Five players, three routes, nothing to block with

Centre — 1 of 5

American football · Formation · 5 of your players

Flag 5v5 spread is the smallest complete formation in football. Five players, three routes, and an arithmetic problem the defence has to solve with one defender to spare.

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Five players, three of them running routes

A centre on the line snaps it, a quarterback stands four yards behind him, and three receivers spread as far as the field allows. One is alone on the left, nineteen yards from the centre. The other two are right: a split end near the sideline, twenty-one yards out, and a slot receiver nine yards inside him and a yard off the line.

That is everybody. Nobody blocks, nobody carries the ball out of the backfield, and no defender on the field is doing anything except covering somebody or rushing the quarterback.

What five a side changes

Five-a-side flag is a passing game with a run bolted onto it, and the arithmetic is brutally simple. Rush one and four defenders cover three receivers, so there is a spare. Rush nobody and five cover three, and the quarterback has time he cannot use. Rush two and three defenders cover three receivers, and somebody is one-on-one — which is the whole game.

So the job of the formation is to make the spare defender useless. Spreading three receivers across the full width does exactly that: a spare defender in the middle of the field is nowhere near any of the three, and a spare defender who commits to one side has left a one-on-one on the other.

The two on the right are the pair. Nine yards apart is close enough for the slot to clear space for the split end and far enough that one defender cannot stand between them and bother both.

Getting more out of it

Name the isolated receiver every time. The lone man on the left is your one-on-one. Draw a play where he is the first read and a play where he is the decoy, and make the two look identical for two seconds.
Use the two-man side. Draw a slot fade with the outside man clearing inside, then the reverse. Two receivers and one concept is most of a five-a-side playbook.
Move the centre. In most rule sets he is eligible the moment the ball is snapped. Give him a route and count the defenders again.

Open flag 5v5 spread in the designer, set the width your league plays on, and redraw the splits until the picture matches the pitch.