Compliment the Veer with Power

By Rob “Tog” Paschall

Offensive Coordinator

Carrolton Creekview High School (TX)

The Veer and the Power are not often seen as complimentary.  The Veer has its loyalist within the option football community while the Power is seen as the basis of “big boy football” that doesn’t rely on deception to trick the defense.  Dig a little deeper and you will find that there are quite a few similarities between these two schemes.  In fact, we have found that the similarities in technique and look to the defense actually make them the perfect compliments within our scheme. 

Why Veer AND Power?

Our staff has all come from various styles of offense, with varied ways to attack a defense.  When I came here and was made the offensive coordinator we started to have meetings to figure out where we wanted to take things.  I had the basic system in place having been a coordinator in Texas High school football for years, but have always wanted the staff to have some buy in with the thinking that more input=more output.  When I met with our head coach, Jay Cline, and the rest our offensive staff, my goal was to have a truly collaborative effort that we could put in to develop our offensive system.  Here are the basic tenets of our offense that we landed on.

1. We needed to be adaptable to the talent on hand.  Our offense had to be modular to allow us to keep and teach a system over the years, yet adapt it to the wildly varying talent levels on the team or in specific position groups we see at the high school level from year to year.
2. We were going to be physical.  This is not dictated by the formation.  It is more of an attitude and “what you will accept as a coach” thing.  We wanted to run power.
3. We were going to be balanced, or at least have a semblance of balance.
4. We wanted to be able to do all of the above and keep things simple for the offensive line while being able to pyramid teach our system.  In other words, we wanted to be able to make it look complicated for a defense, be easy, cheap, and effective for our kids, and allow us enough answers in our x and o’s toolbox to be able to attack whatever fronts or personnel issues we see.

We were going to be a vertical push zone team with our offensive line as that was my background and what I believe in as a sturdy system to allow any offensive line, regardless of talent to have some success.  With this, we were going to have the ability to rotate our combos with a simple tag.  When we rotate our combos to the backside linebacker we can insert someone, either an H back, wr, fullback, or an offensive tackle on that linebacker.  We can also read that same guy in the gun.

With this basic vertical zone combo style in place.  We can then adapt in a modular way from inside zone to read, insert, counter insert, filled read, dashed read, and veer where we read the unblocked de on the frontside of the combo rotation.  We can add all sorts of window dressing on top of the zone to make it look more complicated than it really is. When we block veer, we treat it as a backside rotate zone, with the psot as the “insert” guy.  We can run veer as a triple, but usually run it as a double option.