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.
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