Three bodies in eight yards, on purpose

A triangle eight yards wide

Three receivers form a tight triangle on the left. The point man is on the line of scrimmage, thirteen yards in from the left sideline. Two wings stand two and a half yards behind him, one four yards to his outside and one four yards to his inside, so the whole cluster occupies about eight and a half yards of width and two and a half of depth.

The rest of the formation is ordinary, deliberately: a centre on the ball, a quarterback four yards back, a running back five yards to his right, and a single receiver alone on the far right side of the field.

What a bunch does to man coverage

Seven-a-side flag is mostly man coverage, because there is no pass rush worth the name and a zone played by four defenders leaves too much grass. Man coverage means three defenders have to stand somewhere near these three receivers, and there is not room for three defenders in eight yards.

So they get in the way of each other. That is the mechanism and it is entirely legal: the receivers run their routes, the defenders collide trying to follow, and one of the three comes out clean. Send the point man inside and the two wings out, and the defenders on the wings must choose whether to go over or under the traffic before they know what the routes are. Whichever they pick, one of them is a step behind.

The cost is that the three start close together, so for the first second of the play they share one defender's leverage. A bunch that does not separate immediately is three receivers inside a single throw, and one defender can take two of them.

Drawing it properly

• Cross exactly two of them. Three crossing routes out of a bunch is chaos your own quarterback cannot read. Pick two, and give the third a route straight up the field to hold somebody in place.
• Animate the collision. Put three defenders in man and play it through. The moment two of them meet is the moment the play works, and it is worth watching at full speed.
• Move the bunch off the sideline. Slide the triangle five yards toward the middle and see which route gained room and which lost it.

Open it in the designer, draw the two routes that cross and the one that does not, then share the animation with the squad before they run it.