Using it as your base or change of pace O?
Would love to hear more and see some of this O.
Thanks
The R&S offense was basically invented to allow a small, weak team, to keep up in scoring with wishbone. In fact, no offense probably contributted more to the demise of the wishbone than the R&S. If the R&S team kept up with the wishbone team on the scoreboard, it was almost certain to score last and win the game as it only needed about 1:30 of time to score versus the 4+ minutes of the wishbone. The WB team would simply run out of time.
But, once the wishbone disappeared, so did the R&S. The R&S had two problems:
1) Third and 2 was often a passing down.
2) The same fast, small kids that were running circles around those big, strong, slow guys on offense, when they had to go over on defense, were themselves run over by those same big, strong, slow guys.
When you read the manual, you'll see me address problem #2 right off. In a 150 pound league, most of my players weighed 70 to 90 pounds when I came up with this offense. These kids were not going to stop ANYBODY in the league from scoring. Our only chance was to try and keep up. In that regard, it worked. We scored on everybody we played and we moved the ball FAR and FAST.
But that brings us back to problem #1. Although we always succesfuly ran the ball on third and 1 or 2 yards to go using this playbook, NCAA teams running R&S had a bitch of running on 3rd and 1 or 2. Many passed. And here lay the weakness. Because, while we got the same 67% pass completions they did, that did not mean we completed every two passes out of three. We kept track of completions and incompletions in practice (We usually ran about 60 plays a night) and, while at the end of practice we had completed 40 out of 60 passes we had periods of throwing three incomplete passes
in a row. This didn't just happen once in a practice. It would happen THREE TIMES in a practice. Other times we would complete 8-11 in a row and this made the stats average 67% at the END of every practice.
We ran "no huddle" (why bother to huddle?). So if we got off 60 plays in a game, according to this stat, we punted THREE TIMES. Now we never actually punted three times in any game but, if we had, and if the other team always scored on our defense, we'd have lost by three TD's.
If this happened in a game -
And it happened in all our practices - we'd lose ALL OUR GAMES.
But we didn't lose all our games because, while we did, indeed punt once or twice, the other teams did not always score even though they should have. The other teams experienced two problems in scoring on us:
1) Since our kids were always in every game, they had incentive to stop the other team. They all went in for the kill - even the chickens. Instead of having a "dead last" defense, we looked average on "D" (Pretty good considering what we had.).
2) Some opposing offenses went into panic when confronted by the speed and ease with which we scored (Zip! Zip! Zip! TD!). They began to try and match us timewise in scoring and couldn't do it. However, not enough teams panicked to let us get to the playoffs (We came close).
The advantage to this offense is that, given a team of undersized runts, you can stay in a game with ANYBODY. But now you need a DEFENSE for those same undersized runts that WOrKS for when you do punt.
I never found such a "D". Apparently no one else has either or this offense would have appeared in Florida for the Pop Warner championships by now.
But, if you know you're undersized and know you're going to get beat, this IS the offense to use. You will look good. Your team will look good. And when you face the #1 team in the league with all its studs at LBer, you'll play RIGHT WITH THEM.
