First Day Duo: Vertical Chips Not Vertical Doubles in the Priority Gap Mentality

By Landon Miller
Offensive Coordinator
Waverly High School (OH)
Twitter: @Lmiller0524

We frame our Duo play as a “hard dive” mentality. We don’t expect it to be a large explosive play. We are going to come out to you right now to see how tough you are. Oftentimes it is used to set up Counter, which has been our most explosive play. We teach Duo as an “own your gap” mentality. We don’t Mike point anything. It’s a true gap scheme, that is similar to Power. The difference is power hit too slow for us and the line always has to be right. In Duo, the back has to be right and they are more dynamic players so we will rely on them.

Priority Gap Responsibility:

When we talk to our offensive line about a “priority gap” mentality, we talk about owning our gaps up front. This gap is the gap opposite gap of the play call. For example, if we call the play to the right (12 for us) the offensive line has a priority gap to the left. This is highlighted in the diagram below with corresponding responsibilities. For example, the RIGHT TACKLE is RED. His responsibility is to first block any LOS (Line Of Scrimmage) defender that can threaten his PRIORITY GAP (RED TRIANGLE). If a LOS defender does not threaten his priority gap, you are to CHIP on the nearest LOS defender to the CALL SIDE and then responsibility for the 2nd level defender that is threatening your PRIORITY GAP (since most defenses will be gap sound they will have a defender for each gap).

Below are some still images on how our line is taught to block first or second level defenders using the priority gap rule.