HOW MANY FRONTS DO YOU RUN?

Coach,

I always start out of a Stack 44 each year and go from there. I usually run a reduced - 7, 3, 1, 5 - look and a Bear look. I have a goalline front also. Some years we may use the Bear front more often than other years. This year we used it very little. What I found this year is that we stayed mostly with our stack look and made adjustments to it to fit the scouting report. So, I feel that you can run a lot of looks or simply one. The key is that your players need to be comfortalble and completely understand each look that you give them. A team from our area will show you one front all season with small adjustments to it and totally kick butt. They are great at a few things.

Coverages: I try to get by with Man free and Cover 3 with a little Cover 0. We may roll a coverage to meet a scouting report but again I'd rather run something very well than try to scheme a perfect look for everything the opponent does.

Blitzes and Stunts: I've made huge changes over the past few years. Since we run a 44 I feel that we need movement or teams will run off-tackle all day long. I used to blitz constantly from anywhere at anytime. This worked most of the time but we would get burned once in a while for a big play. I've switched my philosophy in that I want to use as much movement as possible but it is driven by the team we will be facing. I don't run to run a blitz just to show we can do it. It needs to fit the game plan. Some weeks we may not blitz our OLBs at all while others we feel the risk is low so we will send them quite a bit.

We run the usual blitzes. Our MLBs will blitz A and B gap for the most part with a little bit of looping to the opposite A gap. We also have a read blitz for them where they go B or C gap base upon how the OT is blocking. We will straight blitz them into C gap also without the read, although less often as this may draw them away from the play.

Our OLBs will blitz C and D gaps but we also will send them through B once in a while with man coverage behind it on passing situations.

Line movement is mostly a variety of slanting such as pinching, slant strong or weak, and such. We will run an inside or outside stunt in certain situations like a twist but not that often.

My last thought is that the ability levels of our kids will dictate how much movement we will use. This year my ILBs were very good. They could read well, flow to the ball and take on O-linemen so I didn't blitz them much. I didn't want to take them away from the play when they could make a good read and get there w/out blitzing. Next season may be different. I have a couple of new kids who will need seasoning. I'll probably have to blitz them quite a bit, at least to begin with.

I hope that is useful. I guess all in all the biggest thing is that the players should be very good at whatever they do. Adding a coverage or a front may be effective against certain things but if the players don't master it they probably won't stop the O. I'd rather be comfortable in less than try to do more.