The Wall Hawk's Smashmouth Football

 
Final score 35-14, Cameron Yoe over Wall Hawks. Details here.

The Wall High School Hawks varsity football team plays Cameron Yoe in AT&T Stadium in Arlington today at 5 p.m. for the state 2A Division I title. Wall has had a historic year, so I asked Gary Speck, one of the announcers during all of the games this year what makes Wall so good.

Wall runs the Flexbone offense, Speck said. The Flexbone is a modified Wishbone formation that, at its core, utilizes a triple option running attack. That means that the quarterback is flanked by the fullback and halfback and determines one of three variations of running the football against the defense, depending upon how the defense’s formation is lined up, or how the defense reacts after the ball is snapped.

The Wall quarterback reads the defense and chooses his option generally on-the-fly. The first option is to hand the ball off to the fullback who in turn will run the ball up the middle. If that option is not available, the quarterback runs parallel with the line of scrimmage and has the option to run up, or around the defense. Last, if the quarterback cannot find an opening, he will hand off (or toss) the football back to the halfback who will attempt to gain yardage.

The offensive line performs “zone blocking.” That means that rather than attempting to pile the entire defensive line up at the line of scrimmage, Wall’s offensive line will be selective on who they block, while other linemen are free to run up the field and block in the secondary.

The Flexbone is a fancy term that defines a modified Wishbone offense made famous during the 1970s and 1980s Southwest Conference football days. “It’s smash mouth football, like when Earl Campbell, or Eric Dickerson ran up and down the field,” Speck said.

The Flexbone offense is potent in Texas 2A football because it forces the defense to be very disciplined. Strict discipline is not necessarily a strong trait of a high school football team, though. Most of these kids play with more emotion than discipline. In the semi-finals against Eastland, Wall out-disciplined the opponent, earning a 40-28 win after a grueling 3-3 halftime tie. Wall just wore Eastland’s defense down.

The Flexbone is unique in Texas high school football today, where most teams, including San Angelo Central High School’s 5A team has adopted the spread offense (think Kliff Kingsbury, Texas Tech, or Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel).

At 2A schools, the depth chart of players is shallower and during practice, because most every school (including their own) is running the spread, the team’s defense only has the resources to practice defending against the spread offense.

Speck said that the Wall strategy is similar to what the Army and Navy college teams do. “The don’t have physically big players on the offensive line like the mainline Division 1 colleges like Alabama do, so they have to adapt, overcome and adjust with ingenuity and speed,” he said.

Nurturing a state championship football team requires more than pure talent and ingenious coaching. Speck suggests that in Wall, the boys start early, in the San Angelo YMCA football league. The crop of kids playing for the state championship today could field two teams with plenty of players to spare when they were younger playing for the YMCA league. In contrast, Christoval’s YMCA team would have to forfeit games because they couldn’t field 12 players for regularly scheduled league games.

What’s more? Speck said that even in the YMCA league, the grade school-aged children are learning the same plays the Wall High School Hawks are running today.

The Wall Hawks (15-0) vs. Cameron Yoe (14-1) starts at 5 p.m. today at AT&T Stadium in Arlington (Dallas Cowboys Stadium). The entire town of Wall is headed that way right now. Speck said that over 2,000 tickets have been sold. You can watch the game on Fox Sports Southwest on DirecTV.

San Angelo LIVE! will be live tweeting from the game, hashtag #WallHawks.

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