Football is a game of patterns. Option football coaches will say…
A) Run midline to the ‘A’ gap bubble
B) Run inside veer to the ‘B’ gap bubble
C) Run outside veer to the ‘C’ gap bubble
A bubble means that there is no defensive lineman in that gap. Here are the gaps with letters A, B, C and D.
So if we had this type of formation against a 4×4 defense we would typically run midline to the right in the open ‘A’ gap and inside veer to the left in the open ‘B’ gap.
So let’s say we want to run inside veer to the left with the above formation. This means that typically the wide receiver on the left has to block that corner, which is enclosed in the red rectangle. It might look like the following image. What if this corner is more athletic than our wide receiver? Could we somehow ‘Remove the Defender’, which in this case the Corner?
As a side note, the blue and green shapes are important in teaching the players who we are optioning during the inside veer play. The color selection is up to you! In inside veer the ‘Dive Read‘ is marked in a rectangle because we ‘Read a Book‘, since a book is shaped like a rectangle. The outside linebacker ‘B’, who is the ‘Pitch Read’ is in a triangle because we ‘Pitch a Tent’, since a tent is shaped like a triangle. ‘Read the Book‘ and ‘Pitch the Tent‘! Simple!
Again, how can we make life easier for our wide receiver, who might be outmatched. Is there a way we could have him not need to make that stalk block on the play side? Let’s steal a concept from the game of Chess called ‘Remove the Defender’.
So what is ‘Remove the Defender’ in Chess? Here is a really good description on Chess.com if you want to read through it there. I will give you an example too. In this scenario it is black’s move.
At first glance all the white pieces appear to be protected. As we look closer the white King, circled in Red, is protecting both the Knight/Horse on f3 and the Rook/Castle on d1. As we will see, that is too much for one piece to do. So as Black if we can get the white King to have to commit to defending one of the pieces, then the other piece will be vulnerable to be captured and we will have ‘Removed the Defender’, which is the white King. Here is how it looks after the capture of the white Rook by the black Rook.
Now the white King has to respond and he chooses to capture the black Rook. But that has now left the white Knight unprotected.
So now the black Rook on f7 can capture the white Knight. After this move the game is effectively over.
So back to football! We talked about how the wide receiver might struggle to block that physically superior corner. How can we ‘Remove the Defender’? One way is to move that wide receiver over to the right-hand side, which creates an unbalanced formation.
It is unbalanced because, while we still have seven players on the line of scrimmage, we have covered up our tight-end and now we only have four eligible receivers. There are pros and cons to doing this and they all come back to the concepts of Numbers, Angles and Grass. Note that you could swap your left tackle and tight-end to keep all five receivers as being eligible. The drawback to that ‘tackle over’ formation is that you have to teach your tackle and tight end a new position.
So now if we run inside veer to the left our wide receiver no longer has to block that corner on the play-side. Yeah! We have effectively ‘Removed the Defender’.
So what if the corner does not follow the wide receiver over to the right? If that happens then you will have a Numbers advantage to the right and your quarterback should check to a play that will go right.
Here is Air Force in Week 3 vs Colorado in 2019 running a play to the weak side of the formation, which is called the ‘Nub’ side. The ‘Nub’ side as explained in this Match Quarters article is a side of a formation that does not have any wide receivers. While Air Force runs a counter running play instead of the inside veer that we discussed earlier, the concept is the same. There are only 4.5 defenders to the nub side that have to be blocked so it turns into a nice gain.
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