If you caught the defense in the right look it was mathematically impossible for them to defend you: If you ran the three-level flood route against Cover 2, they had two guys (a corner and a safety) to defend three receivers and if you caught a Cover 3/4-under defense with your all-curl concept, it was easy pick’ins:Īll this has been detailed before, and if you can identify what coverage you are facing it is still better to run a true three-level vertical stretch or five-receiver horizontal stretch against the right coverage - if you get that right, there’s very little the defense can do. If the perfect pass play was the Holy Grail of modern football, then the triangle is its best personification to date and Walsh its Galahad.īut let’s take a step back to understand why the triangle stretch works, along with its negatives. The best vertical or horizontal stretches use more than two receivers, with three or more receivers being used in various “zone flood” routes. Moreover, Walsh often combined the two zone beaters - the horizontal and vertical stretch - with the third category, the man beating concept, into a single “triangle” read that also was designed to defeat man coverage. Walsh realized that you could combine the horizontal and the vertical stretch to create a kind of “new” stretch, though one made up of both of Gillman’s first two categories. But at some point - most notably with Bill Walsh’s 49ers - a “new” concept began emerging, though it wasn’t actually new at all but was instead a very clever twist on what Gillman had synthesized.

These three categories essentially made up the full panoply of choices for the passing game for, well, for a really long time. Examples include the mesh concept from the Airraid, bunch passes and option-routes.

Man or “object receiver” reads - These are not necessarily distinct from the above horizontal and vertical stretches, but the focus is on having a route or combination of routes that will defeat man-to-man coverage.

Horizontal stretches - These place two, three, four, or five receivers horizontally across the field or a portion of it to “stretch” defenders from left to right or right to left (or inside to out or outside to in).

Another name for these are high/low or hi/lo reads. Examples include the smash concept and the frontside flood concept (see here for a diagram and here for a video).

Vertical stretches - These place two or three receivers at different levels vertically up the field to “stretch” the defense.

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