BYU has scored 2 TDs tonight on trick plays (a throwback to the QB and a WR reverse), been meaning to ask then, if any team has succeeded with a total trick play playbook, weird formations, constant reverses and flea flickers and such, the gridiron version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Asking mainly about college teams, as I would bet that a high school team somewhere has attempted this. I know NFL coaches are too conservative to give this a shot. Would the rewards outweigh the risks? It would require a TON of drill and a team of supremely talented players who have enough sense to know when to hold onto the ball when the play blows up in their face.
I don’t think any college football team ever has done this except the Boise State Broncos using a bit more trickery than other teams, but nobody ever making it the full central focus of the team. If any NCAA team had ever had an offense primarily based off of razzle dazzle, that offense would be extremely famous by now. Everyone would know about it.
Agree. First team to spring to mind. And the Blue Turf! 
Welp, BYU tried another trick play, a fake punt on 4th and 8 from their own 25, and just do a straight run by the punter right up the gut for no gain.
Exactly this.
Trick plays work in small doses, because they’re based on taking advantage of the other team expecting a traditional play, and responding in a certain way when the play begins to unfold. They’re often risky plays, prone to failure, if the defense actually sniffs them out.
An offense that is built around primarily “razzle dazzle” plays loses the advantage of surprise which makes trick plays work in the first place.
But it may make more traditional plays work better, by forcing the defense to always suspect the trick play.
There are even plays that can be called fake-fakery. One of them is the fake flea-flicker, where a running back takes the handoff, then pretends to pitch the ball back to the QB, but then instead keeps the ball and runs upfield.
Perhaps. But that’s a different scenario than what you posited in your OP:
You noted that:
Most Division I / FBS college coaches are going to be too conservative to try it, too, IMO. It’s a strategy of consistently running high-risk plays, and if it doesn’t work a high percentage of the time, a coach running that kind of offense is going to very quickly not be a college head coach.
However, this all reminds me of a coach named Kevin Kelley, who was extremely successful as a head coach for an Arkansas high school team (nine state championships in 18 seasons). He employed several unconventional strategies:
- He almost never punted
- He almost always went for two-point conversions
- He always kicked onside kicks rather than deep kickoffs, unless his team had a comfortable lead
- His offensive playcalling focused on midrange passes, which most coaches would consider to be too low-percentage to use often
Kelley made the jump to college ball in 2021, becoming the head coach at Presbyterian (a Division I FCS school – in essence, the “lower tier” of Division I football). He used the same coaching approach at Presbyterian, and in his first game, they set a ton of offensive records, but couldn’t make that success last: his offense finished near the top of FCS, but not punting and relying on onside kicks left his defense to defend short fields way too often, and they finished dead last in FCS in points allowed. They finished the season at 2-9, and Kelley stepped aside, then went back to coaching in high school.
Trick plays have more points of failure. You want to lateral three times then advance? 3 places to go wrong, not just 1 in the more typical handoff and run or lateral and run.
They also tend to spend a bunch of extra time behind the line of scrimmage before starting to advance the ball.
So they’re going to succeed bigly or fail bigly.
The extra time in the backfield is tolerable if you can stop the rush long enough. Fat chance of that at the upper echelons of college teams or the NFL. HS or bush league college? Sure.
Yeah. The razzle dazzle trick plays are rare because they’re long developing and have a high cost for failure.
There are trick plays that are so common you don’t think of them as tricks. Play-action passes, screen passes, draw plays, etc.
I think to some degree, razzle-dazzle offenses are highly dependent on the era. The difference between unorthodox and razzle-dazzle is probably dependent on how “out there” it is.
I mean, in the 90s, the Run & Shoot as run by the University of Houston among others, was something of a trick offense in its era, in that it was one back and pass-focused as its default mode of operation. Similarly, in 2012, the no pause snaps that teams like Texas A&M used (they’d line up and snap as soon as the ref blew the whistle, often catching the defense out of position or off-guard) was something of a trick offense as well. Or even the option when it was first introduced, I imagine, was something of a trick offense back then as well.
I don’t know about razzle-dazzle though; they were all extremely successful at their outset, because nobody had seen anything like that before. Nowadays, they teach everyone how to defend against them, which is why you virtually never see the option in pro football
Another example is the no-huddle spread offense that Northwestern used in the early 2000s with quarterback Zak Kustok. They didn’t originate the concept, but they executed it successfully and other teams would eventually follow suit.
If you want to go WAY back, St. Louis University threw the first forward pass in 1906. That season the team went 11-0 and outscored its opponents 407-11.
The next season they went 7-3, then 6-2-2, then 3-5. The razzle-dazzle wore off pretty quickly.
I remember there was a gimmicky high school offense that was popular about 15 years ago. I don’t remember what it was called at the time but the posting on Reddit that I found called it PODS. The team essentially puts a lineman wide out on either side of the formation to block for quick screens and outside plays, backs and receivers get ambiguous numbers so the defense has difficulty ID’ing personnel, and everything is quick, sideline to sideline. It was popular and copied for a few years but it seems to have disappeared as far as I can tell.