Excerpt from “Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense…”
This is an excerpt from my book Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense: An Evolution of Option Football. It’s about one of the Coaches that influenced my thinking of offensive football. In putting together the Triple Gun, I had many influences that I try to cover in my book. I try to give you the ideas I got from these influencers. Joe Restic opened up the world of exotic formations to me. Here’s the story..
The Joe Restic Influence. Joe Restic was the Head Football Coach at Harvard while I was at Penn and Coach Gamble considered him an offensive genius. So I rounded up all the Harvard Films I could and spent an hour everyday studying Joe Restic’s Multi-Flex Offense. It was a Defensive Coordinator’s nightmare. He used a trillion different formations, and it was near impossible for the Defense to determine which receivers were eligible and which were ineligible prior to the snap of the ball. As a result, there were receivers wide open because someone didn’t think he was eligible. To tell you the truth, I don’t think the refs knew who was eligible on some plays. Add to the confusion were shifts and motion and every DC in the Ivy League packed a bottle of “Pepto” and a package of Tums when they played Harvard.
After hours of study, I decided, Coach Restic basically ran the Wing T, Buck Sweep Series: Sweep, Trap and Waggle Pass. But with all the formation recognition issues those were the only plays he needed. For example, he ran Wingover Waggle with the TE being ineligible then came back with Tackles Over with the TE being backside and eligible and then used 4 offensive linemen and 2 TEs, but one was eligible and one wasn’t.
I decided I was going to add weird formations to the Multi-Bone. The only difference was that instead of the Buck Sweep Series, we would feature the Triple Option.
This was the forerunner of The Exotic Sets that we featured in the 80s and from then on.
Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense: An Evolution of Option Football is available in Paperback at Amazon .
This video explains it further :