but... alas... i generally dpn't approve of them... I have a deep respect for a dude by the name of John Madden, whom i believe to be one of the greatest football minds of all time once you get past his kinda goofy presentation- and he once said (paraphrased but close) "trick plays show players that their coach has an absolute lack of confidence in them".... watching the "David's" square against the "Goliath's" and using trickery is great... it's the equalizer... but it's kinda stupid if your team is capable of exacting their will...
I don't like that idea... I think "trick" plays are just the tail end of what Chris Brown at Smart Football called the
Constraint Theory of Offense.
Think of it this way. Wisconsin knows what Wisconsin wants to do. They want to line up, beat you to death in the interior with 325-lb linemen who have been eating sausage since leaving the womb, and watch as their tailback dances through your secondary because he's not getting touched until 7 yards downfield.
How do you beat that offense? You load the box. Your safeties cheat up. Everyone keys on the run. If you're anywhere near the same talent level to Wisconsin, beating that offense is easy. If you know what they're going to do, you know how to stop it.
So they throw in trick plays, like a <gasp!> fake handoff to the RB and throw it over the heads of those safeties who have been cheating up. We tend not to refer to that as a "trick" play, we simply call it a play-action pass, but it's at its heart a trick play. You're faking one thing to get the defense out of position, then you make them pay for being out of position.
True, we call a flea-flicker a trick play because it's a little more complex than a simple play-action pass, but at its core it's no different. You show run; you execute pass.
"Trick" plays are just the extreme end of this concept. Make the defense think you're doing one thing, then don't do that thing.