The spread formation also gives you good passing options on the edge (single-coverage fades, screens, bubble screens) that don’t require large amounts of practice time the way a full drop-back passing game does, but that you can’t get in a tight Wing-T setup.

When I was in college (DIII), we played a shotgun team that ran lots of power and counter, and a bit of zone read before it was hip to do so. That cemented to me that you can run a “real” misdirection rushing offense out of the gun.

I do agree it is the same ‘counter’ play, but with an extra blocker at the POA or offensive skill player the defense has to account for on the perimeter.

On another point, in 1995 everyone associated a ‘shot gun’ formation with a Roger Staubach type offense or ‘run and shoot’ that was pass heavy ala the Houston Oilers at the time. Not many (if any) incorporated a run philosophy with a counter scheme out of the shot-gun, that was the part of it that hit me.

The pro & college wildcat exists only as a package within a broader offense. If that were the primary formation the team used, you’d just call it shotgun. You call it “wildcat” or some such only because the player receiving the snap is different from the player they have receiving the snap otherwise.

I went from a dedicated delaware wing-t guy to a shot gun (dual threat – I get it) spread offense guy in about 5 seconds…”

I find your statement incongruous, since the play you describe sounds like a bona fide Wing-T counter play, just run out of the shotgun (drawn up on a board, it’s like Frazier is the halfback and they just removed the under-center QB from the action entirely. You must run quite a package, since I’ve seen very few spread offenses that were sophisticated in the run blocking (most are simple zone/I-formation blocking with the formation taking away defensive numbers).

But if you took Wing-T plays and moved them into a shotgun package, sounds like a good plan and more power to you. That’s exactly what Hugh Wyatt was doing when he invented the Wildcat package in the late 90′s – running his Wing-T-influenced Double Wing offense with a direct snap to deal with the fact his quarterback went down in practice.

What’s so interesting about football is how the “advances” do in cycles, combining old-but-new-again ideas with the latest stuff to make hybrid schemes that become novel themselves. And the same advances can be made independently across the country, for different reasons, evolving into very similar schemes but with different motivations.

This all the more sillifies the NFL pundits’ claim that there is a platonic “true offense” and the rest is just gimmicks.

I realize this is a serious case of splitting hairs and doesn’t take anything away from the Klosterman piece. However, when you spend so much time on a subject (no matter how esoteric it is) you want to set the record straight whenever possible.

At the risk of shameless self-promotion my e-mail address is joshuapaddock@hotmail.com, and if anyone is interested I’d be more than happy to send you a copy of my thesis or share my research. I’m thinking of expanding this for my master’s thesis and I would gladly welcome criticism from intellectual football fans like yourselves.

I went from a dedicated delaware wing-t guy to a shot gun (dual threat – I get it) spread offense guy in about 5 seconds… sort of like leaving your girlfriend of 4 years after one look from a girl in a bar! (or something… ??)

What a great game… looking forward to the future and more ‘disruptive innovations’.

One thing I’ll end with… the field’s always going to be 53.4 yds by 100 yds.. that’s not changing… so the concept of ‘spreading’ the field and leveraging the numbers that a dual threat ‘athlete’ accepting the snap in a shot-gun gives an offense will continue to lead the innovation.