. We just run away from the monster and hit them to the side they're short a defender on and the "Theory of Defense" is beat again. The "short T" can't do that. It can, of course, do ther things but my formation can do anything the "short T" can merely by putting the WB in motion on a "power" call and letting him become the "sniffer" back. All of this is achieved simply by making your offensive formation fit the field - a subject that never gets talked about because it is assumed everybody already knows it. But it's in chapter one along with pre-reads, side line reads, counting defensive linemen, counting safeties, etc. and why all this stuff is done. The coach on the other side of the field is making his calls by "gut instinct" while you don't make a single call that isn't designed to hit him at his weakest point. All that in chapter one (Not bragging - just got nothing to do today. Snow is still falling. They just closed the courthouse.). Moving on to the other chapters I make it so that each kid only has to learn about four calls, not eight like most teams, and yet you can run about 50 different plays with it. I didn't invent that. Don Shula did. I make it so that nobody can blitz your QB on pass or run. I didn't invent that either. That comes from a former U of Hawaii coach. He's also the one that invented using run blocks on pass plays so your guys only have to learn and practice one block. The blocking rules that made it useless to read the guards comes from the coach for the U of Miami of Ohio (brilliant guy). The passing game comes from Navy and Air Force. The pass play calling system and the formation calling system are mine. Knowing when to pass comes from Don Sutton, former Army coach. The timing of the pass plays comes from USC's current coach. The running plays come from 1940-1958, particularly 1947-48. The years 1940-58 allowed me to include "T", "Wing T", and "Split T" ideas together, the latter being why you see the gradually increasing line splits, while the two former allowed me to focus on misdirection. The 1947 stuff is the "Quick Hits" and comes from Army's national championship team. The 1948 stuff produced my belly series of "24, 16, 38 option", etc. The reason for going back so far in time reflects the education of the players then. They could add and subtract, multiply and divide, and read - pretty much what my kids are capable of doing today. Interestingly enough, their blocking schemes and play calling systems were far more difficult to learn than mine and, in both cases, not as good. So my system is actually simpler to use than what the "simpletons" of old had to learn. Thus, the learning curve of the players is really fast (Still snowing. Car has disappeared. School is canceled for tomorrow - expect a long and boring post then too.).

Hey! I appreciate the compliment on my playbook because producing it really was a lot of work (Ask my wife. No! Wait! Don't ask her. Unlike the snow, she won't stop.). Future additions to it will include scouting and filming games and other coach's suggestions. Maybe I'll do those tomorrow. Right now I'm going to add in that the "Over" man is the last man to break the huddle and then go build a snow woman - I mean snow man.