A BACK IN THE BACK FIELD AND 1 WING BACK ON THE OUTER LINE FACING THE QB.

A BACK IN THE BACK FIELD AND 1 WING BACK ON THE OUTER LINE FACING THE QB.

1999 I was the head coach of the Kodiak Lions youth football team. Despite my inexperience and in many cases outright ineptitude with offensive football, my players that year were such incredible athletes and football players that they rose above my blunders to go undefeated.

We didn't do it because of my offense. It was more in spite of my offense than anything else.

Before the season even ended I was already hard at work, promising myself that I would never again risk the effort and sweat of my players in an unprepared system. Searching the internet, I came across a number of references to an offensive set called the Double Wing. It seemed to be everything I was looking for.

Taking the excellent advice of Jack Reed, I ordered a book from www.amazon.com called The Toss~ A New Offensive Attack for High-Scoring Football by Jerry Vallotton. What I found within its hallowed pages was the offensive system of my dreams.

Power. Misdirection. Mechanical advantages. An effective passing scheme. It's all here, folks.

The father of the offense is Don Markham. In the early 1970's he began using the back side of the offensive line as lead blockers on his off tackle plays. In order to be successful with this technique, and eliminate penetration, he tightened the line splits (distance between his offensive linemen) to non-existent gaps. Since the 1970's, Coach Markham has racked up championship after championship, overseas and at home.

In the early eighties, another coach of great repute, Hugh Wyatt, was running a Wing-T based offense in Finland when he ran into the bulldozer that was the Don Markham Double Wing. In his video about the offense, Coach Wyatt says, "We'd never seen anything like it... We were beaten seventy-seven to nothing by Don Markham's team running this offense."

In case you aren't good at math, that's eleven touchdowns. Per game. On average.

Further adding to the record books, when Coach Markham came home he took the job as head coach at Bandon High School, in southern Oregon. The following season, after he won the state championship in his first year there, the state of Oregon's Football Association created the "Don Markham rule". This rule automatically ends a game when one team is ahead of the other by 45 or more points going into the second half of play!

I'm not finished, and neither was Coach Markham. In 1991 A team coached by Jerry Vallotton took over as the coaching staff of Bloomington High School and began using Coach Markham's system. The previous year, before Coach Vallotton arrived, the Bloomington varsity was 1-9. In 1992 They went undefeated, winning twelve in a row and securing a CFS Championship.

In 1994, Coach Markham's team demolished the national scoring record set in 1975 by Big Sandy High of Texas. Coach Markham's team scored 880 points in 14 games, and finished the season with a national championship. That's 62.86 points per game (or almost nine touchdowns per game.) These same kids had endured a nine-loss season the year before.

Currently, Tomales High School, where I am an assistant coach, runs the Double Wing offense, and posted eight straight years in the playoffs with it. We are a small school, with a student body of 245, yet we are able to routinely hold our own against schools with two to three times our population because of our ability to dominate a defense and control the clock.

Since I became interested in the Double Wing, I've researched it pretty extensively. I've discovered that there are two main "styles" of the offense. Jerry Vallotton's book, mentioned above, documents the Don Markham system pretty thoroughly. Coach Markham himself has a web site on which he now sells videotapes of his offense.

In my opinion, however, the best source of information on the Double Wing offense is Hugh Wyatt, who was mentioned above. After his sound thrashing at Coach Markham's hands, Coach Wyatt decided he just had to look into this offense. Bringing with him the misdirection knowledge of the Wing-T and the passing knowledge of his Run-and-Shoot days, Coach Wyatt was quick to discern the potential for confusing defenses inherent in this system. After running the offense himself for nearly two decades, and winning a number of championships of his own, Coach Wyatt decided to create and distribute his Dynamics of the Double Wing videotape series. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video of the plays must be worth a million.

This following playbook is part of my own Double Wing playbook. This is not the system we run at Tomales High, although there are similarities.

h ydfvhkl

HUH?Chris Keveloh

a wideout on each side

I have used the doublewing and singlewing for 12 year olds. 2009 we scored 156 points in eight games and 2010 scored 226 points in eight games. We were nearly run out of the league for "running up" scores. The league has a mercy rule, so we would let them catch up (de-activating the mercy rule) and then go again. Both of these systems are scoring machines.
My question is, how would either of these offenses do against a GOOD spread offense? Not youth level, but high school or even college. Any opinions?