“Burst Corner” Route Technique in Gap PAP’s

By Kenny Koberstein
Head Football Coach
South Eugene High School (OR)
Twitter: @CoachKoby

As a player and young coach, I “grew up” around Wing-T programs. I have always admired how that offense has built-in answers for pretty much anything a defense can do it. When I set out to build my own offense, this type of flexibility was important to me. While we don’t run the Wing-T here at South Eugene we do base within its principles, especially with our play-action game.

In this article, my goal is to show how we teach and install our play-action game to protect our base runs: power and counter. These shot plays have been our most productive passing concepts in the last four seasons.

The number one foundational run in our offense is the power play, predominantly from 20 personnel. This is the very first play we install on the first day of camp. Each week when we game plan our offense we are looking at how we are going to run power against the front we’re seeing that week. We hang our hat on this play week in and week out.

POWER PASS

Because Power is so important to our offense, the first play-action concept I’m going to discuss is our power pass. Again, our rationale is to make this look as much like power as we can. We do not pull a guard on the play-action.  We want to use eye-candy in the backfield to suck up LB’s while still allowing us to stay in our base 6-man pass protection.

Install:

For both power pass and counter pass, we install them the same day as power and counter. Our day 1 install is power and power pass. Day 2 is a counter and counter pass. We do this to emphasize to our players that these concepts are linked, and we want them to work in concert within our offense.

We always start the install process in the classroom. The play is diagrammed for the players and we show them video clips of the play from previous seasons.  From there we move to the field. The offensive line works this play against even and odd fronts as a part of their group period while the backs work the concept in our routes on air drill. Finally, we bring this all together in the team period. That evening coach will create a playlist of the install clips from practice that day and share it with notes for their position group. This process is repeated the next day with the next installment.