Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Turning Weakness Into Strength

Hopefully all of us as players or coaches want to think that we are at the top of our game. The difference between those who think that but are just standing still and those that are truly moving towards that goal is that the latter group engages in a honest self-critique often. Now, that doesn’t mean that you beat yourself up and say “Woe is me – I’m pathetic”, but it DOES mean undertaking steps to turn your weakness into a strength. And that’s what I’m doing this offseason, as I do almost every offseason – except this time I really have an offseason!

Instead of jumping into a men’s team this fall, I was really looking forward to some true time away from running a team, an offense, or an OL. This is a change from any time since 2010. Coaching year around for that long can get to you, if you’re also obsessing with getting better. Continually coaching teams doesn’t always afford you the ability to undertake large projects, because the immediate weekly needs of the team take precedence.

The past couple of years I’d really tried to find new ways to teach run blocking because I wasn’t really satisfied with the results I was getting from my teams, men or women. So whether it was technique tweaks, new drills, or scheme adjustments, that is what I was focused on. I’m not done with that just yet, but I do feel like I made some progress.

This time it’s a bit bigger project, mainly because I don’t have 24 years experience in doing it like I do with blocking schemes and techniques. Learning how to better attack pass coverages is the project. What I’m learning is that, per the popular saying, “There’s levels to this s**t.”

I’d allowed myself to get a bit intellectually lazy while calling games over the past few years. I relied on other coaches or sometimes my quarterback to let me know which pass plays would work. And I knew which route combinations would likely work against the deep defenders, but I didn’t really understand how the underneath coverage worked or how to attack it. What is scary is that the last few years of offense have been pretty good!

At this point, I’d like to highly recommend Coach Steve Axman’s book, “Attacking Coverages With the Passing Game”. I picked it up earlier this year at a coaches clinic and now dove headfirst into it. Funny side story, as I was looking up the link info on Amazon, I saw that there was a review from my friend and competitor John Konecki of the Chicago Force. This is the second time that I’m aware of that we’ve been using the same source material for our teams.

Anyway, the challenge then, as with anytime you are looking at new or different concepts, is how do you make this fit into your current terminology and system? Coach Axman shows a ton of ways to attack different coverages, many of which we don’t currently employ and which might have been useful against Seattle (who did a great job against our passing game) and certainly Boston. But then it comes back to “how do we integrate this?”

When coaching men (and now sometimes with the women as well) you get all the time, “Coach, why don’t we do this, or that?” My answer is always the same – if you bring me a play, you also have to tell me how we can fit it in to what we already do, from a terminology standpoint. And there better be more than just some new play – what are the counters, the play-actions, the variants off of it? If you don’t consider all that, then you don’t have a system, you have a collection of plays.

I’ve had players do that too – they’ve sat down with me and said, “OK, if we add this, then we can do this and this, and this is what we’ll call it and this is how we’ll teach it” and one of those sessions has resulted in me keeping the package (my 4 vertical plays) in my playbook for a few years now.


So, this offseason has already been a productive one and it’s still early! I can confidently say I’m better now than I was on August 2. Hopefully everyone reading this will become better as well, whenever your offseason is. All it takes is admitting to yourself what you don’t already know.
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Here's the details on the San Diego Football Camp in November. You might want to get your hotel reserved soon!
Basic details here and the Facebook event is here.

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