The Wild Bunch: A Conflict-Theoretical Approach to Football Offense

For the football coach and/or athletic director looking for a winning edge for their program; for the fan who yearns to dig beneath the game-day blather of TV €œexperts€; for students of conflict theory who find themselves attracted to the American version of football because they sense far more strategic thought at work than with, say, soccer; this book is for you!

The Wild Bunch offense features €œmodular€ elements of some of the best-known football offensive systems of the past 50 years, and it does so in a way that maximizes deception and misdirection through what I call the €œunity of apparent intent€ €“ making one thing on offense look like another, and another, and another, long enough to confuse the defense and prevent the kind of swarming gang-tackling that the best defenses feature. These €œmodules€ include play series borrowed from the Air Raid passing attack, the Fly Sweep offense, the Bunch passing attack, and the Run & Shoot offense.

A long time in gestation, the elements of the Wild Bunch system were first shared over Internet coaching boards in the late 1990s, and the offense has been in use ever since in both North America and Europe. As a result of my €œday job€ as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, I have been able to clinic and install the Wild Bunch in five countries on three continents, as well as spreading its basic theory and premises to coaches in some 8-10 other countries.

The present volume represents a number of milestones for the Wild Bunch: First publication; first simplification and codification of its plays into four series; and above all, first working of the Wild Bunch offense into the larger framework of my professional and academic research on conflict avoidance, amelioration and resolution theory, or CAART. This last point has occasioned two major differences from previous collections of Wild Bunch plays which I have posted along the way to Internet coaching forums: First, an in-depth analysis of the strategic underpinnings of North American (American and Canadian) football; and following from that, a spirited defense of the game itself in the face of what appear to be concerted attacks on its very existence, starting with youth football, but aiming inexorably at the game in every form.

While other books have dealt with components of the Wild Bunch offense, none has put together its modular elements into the kind of seamless whole which can misdirect defenses at will and increase scoring opportunities for smaller and less-talented squads. Nor has any football book on a particular system gone into such detail on the strategic infrastructure of the game €“ into the €œWhy€ of offensive maneuvers, rather than simply the €œWhat€ and €œHow€. The great advantage of understanding why to call certain plays is, inter alia, to better know when to call them €“ when the opponent has been sufficiently deceived as to allow priceless scoring opportunities, no matter how superior they might appear to your squad on paper.