To my eyes, the advantage of the spread/horizontal is that you don’t need a whole group of people working together, but can be effective by working in just pairs of upfield cutters or on occasion an isolated receiver. Of course, the better teams will have coordination of all the players, but for a young team, or a team using a new system, things can get up and running effectively with the horizontal.
To the question as which is more effective in windy situations, again I think you have to look at not the ability of the team, but their familiarity with one another and the system they are using. If a team has a lot of experience working together in a vertical stack system, I think they will make adjustments in the wind that will be very effective. Similar for a horizontal stack, the difference would be in a pickup team, or a team without a lot of practice together, I think the adjustments in a horizontal system are easier to describe and implement for windy conditions than for a vertical system.
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