The Perfect High School Offense Part II: Blog Entry Number Two

The "Auburn" Fire Series

In blog entry number one, we talked about moving our back to the pistol look. As I stated, this turned about to be a great move for us. In the next couple of days, I plan to get up some clips of Veer out of the Pistol which I wrote about in that entry. But maybe our best addition this year was our "fire" series. What we were looking for and what we actually ended up doing were two different things. We wanted to add a "fire" series, which for us would be a formation completely different than our normal sets, with a few base plays, that we would run after a big play or as a change of pace. In my search for such a series, I came across the video below.

As you can see we liked what the backfield action did to the defense forcing them to stand still and "find" the ball. So we took the video and drew up our "fire" series. As stated we were going to use it sparingly after big plays and as a change of pace. The only thing was every time we ran the series, we picked up yards so we it end up becoming a huge part of our offense and next season we are going to teach it from day one with some adjustments as a base part of the offense.

Like the video, we wanted all the plays in the series to start out looking the same, hence the name series. In camp we installed 3 plays, an outside zone / buck sweep to our running back coming across the face of the QB and faking a reverse over the top, faking the sweep and giving the reverse over the top, and finally faking the sweep and the reverse and throwing a play action Smash type action. To call the series we simply used numbers, "Fire 1" was the sweep action, "Fire 2" was the reverse over the top, and "Fire 3" was the play action. We started with 3 and ended up with 8 and it became a running joke every time we added a play and coaches and kids would say things like, "coach what is Fire 20 going to be?". Here are the diagrams for the 3 plays:

We obviously set up the rest of the series by establishing the sweep first. We actually opened the game with the sweep the first four weeks of the year with good success including one that went for a touchdown. Week five we threw the play action on the first play for a touchdown. We did not run the reverse much, but it was very effective when we did.

This was our second best play action pass. The boot is our best play action pass, but this ran a close second and the nice thing about that is the fact that the reads for the QB are almost identical to that of the boot. The reads are easy for the QB. He looks for the Smash route then comes off to the divide and down to the over. If he feels pressure, he throws to either back out of the backfield. The wheel by the sweeper down the sideline is the big play throw on the pass and should be stealing against high school defenses. We hit some huge plays throwing that route.

This series was tremendously effective for us and we will use it as one of our base sets next season.

Here are highlights of us running our Fire Series.