Dordt University Head Coach Joel Penner firmly believes that you must throw the football in order to win games.
One of the reasons that his program is able to have so much success doing so is because of the foundation that they’ve laid in the run game, averaging 5.6 yards per carry in 2023 with the Triple Gun offense!
Because of the success that they’ve had on the ground, naturally defenders can become extremely nosy trying to slow down this dominant ground attack. That’s why today we’re going to talk about some answers that Coach Penner’s offense uses to keep the defense honest and take advantage of chunk plays when they’re not!
Learn all of Coach Joel Penner’s option secrets in our latest release: The Dordt Offense – The Complete Series
Play Action Screen Wrinkles
Coach Penner’s first answer to defenses that aggressively defend his rushing attack is to take advantage of play action passes. One of Dordt’s favorite ways to do this is by using screen game concepts that Dordt also utilizes as RPOs.
The reason that Dordt uses the same screen concepts for their PAP and RPO games is because by calling the play as a PAP concept instead of an RPO, it guarantees the result that you’re going to get with the ball traveling through the air against great pass looks.
This process of play calling allows the offense to create two layers of play calling with productive plays that sets the defense up to get burned with one extremely simple wrinkle.
Below is an example of a wrinkle being tagged on to one of Dordt’s simple two man screens from their half-field PAP game.
What makes a half-field PAP concept different than a regular PAP concept is that you’re never going to ask your QB to go through his progressions across the entire field with a half-field concept.
Instead, the field is divided into two sections and the QB is only going to be concerned with the action going on to the most favorable side.
In this example, the defense allocates a heavy amount of their bodies in the box, which leaves 2 over 2 to the half-field side of the formation.
Because Dordt has already ran their two-man smoke screen in this game, the secondary defenders come downhill aggressively toward the receiver selling the screen, which allows the other receiver to run right by them and get WIDE OPEN.
This is just one of Coach Penner’s simple play calling wrinkles that is so complimentary to the other layers in his playbook and makes the concepts so much more effective when used together properly!
Learn all of the details that you need to master the Gun Triple Offense today with The Dordt Offense: The Complete Series
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