11-Wide
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11-Wide is the name of an offensive formation in American Football. It is well known for its particular difficulty to perform, and its incredibly influential history in the sport, cited by several NFL and NCAA coaches as being one of the most rewarding techniques in football once it is mastered. To this day, the formation has only taken to the field thirty-four times in regulation NFL play, and has only yielded an official completion once.
[edit] History: The Humble Beginnings of Ultimate Innovation
In the year 1972, John Cotter High School's football team was the absolute worst in their league. Over seven seasons, they had never won a game. They were absolutely terrible. It wasn't surprising of course, being that John Cotter High School was located just across the street from the location of a nuclear explosion of unknown origin, that had taken place in the early 60's, and hence the generation of teenagers at the time had been horribly exposed to its radiation all their lives. Despite the terrible health risks associated with several radioactively exposed teenagers running around a radioactively exposed campus, playing radioactively exposed football, the show, as it were, still went on. Poorly.
Opposing teams in the division were always playing tricks and rubbing their success in John Cotter students' faces. As the winning became less and less satisfactory, the teams began showing up to games very late, as a joke that the John Cotter kids may think that the other teams thought the game wasn't worth their time. In reality, the other teams really did think the John Cotter team wasn't worth their time, and truly their stuffed practice dummies and punching bags posed more of a challenge than the sorry bunch of inhaler-dependent teenagers from across town. However, the opposing schools would have been disqualified, had they not played, so they decided that the "showing up late" gag would be fun for a while. The despondent roster of the John Cotter Giants never managed to catch on, and showing up late became a tradition.
The Giants' coach, Harry Miller, had tried every possible way to bring his team a win. If ever there were a more dedicated high school football coach than Harry Miller, the John Cotter Giants had yet to see him, and in their dismal state of play, probably would have taken the immediate opportunity to fire Miller and hire the new guy as soon as they met him. Still, the school loved their amphetamine-ridden coach, and were willing to rally behind him and his team until the very end. Understandably so, since John Cotter Giants games tended to only last one quarter, due to the fact that by that time most of the team members had either passed out or began puking of the side of the field, on the dirt track. "Rallying behind the team until the end" really only took about fifteen minutes out of people's schedules once every Friday, so it wasn't that big a deal.
One day, a light bulb formed above Miller's head. It then fell on top of him and woke him up from a deep sleep, the impact of the bulb sparking an intense moment of thought. That was it. He knew how to get a win. Of the best players on the team was definitely James "Squid Boy" Taylor. As his nickname suggests, the lifetime exposure to radiation had given "Squid Boy" several unnatural tentacle-like appendages. Despite how terrible the team as a whole was, James Taylor's 22 arms made him the Sunny Mountain division's greatest wide receiver. This gave Harry Miller an idea. All of these years, Harry's primary offensive formation had been the 3-wide. This consisted of three wide receivers on the field, the other players shifting depending on the play. Miller thought to himself, "if more receivers is more chances to catch the ball, then more receivers must mean better offense." A legend was soon born.
[edit] 11-Wide's Controversy and Subsequent Adoption Into Regulation Play
The concept was simple. Every so often, especially helpful if the game was on the line, the offensive team would surprise the other team by setting every player on the field as a wide receiver. The defense couldn't possibly guard all of those receivers, and therefore would be faked out into allowing a touchdown. Obviously, the formation's lack of a quarterback, running back, or center caused controversy at first amongst the high school level officials. However, being that it's just high school, the board decided to let it go. The NFL was a slightly more difficult opponent to convince.
The Giants had been using 11-Wide as their primary formation for 5 years, and built up a steady playbook around it, but Coach Miller was still having trouble getting it recognized by official rulebooks. Since the team had escalated from bottom-of-the-barrel to top-of-the-pops, scouts would come from far and wide to see if they could sway any of the school's genetically mutated players to join their colleges. Needless to say, "Squid Boy" received a full-ride sports scholarship to Stanford, where in his first game, he would break both legs while extending for a long pass, permanently ending his football career. Despite this, scouts continued to frequent the school, and John Cotter eventually turned out quite a few successful NFL players. One such scout was Rich Greenbloom, the first NFL scout to set foot in John Cotter High School. He was so impressed by the team's ability to play and win without any conceivable way of moving the ball between players, that he spent the next year and a half convincing various NFL officials and coaches that it would be a good idea to adopt the formation into the official league playbook. The 1979 NFL season would be the first to officially host the formation. History had been made.
[edit] The 80's
The 1980's was the decade of innovation. Music groups started trying new and different things, new art forms were popping up every five minutes, and David Bowie and Frank Zappa were in their prime. This mentality easily carried onto football, as the sport continued its turn into a media-driven powerhouse of commercialism, beer, and cheerleaders with short skirts. Oh, and also the love of the game. They had that too. But seriously...beer and short skirts, that's where it was at. And there was nothing like the 11-Wide formation to further emphasize that.
The first Monday Night Football game of the 1980 season pitted the Dallas Cowboys against the Washington Redskins. While 11-Wide had technically been a perfectly legal formation for one year at this point, no NFL team had yet worked up the courage to run it in a game. Until tonight. The Redskins were down 10-3 at home in the fourth quarter, with twenty seconds left in the game. Washington had the ball, but it was third down on their own 35 yard line.[1] Things looked hopeless for this one. That's when Head Coach Jack Pardee, the previous year's winner of two Coach Of The Year titles, seemed to remember an outlandish formation called the 11-Wide. The team had only practiced it once before, and being unable to put the ball in play, the players quickly requested that the coach never force the formation upon them again. But this was it. This was the time for such an outlandish, seemingly useless formation to pull through. This was Washington's time to shine, and 11-Wide's time to shine.
After a 15 yard loss on a delay of game penalty, Washington turned over the ball on a fumble, allowing third-line defensive tackle Alonzo Perkins to exhaustedly run the ball back twenty yards for a touchdown, hence sealing Dallas's 17-3 victory. 11-Wide would never be used by any team again for another decade.
[edit] The 90's: The Revival of 11-Wide
After a surprising upset in a college game between Boston College and the Duke Blue Devils, 11-Wide began its trend of popularization. It would ironically be the Redskins, who once again brought the formation back out of its seclusion, and officially put 11-Wide in the rotation again. The 1991 Washington Redskins team would go a league best 14-2, as well as win the Super Bowl against Buffalo. While Washington was believed to have dominated the season because of outstanding play by Quarterback Mark Rypien, amongst other factors, the real secret to their victory lay in the fact that they ran the 11-Wide play at least once during every regular season game. Constantly keeping their opponents on their toes, the Redskins attempted and failed twenty nine downs in the 11-Wide formation, often losing possession or a substantial amount of yards on penalties. Complete pass or not, the idea was that the Redskins had developed a strategy for throwing their opponents offguard. And they won the Super Bowl, it must have worked.
Halfway through the 1991 season, Redskins merchandise began selling with logos depicting the 11-Wide formation, and fans were often seen at games waving 11-Wide flags and banners. A common practice for home fans was to stand up when the 'Skins were at a fourth down, and chant "E-le-ven!" until they turned over the ball, at which point the home crowd would cheer ecstatically. This would often greatly confuse the other team, another point that the Redskins' success is not often attributed to, but should be. Head coach Joe Gibbs would later go on to state that "we never used the 11-Wide as a serious play. I don't understand what all this fuss is about, we only played the 11-Wide when we had a substantial lead, or were playing against a crappy team. We never used it in the playoffs, but everybody keeps saying it's why we won the Super Bowl. I don't get it." Joe's statements are widely believed to have been a subtle hush-up so that the other teams in the league would not catch on to his brilliance. The Redskins never ran the formation again.
[edit] The 2000's: No Fancy Header Title Here, Just A Vague Decade For A Date
After only three attempts at 11-Wide completion since the Redskins' Super Bowl win in '91, the formation saw yet another hiatus of use. It was considered an unwritten rule at one point that the 11-Wide was an illegal operation, though it had never been illegalized by anyone in authority. Certain teams had outlawed it, for its apparent utter uselessness, but a few teams let it stay, many coaches and owners still unaware that 11-Wide even existed, despite the rather successful segments during the 1991 season that took up several hours of NFL commentator analysis on its behalf. Harry Miller had died in 1996 of natural causes, John Cotter High School still thriving, but giving up on the use of the 11-Wide long before its repopularization by the Redskins. "Squid Boy" had become a successful marine biologist, and even had a short-lived program on Animal Planet, entitled Half-Man, Half-Squid: The Adventure Never Ends, before the network was sued for hosting a show that frightened most of the nation's small children. All in all, 11-Wide had been abandoned.
And really, that's about it. I know you were expecting some sort of miraculous completion of the play to have occurred when you read the whole bit in the title about only one in thirty four attempts ever being completed. And I know you've been counting down this whole time, realizing the fact that I've now more or less detailed thirty three of the thirty four attempts as incompletions and failures. The one ever completion occurred freakishly, when a football from the crowd was accidentally thrown onto the field during a run of the 11-Wide by the Philadelphia Eagles in one of their many lost NFC Championship games. After the play was accidentally called, and the players went into their positions, they noticed they had no center, and therefore no ball. Time ticked down, and at the last second, Donovan McNabb, playing the Wide Receiver position, was pelted in the head by a rogue football from the crowd. The ball was caught by Deuce Staley after ricocheting off of McNabb's head. Deuce ran for a one yard gain, after which the ball was turned over on the next play.
The future of the 11-Wide formation remains uncertain, but its influence on football is an ever-perpetuating legacy, the likes of which have never been seen. Nowadays, some people even remember its name. I'm Rick Rickenbauch, and this has been Uncyclopedia's retrospective look at more of sports' most legendary moments. Join us next time, as we recount the history of the yellow fur on the tennis ball. So long, and goodnight.
- ↑ If all of these numbers don't make sense to you, whether because you're not American, or just unfamiliar with this sport, here's the condensed version: Washington was fucked.
