Best-Of-The-Best Goal-Line Plays (23 pages, PDF)

Best-Of-The-Best Goal-Line Plays is the digitised edition of the printed Gridiron Strategies Special Coaching Report of the same name — 23 pages, delivered as a PDF with a searchable text layer and a bookmark for every play title. Inside the 10-yard line the field shrinks, most teams turn to man coverage, and a bad call costs you a score. The editors of Gridiron Strategies collected 58 goal-line plays from coaches around the country and printed each one as a full diagram alongside a written summary of player assignments and quarterback reads, so a call can be lifted straight into your own playbook. In the report’s own words, these are “real, tried-and-true, goal-line plays from some of the most successful goal-line offenses from around the country.” It is a collection of individual plays contributed by 58 coaches, not one system installed from front to back.

What’s inside

• Goal-line pass plays — 38 plays (pages 2 to 14). Sprint-outs, half-rolls, naked boots and five-step drops aimed at the man coverage teams play on the goal line: legal pick and rub combinations, mesh routes told never to stop running, play-action off the power, blast, jet sweep and stretch, a triple-option pass, and a shotgun answer to the seven-man blitz from Jim Caldwell, head coach at Greenville High School, Greenville, Ohio. Several entries are flagged as two-point conversion calls, and one — “29 Special” — is tagged specifically for a 6-5 goal-line defense.
• Goal-line running plays — 15 plays (pages 15 to 21). Power, counter, counter dive, power toss, belly, veer, weak-side iso blast, the wham, a fan-blocked power out of the Power I and a shotgun sweep, each with blocking rules laid out by position. Sam Vaiana, head coach at Highland High School, Palmdale, Calif., contributes “Bull Right, 29 Power” and reports his team was 43 for 43 in red-zone conversions with it.
• A run-game article by Paul Dunn, run-game coordinator and offensive line coach at the University of Kentucky (page 15). Treating the goal line as four-down territory from the 6-yard line, a 10-minute goal-line segment practised Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and finished with a fourth-quarter period, getting heavy with extra linemen and tight ends, and the six run plays in his goal-line segment: option, isolation, power off-tackle, toss sweep, quarterback sneak and fullback run. Passes in that segment: none. He quotes Woody Hayes — “It doesn’t matter what else you do if you can’t produce points in the red zone.”
• Goal-line specials — 5 plays (pages 22 and 23). A halfback pass off jet motion from Gary Phillips, head coach at Great Valley High School, Malvern, Pa.; the “Annexation Of Texas” fake field goal, in which the holder spins the ball laces-out and then tosses it over his shoulder to the kicker, contributed by Jo Jo Reyes of Roosevelt High School, Fresno, Calif.; “Coaches Nightmare,” a back-to-the-line throw over the head to a tight end in jump-ball position; a two-handed lob to a tall split end; and Chris Kirkpatrick’s “Irish” Special, which splits the formation with the quarterback, fullback and receivers out near midfield.
• A diagram and a written summary for every play. Each entry names the contributing coach and school, diagrams the player movement in the end-zone area, and explains assignments and the quarterback’s read progression in the coach’s own words. Six entries carry two diagrams — a base play plus its complement, boot or change-up.
• Three tabbed sections you can jump between. The printed report used a coloured tab at the page edge for pass plays, running plays and specials; the PDF keeps those tabs and adds bookmarks for all 58 play titles, so you can go straight to a call by name.

Who it is for

High school offensive coordinators and head coaches who want a bank of goal-line and short-yardage calls to shop from, rather than another whole system to install. The contributors are almost all high school head coaches and coordinators, so the plays are built for high school personnel and practice time; youth and small-college staffs will find most of them well within reach, and Paul Dunn’s article gives the college view of how a goal-line segment is organised and practised.

Because the 58 plays come from 58 different programmes, the formations vary widely — I-formation and Power I, double tight, wing and full-house backfields, trips, bunch, twins, unbalanced, five-wide and shotgun — so it suits a coach who wants to find a goal-line answer that fits what he already runs. Quarterback coaches get read progressions written out play by play; offensive line coaches get the blocking rules for the run section. It is a digitised print report, not video, and not a single-system playbook.