Youth Football Pirate Stunt & More


By FirstDown PlayBook on Aug 17, 2023
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If your youth football team sits in a base defense long enough, a seasoned offensive coordinator they will expose you. It’s not that you or your players are doing anything wrong. It’s just that if they know your defense they should be able to attack it with specific plays. This is why today we want to take a look at a simple Pop Warner style pirate stunt. This is an adjustment by your 5 technique defensive end to offset a B gap run game.

The Pirate stunt is really used at all levels of football. It is often used at the high school, college and professional levels to protect an inside linebacker from conflict of assignment. Defensive coordinators have to be careful not to give a linebacker A or B gap run responsibility while also asking that linebacker to cover a curl flat area.

Use The Pirate Stunt At The Youth Football Level & High School As Well

The Pirate stunt is often the answer in this situation. This stunt frees up your linebacker from the inside gap responsibility. Now they can get to the curl area and still play sound run responsibility. Odds are that a Pop Warner defensive coach will not be concerned about conflict of assignment. You will be looking to stop the B gap run game.

At the youth level, the pirate stunt can still provide a nice simple changeup to stop the inside run game. You will often see this from 2 Back Slot offenses. A pirate stunt will have your 5 technique defensive end stunting inside to play the B gap. The linebacker to that side will scrape over the top to play the C gap.

Defensive Line Stunts

Can You Make An Adjustment With Your Youth Football Defense To Stop The Bleeding?

This will prevent an offense from pounding you in the B gap. Today’s short video shows how you can implement this small but effective changeup with your youth football defense. Just a note. We refer specifically to the weak side in this video but you can run a pirate stunt to a tight end side too.

FirstDown PlayBook offers you 6 different defenses and plenty of adjustment help. You should consider one or two of these for your Pop Warner defense. Tap on any one of the tiles below to visit the article describing that formation. After reading the article then go join FirstDown PlayBook and get busy coaching your Pop Warner team with the best football playbook available!

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