The Swinging Gate

With the Swinging gate, most folks line up a snapper who is eligible and a flanker to the right (since most kids are right handed). To the left they line up their 5 lineman and a TE with a back set behind the wall. Behind the snapper you have a holder and kicker in most cases.

The offense has 5 possible scoring threats to the right. The Holder, the Kicker, The Snapper, the Flanker and the one some defenses forget about is the back behind the wall. So you need to place 5 defenders to the snapper side to defend the 5 threats. That leaves 6 men to defend the wall and they had better be down in a stance ready to play.

So we look for 4 or less to the flanker side or 5 or less to the wall side if we are going for two points. We will go to the wall defended by 6 men if the defense is standing around waiting for us to shift to PAT formation or they do not have everyone on the LOS. We feel we can get under their pads and get a surge.

So simply line up 5 to the flanker and 6 men to the wall to get most teams to shift to PAT.

One thing we have done is shift to PAT and then run a fake from there. It's amazing how defenses have been trained to watch for the swinging gate only to let their guard down after the shift.

I am no expert, but we line up pretty much like 50 mentioned when we see the gate. Only difference is we have one of our best athletes line up just inside the wall ready to come across and knock down / catch the snap to the back behind the wall. Don't know if it actually works, but nobody has tried it on us when we were lined up like that.