Special Play of the Day – a free excerpt from my book Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense: An Evolution of Option Football. This is from the Chapter on The Zone Read.  Of course this just a snippet of what is explained in the book on the Zone Read Series.

The Zone Read

The Zone read was another Double Read Play we added to The Triple Gun Menu. It was not meant to be a “Core Play” but a play to use for Play Action Passes and RPOs (Though we didn’t call them that. But it was great with the Play Action Vertical Game)

When I first looked into going to the gun in the winter of 1999, I did not like the Zone Read. Though Northwestern and Tulane had done well with it, I thought it wasn’t a downhill play & seemed to be stopped by simple option defensive stunts like Squeeze and Scrape.

But when Coach Isernia approached me about looking at the Zone Read at The University of Charleston, we were looking at it as a complementary play to the Gun Triple, not a core play. So we experimented with it and liked it with 3 and 4 wide receiver sets.

Here are some of the benefits of using The Zone Read as a complement to the Gun Triple:

• Another play to hand the ball to a variety of playmakers.
• Very formation friendly.
• Very conducive for the 4 vertical Play Action Pass game.
• Simple blocking scheme which fits with “Smart Splits.”
• Gives the Hand Off Key a different look.
• Very Conducive to RPOs
• The Offensive Line uses the same techniques as Veer Blocking except in the opposite direction.
• The play was enhanced by “Smart Splits

Here’s a link to the book and a video overview:

 Tony DeMeo’s Triple Gun Offense: An Evolution of Option Football is available at Amazon .

https://amzn.to/3YIKFJ9