How We Combined Our Best Vertical Shot with a Horizontal Stretch

Pairing a Vertical Shot with Y-Cross to Build Answers Into One Call

Even good systems sometimes have bottlenecks. As OCs, it’s our job to find them and fix them.

For us, one of those bottlenecks was our Lock concept, the screen-and-go.

When the defense bit, it was one of the most explosive plays in our call sheet. When they didn’t, it gave us nothing. We were essentially living or dying on whether that first fake worked.

This offseason, we asked a simple question: What if we could keep Lock’s big-play upside but build in an answer when the defense stayed disciplined? That led us to Y-Cross, one of our most reliable horizontal zone beaters, and the idea of merging the two.

The result is a single call that can hit a home run against man or zone, and still create explosives when defenses stay over the top.

The Minimalist Mindset

We’re always looking for ways to distill our system down to its simplest form. If you study the history of successful offenses, the common thread is the same: they mastered a small set of concepts and built everything else around them.

Too many choices ends up being no choices. Our goal is to carry plays that attack as many coverages and fronts as possible, then add only the few specifics we need for protection.

That’s why Wide Zone and Choice are core for us, they stress defenses in almost every situation, so we don’t need to carry 40 different answers.

When I looked at our offense through this lens, I realized we were leaving something on the table. There was an opportunity to merge two plays into one call and make it stronger than either on its own.

Lock (Screen-and-Go) Review

I’ve already broken down the details of Lock in a recent article.

From Horizontal Stress to Vertical Shots: Our Screen-and-Go Blueprint

The idea is simple: start with short completions to pull the defense up, then punish them with the screen-and-go once they overplay it. Early in the year, it’s a great way to steal explosives.

The issue is the more success we had with Lock, the more teams schemed it out. They would get creative with their coverages so they had someone aggressive to play the screen, and someone deep waiting for the vertical route.

That turned Lock into an all-or-nothing shot. If the defense didn’t bite, our QB was left checking it down into traffic or throwing it away. We still hit on some, but the efficiency wasn’t where we wanted it.

The Defensive Problem

There are never enough defenders to cover every blade of grass. When a defense sells out to stop our screen-and-go, they’re giving something else up.

Take Lock, for example. To defend it, safeties are forced to widen outside the numbers. Corners play tighter, linebackers cheat up, and suddenly the middle of the field, especially the hook-curl window, is exposed.

The problem was, we didn’t have a natural answer built in. Choice wasn’t the right fit here. What we needed was a concept that lived in the exact space defenses were leaving behind.

The Solution: Lock + Y-Cross Hybrid