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AFM Magazine


An Offense For the Undersized: The Double Wing

by: David Purdum
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In 1999, Ygnacio Valley High School, under the direction of head coach Tim Murphy, set the all-time large-school record in Northern and Central California by rushing for 5,019 yards. The Warriors’ offensive line that season averaged 208 pounds.
In 2003, Murphy led Clovis East High School to the California Interscholastic Federation title and finished ranked in the Top 25 in the nation. The T-Wolves’ offensive line averaged 198 pounds.
In 2007, Clovis East rushed for just under 5,000 yards with an O-line that averaged 205.
How is Murphy able to produce such prolific rushing attacks with such undersized players? It’s simple – the Double Wing offense, one of the best talent equalizers in the game.
Featuring two tight ends, two wings and a fullback, the Double Wing offense is built around a longtime football philosophy. “It starts out with a philosophy in football that the better athletes that you have the more you want to spread them out throughout the field,” said Murphy, who boasts a 106-25 career record. “The less-talented athletes, you want them grouped together.
“When you look at what’s going on in college football, the NFL, and even high school football, coaches are trying to spread their wealth. That’s all fine and good, when you have a quarterback and a couple of receivers and some big linemen. But when you are at a school that generally is not going to get those types of players year after year, you have to find a way to balance out playing the big schools like Long Beach Poly and De La Salle. If you’re at a school that is getting one Division I scholarship every three years as opposed to getting five a year, you have to come up with something.”
Texas power Midland Lee is on the list of big-name opponents that have fallen victim to Murphy’s offense. In 2005, Clovis East traveled 1,300 miles to Texas and put up 37 points on Midland Lee in a double-overtime victory. That’s just one example of a century’s worth of upsets the Double Wing has produced.
Legendary coach Pop Warner is credited with developing the Double Wing, which evolved from Warner’s Single Wing attack in the early 1900s. While the formation is not seen much in the higher levels of football, the blocking schemes and concepts are. The increasing popularity of the Wildcat, a modernized version of the Single Wing, is the perfect example.
Murphy has utilized the Double Wing over the past 11 seasons. His teams have rushed for at least 4,000 yards each year and averaged just under 40 points a game. He has made 11 straight playoff appearances, won nine league championships and three state titles.
He’s accomplished it all with very few Division I recruits.
It begins in the weight room, an area of expertise for Murphy. “You can increase a kid’s size, his power and his strength a lot more than his ability to play football or any sport,” Murphy said. “Not that you can’t improve athletic ability, but it’s just the level of improvement in the four to six years you have a kid is so much greater from weight room stuff.”
Even when Murphy maximizes a player’s weight room gains, he’s still fielding a team of players that average around 5-11, 200 pounds. He makes up for their lack of size with the offense’s blocking scheme which is designed to allow his players to compete against bigger competition. “We had an All-Valley lineman who was 5-7, 165 pounds,” said Murphy. “He was going up against guys who were going to the Pac-10.
“This offense exploits what you do in the weight room more than any other offense, and guarantees you from year-to-year. No matter what your talent pool is, you will be able to compete with the best schools in your area.”

The Double Wing Offense

Murphy’s offense is double tight and double winged. The wings are tilted 45 degrees and lined up one yard-by-one-yard off the tight end’s outside leg. The fullback is three yards off the ball, close enough to “reach out and touch the quarterback’s backside,” said Murphy.
Early in the season, the offensive line features no splits, but progressively widens as the players become more comfortable in the system. This allows Murphy to implement decoy and trap splits. “Basically, when a kid knows a trap is coming over his area you can widen that defender out with a split, but he also needs to know how to decoy a split,” Murphy said. “So when the play is going away from him, he can split without it affecting the play. As the season progresses and you teach your kids the understanding of the whole offensive concept, then they will actually go from six inches in to two feet.”
The offense is built around double-team blocks. A double-team is featured at the point of attack on almost every play.
“Two little guys are definitely stronger than one big guy,” Murphy said. “We talk about the word synergy all the time. In synchronized energy, two bodies are better than one no matter how big that one body is. But at the same time we talk about synergy with our blocking. If we use our ankle joint, knee joint, hip joint and our shoulder joint all at one time, we are going to be really effective. But when your mechanics are off and your ankle joint unlocks and then your knee joint unlocks and then your hips are maybe a little bit behind, that synergy is not there anymore. Our blocking progression is very precise and it’s very exact. Once the kids understand that and couple that with the double team, they can push around any kid no matter what school that kid is going to.”
This synergy is fine-tuned in the weight room, where Murphy’s entire routine is based on the power clean and snatch.
“If you think about what a power clean and a snatch is, it’s unlocking all those joints,” said Murphy. “It’s not that they are all working, it’s that they are working all at the same time and doing it in a fraction of a second.
“So they are doing it quickly, explosively and simultaneously. If a 165-pound guy tries to unlock one joint at a time, he is going to get drilled. But if you use all four joints together at the same time coupled with the double team he’s going to beat that 310-pound kid who is going to be a Trojan next year.”

Power Play vs. a 4-3 defense

Like the vast majority of option-based offenses, Murphy’s Double Wing is built around the basic, off-tackle power play. The ultimate goal of the play is to get five yards, nothing more, nothing less.
“It’s basically like a stiff jab in boxing, I mean everything that we do in power is to get that five yards, every time,” said Murphy. “We’re not looking to break the play away; we’re not going to bounce it outside. We will cut it back and bounce it outside when we have to, but we will get back to what we call the vertical track right away.”
Murphy faces a lot of 4-3 and 5-2 defenses that technically become a 6-3 to slow down the running game.
The defensive ends will be head up on the tight ends, with the defensive tackles on the outside shade on the guard. The linebackers will be four yards off the ball, with the Stud linebacker over the tackle. The Mike linebacker is over the center and Will linebacker over the other tackle. Cover 2 corners will be rolled up on the wings, approximately a yard off the ball. The Cover 2 safeties will be 10 yards off the ball over the tight ends.
Here’s how Murphy’s power play to the right would be ideally executed against a 5-2 defense (See Diagram).

• The center and right guard combine to double-team the nose guard.

• The right tight end and right tackle combine to double-team the defensive
tackle.

• Right wing is going to the Cover 2, tunnel him out and push him to the outside.

• Left guard comes around and finds the linebacker.

• Left tackle comes around to pick up any kind of loose change or helps double-team the linebacker. If he gets through completely, he reads to the next level and gets the play side safety.

• The quarterback follows the tackle after he pitches the ball to the fullback. The quarterback is just a touch deeper and a touch behind the pulling tackle. He has the same mission as the tackle: clean up any loose change, push the double-team if it needs to be pushed further, pick up a backer if he squirts through or pick up any blitzers off the edge.

• The fullback aims for the inside hip of the tackle and ends up kicking out the defensive end that’s lined up over the tight end.

• The left (backside) tight end cuts behind and blocks the left defensive tackle.

• The wingback receiving the ball takes a one-step motion in a 45-degree arch angle. He’ll receive the pitch between his second and third step and then aims for the right tackle’s inside hip.

Double Wing Passing Game

On average, Murphy calls on three to eight passing plays per game. Seventy percent of those are deep passes, with the remaining going over the middle and into the flat. Each pass play mirrors one of the running plays and is designed to punish defenses that become overly aggressive trying to stop the running game.
Murphy’s staff in the press box is watching closely to see if the safeties are coming up aggressively against certain plays or if a linebacker is vacating an area of the field. Once they identify a tendency, they’ll attack over the top.

The Secret to Stopping the Double Wing

There isn’t one.
But what you absolutely should not do, says Murphy, is scrap your entire defensive scheme in an attempt to match-up with the Double Wing. “Those are teams that we’ll usually score 50 points on,” he said, “because they came up with something on Sunday in the coaches’ office, try to install on Monday, practice it on Tuesday and Wednesday and their kids are just out of their element. They can’t think, they can’t hit, they can’t react.
“By the time our players are juniors and seniors, some of them have been running the offense for five years. When they face kids that just learned something this week and are out of their element, we absolutely kill them.”
Defenses that stay as close to their base as possible, with just slight adjustments to the alignment, generally have more success. “At least, they don’t give up a ton of points,” said Murphy.
A well-designed, sound blitz package also has been effective against the Double Wing, especially early in the season. “Come league play and playoff time, teams can blitz us all day,” explained Murphy. “We actually enjoy it, because our kids know the blocking scheme so well that it doesn’t matter if a defense changes its alignment at the last second or two guys blitz one hole.
“But in the beginning of the year, because you only have so much time to teach the basic alignments, especially in the first half, it has given us problems.”
One of the great aspects of football is that strategy can trump athleticism. The Double Wing is the perfect example. It’s not flashy like modern spread offenses, but it’s proven to be successful against bigger, faster and more-talented competition. That’s why coaches across the nation have joined Murphy in reaping the benefits of the Double Wing attack. p






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