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The 30 Stack vs the Wing T

In recent years, it’s been difficult to pick up a football coaching magazine, attend a football clinic, or visit a football coaching message board without hearing about the 30 Stack .

Three-man line defenses have become increasingly popular in high school and college football as a way to counter wide-open, 3, 4 and 5 receiver passing attacks, both as a base scheme and as component in a multiple-front Defensive package. What may come as a surprise is that some coaches view the 30 Stack as a way to defend the Wing T, as we learned when we visited the Megalinic/Jerry Campbell message board recently.

The thread was opened by coach LC, who asked..

“Just wondering what some of you guys use to defend against Wing-T or Run and Shoot offensives. If anybody has the ins and outs of purple coverage please let me know. ”

As expected, community members had a lot to say, including the comment below, from footballcoach36.


“We just played our first Wing-T team last week…we gave up 7 points on play that wasn’t run from wing-T they ran the spread option and the kid broke it for a 68 yard TD…those were the only points we gave up… ”

Let me preface this by saying our 3 stack linebackers are all fast and can run sideline to sideline as good as I’ve ever seen high school linebackers do it, and our Spurs (we call them dogs) also have great speed and are physical…

We shaded our nose guard to the strong side, and kept our ends head up the tackles…our tackles pinched into the B gaps the majority of the night and basically bubbled everything into the backfield to give our linebackers time to chase everything down…

our mike linebacker read the center- if the center blocked back on nose he filled the weak A RIGHT NOW to blow up the trap…if the center did anything else, he flowed…

we placed our spur to the strong side outside shoe of the wingback and when the wing blocked down he stepped down to reduce the LOS and took on everything with his inside shoulder to turn it back inside…our “Bats” or Sam and Will flowed and made tackles all night…also worked well on down…they didn’t run much Belly at all…

our backside Spur stayed home for counter criss-cross which we gave up a 40 yard run the first time we saw it because our spur got sucked inside and sealed off…after a good butt-chewing by me it didn’t happen again…

A couple of other excerpts from the comments include:

“we also at times walked our Bat up on the strong side and sent him off the edge… ”

and

“the thing i always remember when playing the Wing-T is that the lineman rules are Gap, down, Backer…so we tried to put people in gaps and put people down when we were going inside anyway to keep them off our linebackers as much as possible… ”

Looking for a complete book on the 30 Stack?

Check out this one from Jerry Campbell and Lyle Lansdell

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