Friday, January 9, 2009

Inside Shovel Off The Speed Option - Spread Offense

Congratulations to the Florida Gators ! If you watched the game last night, you saw a great play that Urban Meyer has used for some time now even before coming to Florida, but last night might have been the first time some of you may have seen it.

It's off speed option action to the perimeter... but the backside TE (or H-Back in a different formation) runs the inside shovel pass, with his backside guard pulling or folding up into the hole for a gut or kick-out block. If the defensive end knifes down for the shovel pass, the quarterback keeps the ball and attacks the outside with his pitch relationship to the running back. If the defensive end square shoulders the QB or keeps outside leverage, the shovel pass is executed to the TE.


--Mark

2 comments:

The Geek said...

As a huge Gator fan and a student of the spread offense, this is one of my favorite plays. When run correctly this play is so hard to stop. I'm not a coach (yet), but if I was, this would be one of those go to plays to keep in the ol' vault.

MacAddict said...

This is a great play. However, I have not seen Urban Meyer run this that much since leaving Utah. Oklahoma did not seem to have an answer for the zone triple option to P. Harvin and the shovel option. Personally, I love the shovel option. It softens the middle of the defense by threatening the perimeter right away with the QB and the pitch back. This is one of our staple plays. We run this play out of multiple formations with many different looks. We will run it out of one-back and two-back sets, but mostly we run it out of empty. We even run it as a misdirection play off of jet motion. However, I have never ran it with a TE who was on the line. That might be a good wrinkle next year in the red zone.