Building blocks of X's and O's: The critical leverage point on the football field

Football is richly complicated for all of its tactics and back and forth trench warfare. That also makes it easy to misunderstand on a fundamental level.

For my last column, I took inspiration from watching 8-10 year olds try to make “tackles” at a flag football camp to discuss the art of defensive leverage. I’ll actually have more on that in a future column.

Defenses are always designed to work in concert, like a pack of wolves cornering a caribou or a pride of lions trying to separate a weaker gazelle from the rest of the herd. The alpha defenders who excel at flying in to make the actual tackle are important, but if the rest of the unit isn’t setting things up for them their odds of successfully bringing down prey when the prey is an ultra athletic receiver or running back with a two-way go in space…are not good.

There are a number of underlying principles which offenses are utilizing in order to create space for their skill players to avoid being cornered with the alpha safety or linebacker bearing down on them with bad intentions.

But…I must reiterate the central point of offense which is all too often lost as everyone fixates on the yellow line on the screen. That white line which only comes into the screen as the offense advances down the field.