It can be surprising how much the game of football stays consistent. This is regardless of the age of your players or the type of football you are playing. Take man coverage for instance. If you are a flag football offensive coach and you are getting a heavy dose of man coverage, you should be dialing up crossing routes just like they do in NFL on Sundays. One of the best ways to do that is to call these crossing routes from a flag football bunch formation.
A flag football bunch formation gives the defense problems as soon as the ball is snapped. They have some decisions to make about how to handle the routes that all come spraying at them in a split second. If your flag football offense is playing fast and run your flag football players run disciplined routes, the defense will have their hands full defending you. A flag football defense will have to choose if they are going to play man coverage or if they are going to try to zone off the receivers' releases.
The rubs or picks that are created with crossing routes give flag football defenses, who major in man coverage ,a lot of trouble. This especially true if the flag football defense does not know how to fight through the rubs. In order to defend crossing routes when playing man coverage, defenders need to play at different levels from the line of scrimmage so they do not run into one another. Most flag football defenses don't work on this enough to be good at it.
The alternative for a flag football defense is to play some type of zone coverage. When they choose to do this, they now have a different problem on their hands. The defense has to work hard at trading off crossing routes. All it takes is for a slight communication problem for the flag football offense to have a receiver running across or down the field uncovered.
For all of the reasons above, flag football bunch formations should be part of your gameplan. You will find that bunch formations are effective vs man coverage and zone defenses. In fact, as a flag football coach, you should be even quicker to get to bunch formations. Here's why. When you coach flag football, your center is often eligible. You can now create a bunch set with your snapper as the middle player in the bunch.
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This allows you to create similar rubs and picks that you get with an extended flag football bunch formation. Here at FirstDown PlayBook we like this because it also gets your center involved with the passing game. The center is an often neglected target in flag football. You can now have two types of flag football bunch formations. One as an extended bunch and other bunch formations that include your snapper.