Stretching the triple in the triple option: the two things you have to do is keep everything simple and adjust to your personnel.

Though the triple option has been an offensive modality since the early 1970s, its popularity has been declining in recent years, thanks mostly to creative defenses and the influx of newer offensive schemes.

When I played in the early 1970s, the triple option was one of the most feared running attacks in football, especially from the wishbone formation. By the early '90s, a lot fewer coaches were running a wishbone and even fewer were triple-optioning.

When planning our offense for 1996, we felt that we had the right combination of running backs and quarterback to put the triple option back into our offense, but we weren't quite certain about how to do it.

We have always believed that we didn't need 40 plays to be successful. All we needed were five or six running plays and the same number of passing plays, so long as we ran them from several different formations.

This would be enough to force the opponents to work overtime preparing for us; and since we also kept everything simple we believed that we could enter the season better prepared than the opponents and with the versatility to outmaneuver and confuse them.

Our problem last year was this: How could we fit the triple option into our system by the first game? We had always run some kind of option (belly, trap, etc.), but all of them had been basically one-read options. Could we get our players to grasp options that had a second and maybe a third read?

This was very important to us because we wanted our two running backs and the QB to become ball-carrying threats.

We began experimenting and it didn't come easily. At times we thought of junking the idea, especially after a practice in which we fumbled five out of the nine times we tried to run the triple option.

My head coach wasn't happy, but to his credit and our players' perseverance, we stayed the course. The triple option - or "veer," as we called it - became a big part of our offense and helped lead us to a championship game and our best record since 1990.

Our fullback gained 1,300 yards, our halfback 950 yards, and our QB 600+ yards, including 32 TDs. The triple and the play-action passes off the veer accounted for a large part of this yardage.

Since our offense ran from a combination of formations (wing T, run and shoot, I, etc.), we had a pretty varied attack. The diagrams show how we ran the triple from a couple of formations and a play-action pass that produced huge results.

Remember, this isn't really all we did with the veer. It just provides an insight into what can be done with a little imagination that will, coincidentally, give your opposing defensive coordinators a lot of nightmares.

The plays are shown vs a 5-3 cover-3 defense, though they can also be run against everything from a 4-3 to a 6-1 or 7-diamond, with little, if any, changes in blocking assignments from week to week.

One blocking scheme that was good for us was using a crack/stalk technique because of our outstanding wide-outs, especially to set up our play-action pass.

I firmly believe that everything you do offensively should tie in with what your personnel does best.