I know this won't answer your questions, but here's how I run it and I tend to follow
Mike Leach's way and
Leach has been pretty darn successful with the
Air Raid.
As far as the two outside receivers, I look for bigger guys. Think
Michael Crabtree at
Texas Tech. He's
6'1 210, so he's not really big, but if you find receivers that are
6'1 to
6'4 as your outside guys, that should do.
As far as the inside guys, you want smaller, faster guys. Think
Wes Welker. All of your receivers should be excellent at catching the ball.
As far as formation subs, I always have
11-12 WR's on my team, so I have my starting four, and they're in about half my formations. Then I have the guys who are
5-8 in formations and then
9-11 or
9-12 in maybe two formations.
One thing
Leach is a big believer in is keeping the passes equal or as equal as possible. Sure, he'd have guys like
Crabtree who were just stars, but he always looks at the stats at halftime and sees how divided up the receptions are. He believes that if your four starters all have
4-5 receptions each at half, and the backups all
2-3, then it makes it harder to defend because the defense can't key on one or two guys.
Now you'll have games where one guy will just be open more often, so he might have
10 or
11 receptions where everyone else is between
4 to
7. And that's fine. But you want to strive for balance there.
If you're playing on-line, that will really benefit you. If you're playing off-line, it's not that big of a deal because the CPU isn't smart enough to figure out that you're going to one or two guys a lot more than the others.
Anyway, that's how I do it and that comes directly from
Mike Leach himself. Good luck with the offense. There's a lot of good
Air Raid plays in the game, although the names aren't correct. If you study the
Air Raid you will learn what each play is called. Anyway, best of luck!