Please Don't Run the Pistol

In 2007 I was coaching with the Valley Wolfpack organization in Sumner, Washington. For some reason the Cascade Junior Football League reversed the "normal" nomenclature for football levels. Although I was coaching the 12-14 year olds, our level was the "Pee Wee" (because freshmen just love to be referred to as peewees). The youngest level was the "midgets." I don't really get it, either.

That's not really important. What is important is that, in two of our games, we faced the Puyallup Rough Riders football club, which has a twenty year reputation for success at all levels, and the Puyallup team ran the Pistol offense.

I'm not going to describe the system, or even give you any diagrams to look at because I don't want to distract you from the ultimate message here. Suffice it to say that the Pistol is a Spread-based offensive attack that places the quarterback about four yards deep behind the center, and puts the tailback at I-formation depth (seven yards). From this position, with four wide receivers, the offense can execute a number of option, run, pass, or play action plays.

Here's where things got turned upside down. I was entranced by the Pistol. Not enough to run the damn thing; I'm not that insane, but enough to try to reverse engineer a playbook for it and consider that if I ever chose to run it, this is how I would do so.

I put the playbook online after I finished it. It was an amalgam of research into the history of the Pistol (developed at Nevada in 2005 under head coach Chris Ault, with an ultimate grandfather in the Glenn Warner Single Wing), and the modern Double Wing blocking rules I use for my own offense (which can largely be found in Jerry Vallotton's outstanding book, The Toss.)

And... that's where the midden hit the windmill.

You see, I made the mistake of titling the work The Pistol Offense for Youth Football. To me, Youth Football starts at high school junior varsity and goes down. My Pistol is pretty simple, but it's still a Spread offense, and I have never advocated using the Spread below the high school level.

About three to six times per week, depending on the time of year, I get an email that reads something like this:

Hi Coach Wade. I recently came across your Pistol playbook and it's really swell. I'm a rookie head coach and I was searching the web to find a playbook for my eight and nine year old team. Most of them have never played before, but I think this offense can help us win a championship. Are there any other plays you didn't put in the book that you can send me? How many championships did you win while you were running this?

Um.

In the first place, I clearly point out in the playbook (Page 2) that I have never run the Pistol. One of the things that scares the crap out of me is the thought that a coach who couldn't read the playbook well enough to realize that I only reverse engineered the system from game film is now going to use it to coach a team of rookie players.

In the second place, although I obviously didn't make it clear enough, the Pistol is not for eight, nine, or ten year olds. The absolute rock-bottom youngest age group I'd run the system with is a team of ages 11-12 that was heavy in the older/lighter category. As written, the system is better suited for the midget level of youth football (or the peewee, if you're in the Cascade Junior Football League).

In the third place, rookie head coaches are probably best served sticking with ground-based attacks. It's a lot easier to coach a power/misdirection system like the Single or Double Wing, or a Wing-T or even Power-I, than it is to try to coach the intricacies of pass blocking, coverage reading, and proper route running. Can it be done? Absolutely. A rookie head coach with zero experience could step in with any offense, a decent work ethic, a reasonable study period before the season begins, and comparable talent and be successful-- for a given value of the word "successful." He might go .300. He might even go undefeated if the right elements are in place. That depends on him and his players.

However, the odds are highly, highly stacked against him. Most youth coaches who try to run pass-heavy playbooks get their asses handed to them. It's not uncommon to see them go entire seasons without scoring a single touchdown. They turn the ball over on bad-call interceptions. They don't know how to read defenses themselves to determine a Cover-2, Cover-3, or Cover-1, and they run receivers into waiting defenders or overpressure their quarterbacks with insane demands like reading three receivers in widely disparate sections of the field in two seconds.

Their players get frustrated. They get frustrated, and they drive young people out of football. They themselves get out of coaching too early, without realizing that it wasn't the kids; it was them not knowing what the hell they were doing.

Even the ground-based attacks have a ridiculous number of details. I coached a Double Wing at Tomales High School at the varsity and junior varsity level under the outstanding head coach Leon Feliciano for three years before it ever occurred to me that our offense would get better if the pulling guard ran forward-- through the center's hips-- rather than pulling flat and turning up. That one little adjustment added .6 of a yard to our lifetime average on 24 Toss, the cornerstone of our offensive plays. That doesn't sound like much, but when you run that play 75% of the time, .6 of a yard turns into one more touchdown each half, and one to two more wins each season.

We're not even getting into the fact that if you coach a passing system, you have to coach pass blocking and run blocking, but you can conceivably get away with either not passing at all in a running system (Been there. Done it. Got the trophy.), or using only play action and teaching run blocking on all your passing plays.

Pass blocking is passive. You sit in one position and guard a space on the field, blocking only the defenders that enter it. Run blocking is aggressive. You physically attack a defender with the intent to either knock him on his ass or at the very least physically move him from out of the path of the ball carrier.

Pass blocking can be out-schemed by blitzing much more easily than run blocking can. What does a pass blocker do when threatened by two or more defenders? Who knows? But a run blocker doesn't care that much because he should already be engaged with one of them-- the guy he attacked at the snap.

In the fourth place, there are nine running plays that can be reversed in the playbook I wrote. That's eighteen plays that hit all points of attack: interior, off-tackle, outside; and also provide power, misdirection, and draw action. That doesn't even count the ten passing plays that can be mixed and matched on each side of the field for more than one hundred potential pass pattern combinations off of just a single formation. Writing me to ask for even more plays for this offense shows me that you really haven't studied what's already there.

Does my Pistol work? Yes. I had a coach contact me that was running a Multiple-I system in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2008. He switched to the Pistol in 2009 and scored 38+ in every game for two years straight. I had a high school coach from Long Island, NY email me and tell me he was using my system with his junior varsity, and had adapted his own terminology to fit mine because mine was easier for them to grasp and more modular and expandable.

I had another coach, much more recently, contact me asking if the Pistol was a good fit for him. He was coaching younger players, 11-12 year olds, but they were experienced (he had one player that had never played before, and two players with only one year of experience. Every other player was in his third year or more.) and he himself had been coaching for six or seven years. They'll be using it in the 2011 season and I think they'll do very well.

Properly coached, with the right personnel in place, at an age group that can functionally perform the required skills, the Pistol as I've developed it is very effective. However, this does not mean it is right for you:

• If you're in your first three years of coaching-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If this is your first year as a head coach or offensive coordinator-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If your players are younger than age eleven-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If your team is composed mostly of rookies-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.
• If you're not comfortable with your ability to read a defensive coverage-- the Pistol probably isn't right for you.

I believe that anyone can beat the numbers. America is the greatest country on earth because anyone can work hard and achieve success. However, I also believe that intentionally charging headlong into overwhelming odds is more likely to make you dead than make you a hero. Yes, you can be successful running the Pistol as a rookie coach with a team of eight year olds. This does not mean that you should try to do so. The risk of leading that team to an 0-8 season and the frustrations that entails (which will probably be worse for you than for them because... they're eight.) is just not worth the pleasure of calling a tunnel screen at the perfect time.

I get dozens of emails each month about this playbook, and very few of them turn into actual conversations. The first email I receive is above, and my reply usually says, "Coach, I really, really do not recommend what you're about to do. You're not coaching the right age group and your experience level doesn't lend itself to easy success with this offense." That email almost never gets a reply back.

I'm not trying to say that you're a bad coach, or stupid, or anything negative like that. I'm saying that my experienced opinion (which you asked for when you contacted me) leads me to believe that you will have more success with another system. If you've got the experience, and you've got the players, by all means, give the system a shot.

But if it's your first year as a football coach and you're in the junior peewee division... please don't run the Pistol.

~D.

Four Wides of Death (Part Two)

Last week I talked about the basic four vertical passing game and how to integrate it into your existing spread package. This week I want to talk about some basic formation adjustments to keep the defense guessing. I also want to discuss some protection schemes to help keep the heat off your quarterback.

As you recall from last week, we spoke only about the "Basic" formation and the 4 vertical play as taken from the playbook used by Mike Newsome, at Butler High School in North Carolina. Whatever terminology you use, the play is one of the simplest in football:

There are a lot of ways you can change up this play to keep the defense guessing, and they're all pretty simple from the offensive point of view. As you probably know if you've read my stuff regularly (or at least as regularly as any schedule I've been on for the last seven years or so), I am a huge believer in changing formation without changing my offensive assignments. If you can alter your alignment, without altering where a player goes or what he does after the snap, in a lot of cases the defense has to treat that as a whole new play.

So take a look at what happens when we adjust from "Base California" above to "Trips Right California" below:

What changed for our players? Nuffin'! #1s still run streaks (arrows, go routes... whatever you call them in your specific terminology) outside the numbers, and the inside men still run the same thing inside the hash marks. The only change is that the mostest innerest man now has to cross the formation before angling downfield.

With this in mind, we can use any formation: even Quads, Ace, TE Trips, what have you, and we can still get our receivers into the places they're supposed to be. Further, just like the Pistol playbook, the receiver responsibilities change based only on where their alignment places them: if you're the #2 receiver, then you run the #2 route, always, forever, whenever. If motion makes you the #1, then you run the #1 route.

I'll let you come up with motion tags to adjust this further, but if you're looking for help, the Pistol playbook has some for you.

But if you're ever going to get that pass off, you need to spend some time working on pass blocking. This has taken me a long time to understand, and after some research and study this year I finally discovered that I had backed into an excellent pass protection scheme several years ago.

In 2003 I sat down with every video copy of our offense running a flood pass over the preceding six years, as well as some video of the same play being run by other teams. I came to the conclusion that we needed to run away from one defensive end, and get a back on the other. I was so damn smart I even spent 35 minutes talking about it at the 2004 Double Wing Symposium (DWS-I).

Here's why passing coaches in the audience were yawning: what I was doing was simple slide protection, nothing more.

Here's the basics for how it works. At the collegiate-- and sometimes high school-- level, protection is called based on where the defense is most likely to stunt from. Defenses at those levels generally decide to stunt from the field (the wide side) when they want to be in the quarterback's face and disrupt his vision lanes, and from the boundary when they want to blindside him. According to Mike Archer of NC State, NCAA offenses generally throw to the wide side about 65% of the time. He likes to blitz from that side, and gave me an excellent zone blitz package called "Fargo" ("field").

The offense can slide their protection one way or the other in order to intercept the stunting defenders. This works for the same reason angle blocking works on running plays: you're cutting a defender off and shoving him to the side rather than meeting him head up when he may be stronger than you. (Which is traditional "cup" protection.) If the middle linebacker stunts from the picture below, instead of a center standing still and catching his charge, there's an angling guard (or even tackle) crossing his face automatically to earhole him. Odds are, at the youth level, he won't even see this one coming.

Sliding to the field looks like this:

The way it works is actually pretty simple. All offensive linemen take a sharp, angled step towards the wide side of the field. Their goal is to engage, not the defender aligned on them, but the defender one gap or more to the inside. They're seeking to get their head and upfield shoulder across the defender and "lock" him into the 90-degree angle between their earhole and their shoulder pad. Then, if they just keep driving, even if the man penetrates the line, he's shoved far enough off-course that he can't get to the quarterback before the throw.

Pay attention to the running back. In the play above, we have "Field, Away" as a protection call. This mean our offensive line blocks towards the field, and our running back blocks away from them, to the boundary. His job is to pick up the first man outside the offensive tackle's outside foot. To do this, he needs to start out with an aiming point at the tackle's inside hip. (He can be beaten outside if the defensive end takes a wide path-- we can live with that. However, if he's beaten to the inside gap, he should be beaten-- with a stick-- after the game. Don't really do that.) If the defender arcs wide outside, he can come up underneath and run them upfield. If the defender cuts inside sharp, the running back meets him near the line.

Don't forget that, at the youth level, your running back is one of the top three athletes on your team, and that defensive end is one of the middle guys, talent-wise.

Now, if we want to roll or half-roll into the field to force the defense to commit one way or another, we can make a slightly different blocking call: "Field, towards."

In a towards call, we can assume that the defensive end is coming wider-- he has to in order to escape the playside tackle's block. For this reason we want our running back to take a more arced path to the point of the block, and try to meet the defender with his shoulders square to the line. If the running back can cross the defensive end's face, is springs the perimeter open if the quarterback wants to run with the ball. Again, we've got a stellar athlete on an average one (although wide side ends tend to be higher up on the talent chain than short side ends).

As you can see, with some basic adjustments to the formation and the addition of a couple of blocking calls, we can make our offense much more dangerous.

~D.

Four Wides of Death (Part One)

Understand right here that I can't stand the Spread offense, particularly at the youth football levels. Other blog articles will detail my reasons for this intense dislike, but the main reason is because it's not well suited as a system for the natural abilities that young players have and the skills they usually already have developed when they first come to you. It takes a lot of practice at the mechanics, throwing and catching, just to make a reception possible, and that's not even considering the lousy pattern development some youth coaches do because they don't really understand how the defense covers the field.

Of course, the only thing worse than the way some youth coaches teach throwing, catching, and pattern running, is the way they teach pass blocking.

Despite that, I spend a lot of time studying the Spread offense because I see so much of it now at the high school level. This last year I attended a coaching clinic at NC State University that was just fantastic, particularly when the NC State coaches were speaking. There were a few coaches there who wandered somewhat off topic-- one coach spent more time explaining that he requires his players to take showers than he spent explaining his offensive system.

But then there was coach Mike Newsome, of the Butler Bulldogs, a 4AA North Carolina High School Championship coach, who broke down his four vertical system in astonishing detail.

I'm only going to give you the parts that I think will work for the youth game. Feel free to adapt this into whatever system you're running if it fits! If you're a Wing-T or a Wishbone coach, you probably won't be able to get much done with this formation and style of attack. However, if you're running Ted Seay's Spread Option Run and Shoot (SORS), or my Pistol for youth football you may find it useful.


The basic four vertical attack comes from the traditional "Doubles" formation.

I show it here against a common youth defense, the 5-3. If the 5-3 aligns in man coverage (which you can determine by sneaking in a little motion-- or by doing a comprehensive scouting report before you play), you need to ascertain two things: which of your receivers is faster than the man covering him, and which of your receivers can catch. If the world is perfect, these will be the same guy.

The basic 4 vertical play Coach Newsome runs is called "California." He simply yells a formation (In my terminology, this would be "Base" or "Pistol" if you put the QB back about four yards in a mini-shotgun look.), and then "California." Because the offensive players execute a defensive read, he doesn't particularly care if the defense hears the play call.

At the snap, the inside two receivers will adjust their paths to run down the inside of the hash marks, while the outer two receivers will run down the outside of the numbers. Assuming that the defenders are in man, it will look something like this:

I believe very strongly in giving my quarterbacks only a couple of reads so, I would probably make a call like "California Left" to make him look at his left hand side of the field. You can code this out: "California, Zelda!" Zelda featured the main character "Link." "Links" is German for "left."

This is just one corny example. There are dozens of others you can use. Yell a series of numbers out: "One thousand, two hundred, nineteen!" That's an odd number, and all the odds in my terminology are on the left.

Pick a receiver, throw the ball.

The next adaptation is when the defense shows a zone coverage.

When this happens, you need to spread the zones as far as possible apart. If you look at the basic Cover-3 shown, the free safety is on something of an island. When we're on offense, we like that sort of thing. If we can make sure our outside receivers stay outside the numbers, we force that free safety to stay in the middle of the field with no help from his corners. Our inside receivers fit nicely into the natural gaps in the coverage, and we need only flash our shoulder away from our intended receiver before throwing back to him and we should be able to get the safety to move as well. (A little play action will help this nicely as well.)

What if the defense shows a Cover-2 look? With more Spread offenses leeching down into the youth levels, we're starting to see more two deep and umbrella coverages.

Coach Newsome teaches his receivers to read the defenders. This is not difficult! Simply teach your players that if there is a defender in front of them at five yards past the line of scrimmage, that they should continue straight down the field until that defender turns his hips and then break inward!

We do have to worry now about the middle linebacker undercutting our routes. This shouldn't be that difficult if you rep it well. You have two receivers crossing behind the MLB. Pick the receiver you want to throw to and turn your shoulder towards the other one. When you see the MLB step towards your shoulder, reverse and throw to the open man.

This is somewhat more complex than the basic passing systems I routinely advocate in my writing, but it doesn't mean that it's not possible. If you're going to run a passing system, you need to rep these sorts of things constantly.

Here's a quick way to rep the receiver read. Have a defender hold a shield in front of himself so the receiver can't see his jersey. At the four yard point, have the defender drop the shield (There is now an ugly jersey in front of me: I cut inward) or maintain the shield (I see no jersey: I continue straight.)

For the quarterback, put two receivers about six yards behind a middle linebacker and spread out to about ten yards to either side of him. Have the quarterback practice pointing a shoulder at one receiver, and then snapping quickly back to throw to the other. As he gains proficiency, have these receivers jog towards one another, gradually increasing the pace until they are running at game speed.

There are dozens of other drills you can run to improve this simply play. If you've got a favorite, shoot me an email and let me know what it is.

Next week we'll continue this discussion with some insight into trips packages and pass blocking. I can hardly wait.

~D.

Stop Screwing With Football! (Part Two)

Last week I wrote about the defensive side of the ball when a league has some ridiculous rule like:

Six defensive players must be aligned no more than one yard off the line of scrimmage and head up on the offensive guards, tackles, and ends. No defender may align on the center, and all other defensive players must be at least five yards from the line of scrimmage. Blitzing is not allowed.

My opinion of these horsesh!t rules is pretty well known. If you want your kid to play football, sign him up for the sport. If you want him to take dancing, find a dancing instructor. Football has rules that have existed in pretty much standard form for over a century now with little adjustment. No group of mommies and daddies sitting in pizza parlor having a "board meeting" for a youth football league is going to improve on this sport when officials who spend their entire lives playing it, coaching it, and refereeing it can't. The NFHS rule book is written by a group of people with about 500 combined years of football knowledge. They know how to seal the gaps when a coach does something borderline unsportsmanlike (Look up the A-ll Offense sometime.), and they can do it competently and efficiently without throwing the rest of the game out of balance.

Not so, mommy leagues, so to help demonstrate the stupid that falls out of these cheesy rule changes, I'm going to show you how to obliterate the standard mandated defenses.

First off, if the defensive alignment that is required looks anything like the description above, you'll score 800 points a game. Here's how: the defense is required to be head up on all players except the center, so take your guards and split them thirty yards to each side. Have them take a knee, and have your tackles align just outside them and do the same. Ends, of course, do the same as well.

Behind the ends, align your two wingbacks. This should leave you with a formation in the middle of the field that looks like this:

Catch on yet? Because of that stupid rule, no defender on the line is allowed to be within thirty yards of the ball at the snap! Do you think any of your players, if given a 30 yard head start, could fail to score in one play? The only two things that could possibly prevent you from scoring are a fumble or if your ball carrier trips over his own feet on the way to the end zone.

I specifically pointed out to have your non-essential players take a knee. This is because I'm a smart ass and I'm pushing it to the ultimate to show the absurdity. In practice, I'd have my players fool with three to six yard gaps between center and guard. It makes the same point without really being quite as sarcastic.

So what will the league do to prevent this from happening again? Well, because leagues like this operate on a knee jerk basis, if they don't kick you out of your coaching position, they'll probably hold an emergency meeting and add a rule that says:

Okay, we have to prevent coaches from taking advantage of the blind spots in our ability to understand the game, so now no member of the offense from tackle to tackle is allowed to split more than one yard.

Fine. I would run just two plays: toss sweep and counter trap. Call the trap about every fifth play. You might put in a pass just to look good, and I’d run about six different formations and four or five motion tags, but that’s all I’d install. You’ll be really good at blocking them because there is still no possibility a defender will ever be in an unexpected position. Bunch up with no splits at all and put the defense shoulder to shoulder. This will make it easier to wall them off. Every sixth or seventh play, chuck the ball deep just to make the defensive coordinator holler out helpful things like, "Watch the pass!"

If you're not catching on yet, I don't care for leagues that try to hamstring my sport. Football is an excellent, detailed, strategic and tactical competition that has been a hundred and sixteen years in the making! A group of parents, at least 50% of which have never played the sport in their lives, is not going to improve on this game.

As I mentioned last week, what they will do is stifle innovation, turn good coaches into lazy ones, bore and demotivate their players, and make a pig's breakfast out of the game we love.

If you have to coach in one of these leagues, get hold of their bastardized rule book as early as possible and start thinking of creative ways to screw with the rules. Remember, the football rule book lists only what you can not do. If it's not expressly forbidden, it's within bounds. (With obvious exceptions. Do not give your car keys to your running back with instructions to "Drive this ball to that goalpost over there at the snap.")

But don't be afraid to have a little fun.

~D.

Stop Screwing With Football! (Part One)

Probably the number one question I get asked goes something like this:

My league requires six defensive players on the line of scrimmage. No one can be head up on the center, and the linebackers can't be moving towards the line at the snap. I coach 9-year-olds and would like to run the Gap-8. Do you have any advice for modifying the defense for these rules?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, I really don't. I do, on the other hand, have some excellent advice on another topic: get your ass out of that league.

Rules like this are absurd and unnecessary. Worse, they are actively interfering with the players' ability to learn and enjoy football. These rules are usually put in place by well-meaning parents and board members seeking to "ease" their kids into the game.

Well, I say "usually." On occasion these idiot rules are put in place specifically to stifle an innovative coach who tried something that is completely legal and within the regular high school rules of football but that his opposing coaches were not competent to coach against.

Rather than encourage the maroons to get out there and get better at coaching this great sport, the board and rules committee decided instead to hamper the innovating and hard working coach. This is repulsive to me on a number of levels.

1) Youth sports are supposed to be about the kids. This is what always prefaces these asinine rules. Here's the problem with that thinking, though: the kids are learning less about football.

Take a linebacker on that defense up there. Because he cannot be moving forward at the snap, he will go the entire season without learning how to blitz through a gap and secure it properly! Is that fair to him? Is it okay to tell him, "Billy, kids your age in other programs are learning to play football, but we just don't think you're smart enough for it."?

Now consider that offensive lineman across from Billy. Because Billy is not allowed to blitz, he will go the entire season without learning how to react and respond to a blitzing linebacker! Again, is that fair to him?

You mean to seriously tell me that a 9-year-old can figure out the button combinations on Madden and can't figure out how to play real football, even when patiently coached by a competent adult? This kid can turn 720s on a skateboard and bunny hop from one end of town to another on a bike, and you think he can't play football!

2) These rules ruin the chess match by forcing you to leave a section of the field undefended. Why should the offense run anywhere else?

Football defenses generally clog the middle of the field by design because they are arranged to defense the area of greatest threat, and the likelihood of a particular zone being the point of immediate attack goes up the closer the ball is to that zone. This, the middle of the field where the ball starts is usually the most highly defended zone in football.

As a result of this natural defensive stacking, most youth coaches figure out early that the sweep can be effective if you have decent speed. The reasons why are deceptive. It's not because you're some kind of super-coach. It's because the whole defense is stuffed into a 10X12yard section of field and tripping over one another. You give the ball to the fastest kid you have and let him do what comes naturally.

He runs away from the clogged defense-- and simultaneously away from the offensive line you really don't have any need to have on the field other than as a series of slightly mobile obstacles. The fact that six out of eleven defensive players are forced by rule into the middle of the field just makes it easier to clog them up.

3) These rules obliterate motivation.

Not only are good coaches forced to be lazy because they literally can't find new ways to play to their team strengths, but the players are screwed over as well. Imagine being an offensive lineman in that sweep-only system. Down after down, play after play, you do the same thing: coach says you're supposed to block the guy in front of you and "knock him on his ass," but the guy with the ball always runs away from you. How many plays do you think it would take before you started to crash into the guy across from you and then immediately turn and watch the ball carrier? Three? Six? Would you ever sustain a block? If so, why on earth would you?

4) These rules force the defense into an unsound alignment, and that cheapens every success the offense has.

Look, it sucks when a youth team goes an entire season without scoring a touchdown. It's rough to stay motivated and keep the players happy. I've been there as a coach and as a player, both. In fact, I was in my second season as a player before a team I was on scored a touchdown, and in my first three years as a player, we scored precisely twelve points!

And I wouldn't trade those points for a free Super Bowl ring. We earned those points, thank you. The first touchdown came in my 8th grade season, and we drove from our own 18 to score against Edgemont Junior High in the last twelve seconds of the game. We still lost, and I still remember that magical drive. 

I can also tell you about the interception return that set up our second score, my freshman year, when I got the best hit of my playing career on the Ballou Junior High quarterback. I hope he still has "Riddell" imprinted on his chest.

Here's the point: we earned those points. They have meaning. They weren't handed to us and cheapened by a set of rules that hampered the defense. If we scored against a team's third string, fine-- they practiced as hard as we did and we played as well as we could.

We were all trying our best. Isn't that what we're trying to coach players to do, anyway? Try their best and leave it all on the field? Well, looking back now I can tell you that my coaches rarely tried their best. I'm not talking about Pat Kelly, the wrestling/football coach that talked me into playing football, I mean the inexperienced and out of their depth coaches who didn't understand the game and thought it was all about yelling "Hit somebody!"

Why in God's name would you try to turn a coach into that? Why on earth would you lower the bar for the offense by forcing the defense to play an alignment that literally cannot properly defense the field? Do you think scoring a cheap touchdown has more value than never scoring at all? Do you think the players will never notice? Do you think the coaches won't?

Instead of superior coaching and teamwork prevailing, the players are forced into a situation where coaching means nothing; the team with the fastest kid will simply run him wide until he scores.

So, if you're stuck in one of those leagues, I wish you the best of luck, but frankly, you'd be better off if you quit and coached elsewhere. Paradoxically, so would the league. Here's why: the only reason they can have these dumbass rules is because coaches tolerate them. If every coach that was given a mandated offense or defense politely handed it back and took themselves and their kids elsewhere, these damnfool leagues would have neither coaches, nor players, and would have to fix their houses!

The problem is, too many incompetent coaches are willing to settle for half a loaf-- lousy coaching-- just so they can carry a whistle and clipboard. They'll happily take the title, but never bother to earn it. The worst part? They're teaching their players that cheap success is still success.

I prefer to do it the hard way. That way it means something.

~D.

We're BAACK!

Just a little message here to let you know that we are live, large, and in charge here at our new blog site. Blogger is vastly easier to use than Livejournal, and offers more options for me to make the content more enjoyable. 

After today, the FB4Y blog will update EVERY WEDNESDAY at 09:30AM.

Also, take a look at the right hand side of your screen (over THERE------>). You'll see a nifty little appointment scheduling tool. If you're interested in a free online 30 minute clinic of my coaching materials, click on over and set up a time. I use Skype, which is available for free download, and I can whiteboard out the answers to any questions you have. We can also set up a time for a voice only conference call with your coaching staff so I can help you out as well.

~D.