I was always told as a young coach that everything works in cycles. After many years of running a four wide receiver offense, I have in the last few years started using one, two, and sometimes three tight end’s in offensive packages, bringing me full circle from my beginnings in coaching where that was the norm. I must admit, I really like the advantages these personnel groupings give our offense. True, it gives you more defensive fronts to prepare for as opposed to the four wide receiver formations, but the positives far outweigh the negatives. This is true especially if you have a couple of versatile tight end’s that can play in different spots. We took our fullbacks and tight ends and made them one position group while using different personnel grouping names to get whatever combination of the two on the field we needed. The classic one running Back, two tight end formation of “Ace” still posses problems for defenses making them account for a lot of gaps.
There aren’t many offenses that use that formation right now which makes it somewhat unique. This is a very good run and pass formation (if your tight ends can stretch the field fairly well).
The ability to use two tight ends and get into “Wing” looks are also a big advantage.
You can run a multitude of run and pass concepts out of either of these “Wing” looks particularly if one of your tight ends has the ability to run routes and block. This gives you the ability to motion the tight end “off the ball” out to a spread or back into the backfield to give you some two-back runs. Again, we use any combination of a true tight end and/or fullback necessary for the play at hand. The key is to be mindful of any tendencies that you may develop with each personnel group.
We are fortunate enough to also have the ability to use these tight endss to line up in traditional spread formations.
Finally, we will use three of these tight ends/fullback combinations as another personnel group to get into a bunch/compressed formation 3 TE’sto run, pass, and use play-action.
As you can see, the possibilities of using these personnel groupings are endless. Conversely, using just four wide receivers has its limits, especially when trying to run the football.