Wing-T Reader Q&A: Dealing with Line Stunts and Twists

Coach Burke asked:

I’m curious, how do you run block again defensive line stunts and twists?

This is an area where I think “less is more” – if you spend too much time trying to coach special cases like this, you can easily over-complicate the Wing-T offense and confuse the kids. That said, it is your job to prepare them for situations they will see in game time, so ignoring it isn’t an option either.

First, there are some things you shouldn’t do:

• Don’t change the blocking rules for the plays. This is not a man blocking offense - it is mostly gap assignment blocking. Run properly, it shouldn’t matter if you are seeing stunts / twists / blitzes.
• Don’t try to outguess the defense, predict stunts, etc. Prepare the kids and keep tempo to put the defense on their heels.
• Don’t let the kids get in the habit of choosing the guy they are going to block pre-snap. It is OK to expect to block someone, but they need to follow their rule and understand that he might leave, or that someone else might show up. This starts with good first steps.

What we do to prepare for this is to put the kids in practice situations where they get used to seeing different defensive situations. This can start with simple two-on-two drills (cross block drills, down blocking etc.) then progress to half line and team. Slow things down if you need to in order to walk through what they might see from the defense and how this might change who they end up blocking without changing their rules.

This is very similar with how we will work on blitzing. For example, in the two-on-two drills we will sometimes have two o-linemen face two defensive linemen, sometimes faced stacked LB over a DL.