When you run the power play, you are committing to a certain offensive football lifestyle of hard-nosed, smashmouth football. The more you run a certain play or concept, the more the defense can key off on it and get stops. With great power comes a great responsibility to think outside the box and get creative with your power schemes. Here are three examples that can take your running plays to another level.

Tackle Over

A quick and easy way to get more movement at the point of attack is to bring your backside tackle over to the frontside as the tight end and have your tight end play as the new backside tackle.

The crux of the play doesn’t change. It’s still just power to the “tight end” side but that double team or “Trey” block on the frontside now has a little more juice to it. With two offensive linemen working the 5-technique defensive end, there is potential for more movement play side. If the offensive linemen can bring the defensive linemen into the linebacker’s lap, there’s always going to be potential for a big play.

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Auburn ran this a few times against LSU and on this run in the second quarter, you can see benefits of this version of power.

The PSTE and PST get a great double on No. 97 and torque him almost into the B-gap. Now, the PSTE can come off easy for No. 6. A nice patient run by the running back nets 8 yards.

The backside tackles “sift” technique is not the most difficult block and can easily be performed by a smaller tight end. He’s just stepping down and almost setting a screen from the B-gap to the C-gap so he doesn’t get any backside run throughs.

Flip It and Read It

Inverted Veer/Power Read is one of the best ways to spread a defense out and still use a power scheme. Instead of kicking the defensive end out, the offense will just read that player. If he plays out, it’s like he’s being kicked out and the ball will hit inside of him. If he plays inside, it’s like he’s wrong-arming the kick-out block so the ball will head outside. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. One of the deadliest schemes of the last decade of college football was the slippery Lamar Jackson running this scheme at Louisville.

But what if we don’t want our quarterback as the inside, between the tackles runner? Penn State’s 2017 game against Michigan showed us one of the simplest ways to get out of this dilemma:

Just flip who takes the snap.

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With running back Saquon Barkley offset to quarterback Trace McSorley’s right, Penn State gives the look to run power read to the offense’s left. Right before the snap, the two players shuffle over to their left, making Barkley the “quarterback” now with McSorley offset to his left. Now, they could run power read back to the right with Barkley as the inside runner.

Bonus idea: In this game, it felt like Penn State knew Michigan would scrape exchange away from the running back, so Penn State ended up blocking the “read” player and Michigan ended up with two players outside.

Bluff It

North Dakota State has built a devastating run game around the power play. The back-to-back FCS champions have many variations to their base power run but one of the more creative ones is how they deal with teams that want to spill their bread and butter scheme.

If the defensive end wants to “block down, step down” and then wrong-arm in order to eliminate the kickout block, NDSU will just bluff the end with the kickout blocker and loop around him. The end takes himself out of the play based on his rules and now the Bison have two pull-to-lead players free on the outside.

Interesting play by NDSU to attack a d-end who was wrong arming the kick out block on their A-gap power play. The Bison run a play where they have their fullback bluff the kickout block, and he (and a pulling gaurd) lead for the back who bounces outside. pic.twitter.com/INYfgWGJA1

— Noah Riley (@NoahRiley21) January 3, 2019

USA Football’s Noah Riley has a great article on all of NDSU power schemes included this bluff scheme that he calls “bounce.”

A very nifty scheme concocted down in Fargo.