Formations: Coryell, Walsh, and Earhardt-Perkins Offense Terminology

LOOKING BACK
By John Turney

We showed last week the personnel groupings in a three of the offensive systems that were used in the NFL. Many of the same elements are used today in terms of verbiage, even though most, if not all offenses are hybrids now.

In this post we show the words used for the formations by the Coryell offense, West Coast Offense and the Earhardt-Perkins system and we are sticking to the basics, the 2-back formations.

As you can see the Coryell system uses words, the WCO uses colors and the Earhardt-Perkins uses single digits for those formations.

For example, the Coryell system uses "I-right" for the halfback to be behind the fullback and the tight end on the right side. The WCO uses "Green right" for the same formation and the  Earhardt-Perkins simply calls that "0" (Zero).

For the formation some call "Pro" with the backs split, the tight end side and the fullback in his usual spot to the tight end side, it would be "Split right" in Coryell's book, "Red right" would be in the WCO and in the Earhardt-Perkins system it would be called "6".

Coryell and WCO use "left" and "right" to place the tight end while the Earhard-Perkins uses even numbers for "right" and odd numbers for "left". Below are the pages from the various books that illustrate the formations.

Here is the Coryell system (from a Mike Martz playbook):

Here are the formations for the WCO, from a Mike Holmgren playbook:

These are from the Earhardt-Perkins terminology (from a Charlie Weiss playbook)