Unveiling the Single Wing: A Historical Analysis of Football’s Strategic Roots

Before the forward pass was a staple, football was a game of strategic deception and brute force.

And no system did it better than the single wing.

It's the offense that made legends out of tailbacks and turned line of scrimmage into a high stakes chess match.

Tonight we're going to explore this early offensive strategy and what it does in today's game as well.

We're talking about the wildcat, the spread offense and more coming up on Pigskin Dispatch.

Today we're exploring an offensive scheme that you might only associate with youth football or some trick plays in the wildcat, but it's a bedrock of American football history and one of the first schemes that really set football apart from other sports and put a little bit of deception into it.

But before we get into that, we have to understand a little bit what football was like in the late 19th century.

And Timothy Brown of football archaeology joined us back a few years ago to tell us about how football gained its tradition of getting one player in particular, the ball at the snap.

If you think about even rugby today, the guy that we might consider the quarterback, the guy who gets the ball, you know, they're having the scrum and they're using their feet to kick the ball back to that person, then he picks it up and then he tosses it to somebody else.

Well, when football began, they did exactly the same thing because they were playing rugby.

And then even as they started, you know, going with the rule of possession and downs and, and all of that, they still were doing fundamentally the same thing.

The center snapped the ball with his foot and you know, the ball is laying on its side.

He put his foot on top of it or put his foot in front of it and healed it back or rolled, you know, put his.

Either way, he rolled, rolled the thing back.

And so the ball was coming back unpredictably.

And so the quarterback, just like the guy in rugby, was kind of squatting behind, you know, foot or two behind the center, and he'd pick the ball up and toss it to somebody else to run with it.

And initially there's a great photo of, of Henry Lewis, who's an all American center at Harvard.

You see him snapping with his hand, but he's got the ball on its side.

So when they first started snapping the hand, they were still doing just like they did with the feet, they rolled it on its side back to the quarterback.

So the quarterback stayed in more or less same position.

As that rugby guy.

By the time that the 20th century rolled around, football was a brutal smash mouth game of mass play.

And players were literally picking up the ball carrier and dragging him forward.

Enter Glenn Pop Warner, the legendary coach of the Carlisle Indian School.

A few years ago we had biographer of Warner, Jeff Miller on to tell us a little bit about Warner and the single and double wings that he created.

He developed a single wing and eventually a single wing becomes the format, the standard formation for every, every team except, you know, Chicago Bears, okay, But you know, for the next 15 years it's, it's pretty much the, the go to formation.

And then he also invented this, the double wing.

So the single wing has one wingman out on the side, usually to the right.

With a double wing you have wingmen on both sides and it's more, it's more versatile, can run to either, either way very easily.

Where if you run the single wing, whatever side you put the wing on is usually the side you're going to with a double wing, you don't know.

So that, that again was a big

deal for the single wing.

Warner needed a way for his smaller, faster Carlisle players to compete against the massive brutalising teams of the era.

Warner originally called it the Z formation or Formation A.

So what made the single wing so revolutionary?

First, it featured an unbalanced offensive line, meaning that there were more linemen on one side of the center than the other.

And it created a massively strong side, allowing the, the offense to overwhelm the defense at the point of attack with the double team blocks and trap blocks.

But the real magic happened in the backfield.

You didn't have a modern cornerback quarterback dropping back to pass.

Instead you had four backs that could both.

Any one of them could throw the ball, any one of them can hand off, any one of them can run and they.

The star of the show was the tailback, though the tailback sort of lined up deepest in the backfield to receive a direct snap from the center.

And to run this offense successfully, your tailback had to Be a triple threat, meaning he could pass, he could run, he could kick the ball effectively.

And Pop Warner built a scheme around this, you know, especially a man named Jim Thorpe, who's perhaps the greatest athlete of all time.

The tremendous success of the single wing wasn't just about the raw power.

It was built on the deception and misdirection that the players created by their actions.

You know, in the early nineteen teens, when, you know, the Notre Dame box was getting big and you know, there was a rule change regarding who could, you know, who could run with the ball.

The first guy receiving the center, the snap, center could now run, run with the ball.

And so they start snapping back to the fullback or halfback in the backfield.

And so the, the whole single wing offense and you know, the Carlisle formation and all that kind of stuff was coming into play.

So there were a lot of times at this point where the quarterback never even touched the ball.

And a lot of times he would stay in the same position.

Now sometimes you just move a position or two.

There's other times he'd stay in and get the ball.

You know, it's a lot more about a fake and, or just a lot of it to change them up a little bit.

Then the single wing allowed any of the four backs to run, pass, block, and it birthed the spinner series where the fullback would receive the snap spin 360 degree and fake handoffs to the tailback or wing back crossing in front of them, leaving the defense completely blind and, and really misconceived on who was really actually getting the ball.

But it also featured buck collateral series where the fullback would fake a plunge into the line, drawing into linebackers or what was not the other linebacker, but the center of the line, and then fake the plunge and toss quick lateral to the quarterback or the wing back who would run around the end.

There was so much that you could do, but just handing off and, and faking the handoffs and a lot of misdirection in the backfield was really the main success of the single wing offense.

But the one problem was, like we alluded to earlier, you sort of knew where it was going to.

It was usually going to that power side where you had the wing too, and defenses had to contend with it.

And they did.

And that's why what brought on the, the double wing of Pop Warner just a few years later.

But as the Single wing spread.

Incredible innovators put their own genius spin on it, you know.

General Bob Nayland Tennessee used the balance line, introduced a side saddle quarterback which the quarterback stood perpendicular to line of scrimmage to hide the ball and execute lightning fast fakes and even line up, maybe not even under center.

And Fritz Chrysler at Michigan added pre snap shifts in motion to completely scramble defensive alignments.

Jock Sutherland a pit created the Sutherland single wing, bringing the wing back into the backfield to create a dominant weak side running attack.

And even Pop Warner himself evolved the scheme that creating that double wing by splitting out the second wing back to balance the attack.

And for nearly 40 years, the single wing was the undisputed king of football.

Producing legends like Red Grange, Bronco Nagurski and Heisman winner Tom Harmon.

But all the great empires fall, even the single wing offense.

The football itself had slowly evolved from a round melon like shape into a streamlined prolate spheroid making it much easier to throw tight spirals.

And enter Clark Shaughnessy.

Shaughnessy modernized the T formation which placed the quarterback directly under center.

Yes, the T formation was the undoing of the single wing as the dominant offense.

But it didn't make the single wing totally disappear.

The failure of the single wing wasn't that it stopped working, but it was simply it was outpaced by the specialization.

The new tee formation allowed the quarterback to drop back quickly and survey the whole field and hit receivers in stride.

And coaches found the single wings direct snaps and complex backfield blocking too slow to a modern passing game.

Ucla, Tennessee and Princeton.

But the era of the triple threat tailback had ended.

But did the single wing truly fail?

As legendary Denison coach Keith Piper said, there is no way to improve on football beyond the unbalanced single wing.

It just went out of style.

In truth, the ghost of Pop Warner's master's piece is still on the field.

And every single weekend.

The pulling guards a trap blocking the play action.

Passes that dominate on Sundays were all born in the single wing offense.

And when you see a modern offense run a wildcat formation, you know, that's when in the NFL you see the quarterback, starting quarterback go over as a wide out and one of the tailbacks or halfbacks is taking a direct snap.

Well, that is a form of the single wing.

Now you're watching the exact items that Jim Thorpe ran over a century ago.

The single wing wasn't just a formation, it was a crucible that forged modern football.

We, we thank you for joining in and, and learning a little bit about this single wing offense.

We're going to get into some more of these offensive developments and the evolution of the football game here in the coming weeks here on Pigskin Dispatch.

And don't make sure you check our regularly scheduled programming, including we're going to have 32 straight days of Ed Cleese and I talking about the draft, the draft history.

Not going to be doing mock drafts.

We're talking draft history.

32 straight days starting on March 22, which is 32 days before the draft.

And we're going to talk about position selection number 32 in the history of that all the way to number one on draft day.

Till next time, everybody have a great gridiron day.