Few Plays Many Ways vs Many Plays Few Ways

A conversation with a coaching friend recently brought something to the front of my mind: the difference between a “many plays, few ways” offense and a “few plays, many ways” offense. He’s leaning into the former this season, built around talent he doesn’t have to scheme around — he can just get the ball to good players in space and let them go to work.

Plenty of coaches have success running a large volume of plays, each designed to win a specific matchup or exploit a specific tendency. I don’t doubt the results. What I question is what’s actually producing them — scheme, talent, or an expectation that the defense across from you isn’t going to be disciplined enough to stop it.

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

Anytime I watch an offense built around volume — a long menu of plays where each one wins on its own terms — I find myself asking the same question: is this winning because of the scheme, or is it winning because the players executing it are simply better than the players defending it?

That’s not a rhetorical jab. It’s a real distinction, because the two produce very different outcomes against different competition. A scheme that requires elite talent to function is not a bad scheme, but it’s not a transferable one either. It’s a strategy that works because of who’s running it, not because of how it’s designed. A lot of offenses get credit for being “multiple” or “explosive” when really what’s happening is that good players are bailing out a system that would look very different with an average roster.

Last year, local media said we would be lucky to win two games. Those same writers ended up voting us as high as 6th in the state in our classification en route to a 9-3 record. My starting offensive line last season weighed less than 1,000 pounds combined, our running back was a senior in his first year at the position, and our FB/TE was a freshman thrown in after an injury to a senior early in the season. We ran wide zone, power, counter, and duo — four concepts — against every front we expected to see, and we hit 2,000 yards on the ground because every one of those players knew exactly what to do, every time, regardless of what the defense showed us. That was my fifth year in a row rushing for 2,000 yards, and it has been done at three different schools in that span.

Execution is the one variable that holds up against anyone.

Why Volume Hides the Real Answer

The issue with a large volume of plays is that it makes it very difficult to know which variable is actually responsible for success. If you’re running 20 different concepts and winning, is it because all 20 are well-designed? Or is it because your skill players are good enough to make 12 of them work despite mediocre design,?

Another factor is the assumption or expectation of a defensive deficiency. If the gameplan depends on the other side not lining up correctly, not being physical enough to hold up, or not having seen enough of what you’re doing to recognize it quickly, that’s not a scheme advantage. That’s a bet on the opponent’s weakness. And bets like that work right up until you play someone who is actually disciplined, typically in big moments and season-defining games.

What Execution-First Football Looks Like

I’d rather build a season around a small number of concepts that I can verify work regardless of the variable in front of us — talent level, scheme familiarity, or discipline. Over the last 6 weeks since the start of spring ball, we drilled our core run game against every front we are likely to see this season: even fronts shaded both directions, 3-4 Tite front, and 3-3 stack. This past week, I position-swapped my offensive linemen on the whiteboard — tackles to guard, guards to tackle — and every starter could still tell me the assignment at a spot that wasn’t even his.

That’s the kind of preparation that doesn’t rely on hoping the defense makes a mistake. It relies on making sure my players are right regardless of what the defense does. This past season was my first as a defensive coordinator. We were the smaller team on the field in all 12 of our games and still pitched four shutouts. Two teams accounted for over half the points scored against us on the season. With them, we gave up 18 points per game. Without them, that number drops below 10. The deciding factor wasn’t scheme exotic enough to confuse anyone — it was that our players executed their rules in all three phases at a higher rate than the opponent executed theirs.

That’s the whole case for fewer plays, run more ways. When you strip volume out of the equation, you remove the variable that’s hardest to verify and hardest to repeat — talent, or a defense’s unpreparedness — and you’re left with the one variable that’s actually yours to control every single week: whether your players know exactly what to do, and whether they can do it against anyone.

That’s what I’m all about here at Wide Zone Warriors — on Substack, YouTube, and X. I know content has been slower than usual since releasing The Shanahan-McVay Zone Run Manual. My one-month-old was diagnosed this week with a milk allergy and bad reflux. We didn’t realize it at first, but over the last month of feeding him, he’s been so uncomfortable that it’s tied his neck and back up in knots too. Combined with an extremely active 4-year-old and summer football workouts, there hasn’t been much time for anything beyond getting this weekly article out.

Hopefully having those answers now, along with two weeks off for dead period, helps us get him into a routine and gets me back to creating more regularly. In the meantime, there’s still a large backlog worth digging into — more breakdowns of running one play many ways here on Substack, the offensive system video install series for founding members, and a full library of videos covering just about every offensive football topic on YouTube.

The start of dead period here in Tennessee means the season is right around the corner. I hope you’re as excited as I am! Thanks for reading and being here for it.

Coach Davidson