About this ebook
The Wild Bunch offense features “modular” elements of some of the best-known football offensive systems of the past 50 years, and it does so in a way that maximizes deception and misdirection through what I call the “unity of apparent intent” – making one thing on offense look like another, and another, and another, long enough to confuse the defense and prevent the kind of swarming gang-tackling that the best defenses feature. These “modules” include play series borrowed from the Air Raid passing attack, the Fly Sweep offense, the Bunch passing attack, and the Run & Shoot offense.
A long time in gestation, the elements of the Wild Bunch system were first shared over Internet coaching boards in the late 1990s, and the offense has been in use ever since in both North America and Europe. As a result of my “day job” as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, I have been able to clinic and install the Wild Bunch in five countries on three continents, as well as spreading its basic theory and premises to coaches in some 8-10 other countries.
The present volume represents a number of milestones for the Wild Bunch: First publication; first simplification and codification of its plays into four series; and above all, first working of the Wild Bunch offense into the larger framework of my professional and academic research on conflict avoidance, amelioration and resolution theory, or CAART. This last point has occasioned two major differences from previous collections of Wild Bunch plays which I have posted along the way to Internet coaching forums: First, an in-depth analysis of the strategic underpinnings of North American (American and Canadian) football; and following from that, a spirited defense of the game itself in the face of what appear to be concerted attacks on its very existence, starting with youth football, but aiming inexorably at the game in every form.
While other books have dealt with components of the Wild Bunch offense, none has put together its modular elements into the kind of seamless whole which can misdirect defenses at will and increase scoring opportunities for smaller and less-talented squads. Nor has any football book on a particular system gone into such detail on the strategic infrastructure of the game – into the “Why” of offensive maneuvers, rather than simply the “What” and “How”. The great advantage of understanding why to call certain plays is, inter alia, to better know when to call them – when the opponent has been sufficiently deceived as to allow priceless scoring opportunities, no matter how superior they might appear to your squad on paper.
About the author
Ted Seay is senior policy consultant with the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in London, England. Prior to that, he served for 26 years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, most recently at the US Mission to NATO as arms control advisor from 2008 to 2011.
Previously, Seay was seconded to the Secretariat of the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies in Vienna from 2005 to 2008. Prior postings included Slovenia (1998-2001) as liaison to the International Trust Fund for Demining (ITF); the US Department of State’s European Regional Political-Military (EUR/RPM) office (1996-1998), negotiating compliance with the Dayton Peace Accords’ military annex; and State’s Strategic Policy and Negotiations (PM/SPN) office (1994-1996), where he helped draft the Dayton military annex. He joined the State Department in 1985.
Seay has coached American football internationally with the Waverley Sharks in Melbourne, Australia, and as a volunteer assistant with the youth program of the Chrysler Vikings in Vienna, Austria. Since 2000 he has also served as an Internet consultant with football teams in Australia, Canada, the Philippines, Mexico, England, Scotland, Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark and the U.S. Seay has spoken at a number of clinics, including the first Double Wing Symposium in Dallas, Texas in February 2004, at a single wing clinic in Los Angeles in May 2005, and at the Single Wing Conclave in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, both in person and via Internet video conferencing.
Seay holds an A.A. (Criminology) from City College of San Francisco, a B.A. (Political Science) from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.S. (Strategic Intelligence) from the Joint Military Intelligence College. In addition, he believes himself to be the only person in history to have been published by Wisden Cricket Monthly, Gridiron Strategy, and Arms Control Today.
