Single Wing Package in the Wide Zone Offense

How we've added a simple Single Wing package to our offense for short yardage.

Mostly I’ve written about College and NFL offenses that I steal from or just like studying. Now, I’m going to dive into some wrinkles our team has done at the high school level.

Though our offense falls into a balanced type spread category, I like to have simple wrinkles for certain situations. One package we have carried for the past 7 years is the Single Wing.

It’s been great for us for many reasons:

1. It’s a simple install. We don’t add any plays, we just run our offense from a unique formation. It takes 5 minutes to install, and we work a 5-minute period once a week.

2. Great for short yardage. It gives you an extra blocker and alleviates the need to hand the ball off.

3. It adds something for the defense to account for. We work on it for 5 minutes, but if our opponent wants to stop it, they must have an adjustment they work on for more than 5 minutes. That’s time that they aren’t working on stopping our base stuff.

4. Believe it or not, some defenses just run their base D, which means this package gashes them.

5. It snaps the ball directly to your best athlete. As coaches, we overcomplicate this game. Give it to your best kids and let them be great athletes. This does that.

6. It saves you if your quarterback gets injured and you don’t have a viable backup. (More on that later.)

It’s no secret that I coach in a Wide Zone system, so the first play that goes in is the Wide Zone. Our kids can run this play in their sleep, so adding a funky formation doesn’t bother them. One tweak we do have, is we don’t declare a Mike, or worry about who we are climbing to. We get some crazy defensive looks, so we harp on them to stick to their covered/uncovered rules and secure the first level.

The challenge for the defense is that we’ve added 3 lead blockers. The fullback who is aligned in the B gap, and the running back are reading the wings block and will fit in the first available gap, leading the quarterback.

Depending on the season, we will do different things with our starting quarterback. Sometimes he will play the X receiver, but for the past few years we have just subbed him out.

We work our best 2 or 3 guys at the “Wildcat” quarterback spot.

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