On USA Football: Develop counters and constraints

My next article in a series of developing an offensive system is up on USA Football.  The series of articles presents ideas on building an offensive system that are further detailed in my newest book The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System.  

The base play provides structure for your offense

Find the details that can enhance your offense

Create multiplicity with formations

Consolidate concepts for more efficient teaching and thought process

Once you establish a base play as a starting point for your offense, it becomes clear as to what answers a defense needs to stop the base play.

Develop constraints and counters for your base play:

As discussed in “The base play provides structure for your offense,” establishing a starting point gives you a thought process for play calling. The stretch play was the starting point for our thought process. We wanted to get the defense moving laterally to stop our intentions of getting the ball to the perimeter with the stretch play…read more

My first book 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays is available as the entire series or in chapters by play.

 

From 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays

Are you looking to tailor your learning and study specific topics? I’ve broken my first iBook into chapters. Two are available now.

Pin and Pull Sweep is available for $2.99 on the iBookstore & Play Action is available for $4.99.

Please note these are the chapters from the book. New information and plays in enhanced chapters will be available soon.

On USA Football: create multiplicity with formations

While a team may use only a limited amount of formations during a season, having the ability to utilize different formations while integrating with different personnel makes an offense adaptable. Terminology needs to be flexible as well. As a team adapts different concepts into its structure, it all has to fit logically. Our program was looking to cut down on a huge number of schemes but maintain multiplicity. We needed to build a system that allowed us to do more with less, to be diverse in formations and motions. We needed to create a system that allowed us the flexibility to take advantage of our personnel. We wanted our offense to focus around schemes and concepts that could be used in a multitude of formations, where we could line up in a double wing or with four wide and it did not affect what was going on up front with our linemen….read more

Learn about our formations system using tag words in The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System

First three sections of The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System

My new iBook The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System is available in sections from the iBookstore.  The first chapter of the iBook is free as a download.  This multitouch book was broken up into smaller sections to help coaches with their own personal professional development.  While the total package provides important lessons, it also allows a coach to tailor his learning by providing a la carte pricing.  The remainder of the book was divided into sections as follows:

Define the System and Build a Foundation $6.99

This multitouch book includes the first three chapters of The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System. These chapters provide the foundation for building your own system by illustrating specific examples of how we evolved from an ineffective offense into a record breaking offense.

Structure a Starting Point and Develop Coaching Methods $6.99

These chapters provide the foundation for building your own system by illustrating specific examples of how we evolved from an ineffective offense into a record breaking offense.  Structuring a play to serve as a starting point and developing coaching methods to teach the details are the focus.

Develop the Fundamentals $7.99

This multitouch book includes the chapters 6-11 of The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System. While it is specific to this one play, this section serves as a model for setting up drills and practice so that time is not wasted and both players and coaches are effective.  Generic drills lost value in our system as we moved to practicing only those things that will happen on game day.  This chapter is valuable in stimulating though on how you coach and what you do in practice.  This is especially valuable for a young coach who may get enamored with the drills that a popular coach does but may have little impact on what your offense actually needs.

Section 4 will be released soon.  This section is titled Application of Strategy.

Also available is my first iBook 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays.

 

The Highest Quality Mental Reps

Cool use of technology for mental reps!

On USA Football: Consolidate concepts for more efficient teaching and thought process

Check out my new iBook:  The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System.

As an offense, we used to carry certain route packages for certain coverages. This led to a long menu of route concepts, which made it difficult in practice planning as well as play calling on game day. In searching for a better answer, we evolved to carrying five concepts that we could tag to be able to get more out of each concept’s structure. From a passing game perspective, this is similar to how we treated our run game.

In our system, we basically mirror routes from 2-by-2 and a separate structure of 3-by-1 concepts. The mirrored routes carry a mentality of telling the quarterback to pick a side presnap and work it. We have some routes that bring a receiver across on a shallow or drag, but most are the standard 2-by-2 routes such as curl and smash. We still carry curl and smash combinations within what we do, but they no longer exist as a separate concept. In making this change, we have streamlined our thought process for the quarterbacks and allowed ourselves to have more a focused game plan and practice repetitions. Using different tags within each concept, we allow our quarterbacks to make simple adjustments to routes to allow for a better combination against what the defense is showing.

Read more here…

My first iBook:  101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays

 

 

On AFM: Pairing Zone Read and Power Read to Attack Across the Defensive Front

Get my new iBook, The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System

The read game allows the offense to attack the defense where they become weakest based on post snap keys. The power read allows for a gap scheme read concept that attacks inside and outside in one direction at the same time. The zone option allows for an A-Gap to A-Gap inside run that can hit front side or cutback as well as attacking the perimeter opposite the inside zone. The personnel we use gives us a fullback, running back and a hybrid receiver/running back in the backfield along with a dynamic quarterback. As seen in the diagram below, just two play calls allow us to attack the entire front.

Read more…

Read about developing an offensive system in my new iBook The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System. Learn more about our pistol offense in 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays. Both are full of dynamic content – diagrams, animations, presentations and game video and are available for the iPad or Mac on the iBookstore. 

On USA Football: Find the details that can enhance your offense

It’s up on USA Football:

Good offenses evolve. Coaches looking for answers are most effective when they implement those ideas in a way that builds off the previous season’s structure and learning. They take what’s working best and find ways to enhance it.

One aspect of this that helped enhance our offense at Baldwin-Wallace was the adjustment of our quarterback’s footwork and ball handling from the pistol. In doing that, we created a backfield action in which all of our runs looked exactly the same way at the beginning of the play. This falls in line with our philosophy of establishing a base play….See more here.

Read about developing an offensive system in my new iBook The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System. Learn more about our pistol offense in 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays. Both are full of dynamic content – diagrams, animations, presentations and game video and are available for the iPad or Mac on the iBookstore. 

 

Dynamic Content in The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System

My first ibook 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays  was loaded with dynamic content.  The new iBook The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System includes even more.  Here’s a quick inventory of the content included:

75 Interactive Presentations totaling 622 slides.  Most of these include animation.

2 minute 50 second introduction video

40 game film cut-ups with press box and end zone angles totaling 13 minutes.

16 instructional videos totaling 35 minutes.

That’s 51 minutes of video alone!  A DVD costs you $40 and gives you slightly more in terms of video minutes.  The iBook is just $29.99 and is packed with more depth and detail than you can get in a video or book separately.

Get it for your iPad or Mac from the iBookstore.

Coaching Methodology – Attention to Detail

My new iBook The Zone Offense: Create a Structured System illustrates a method we used to teach the exact details of our offense.  It was a drastic change from how I learned football.  Technology provides us the opportunity to really teach the details of the game and create resources for our players to enhance their learning and performance.

When we started using the system in 2004, we created a hyperlinked, power point playbook which included illustrated and animated position manuals.  The feedback from the players was outstanding, “Coach this is like a video game.”  That’s what we were looking for, and it made an impact on learning and performance as we rewrote the school record books and produced Ohio’s leading rusher and scorer.

We accomplished this by starting with a simple philosophy of how we would coach:

COACHING IS TEACHING – teaching is the ability to inspire learning.  Our entire coaching and teaching philosophy starts with the teaching of good fundamentals.  The first thing we will evaluate on film Saturday morning is the job we have done teaching fundamentals.  What you see is what you taught or what you allowed in practice.  The teaching of fundamentals is the first step towards the improvement of our players.

Any coach can get up and diagram a play or defense.  However, your truly great coaches are the ones who go out and teach fundamentals.  We must teach our players how to play winning football.  WE MUST GIVE THEM THE “LITTLE SECRETS” TO SUCCEED!

Reflecting on that time, we had better than average talent, great coaching, but most importantly attention to detail through a sound coaching method.  Our install included:

• Interactive position meetings to review techniques, mostly through still frame illustrations.
• Film sessions that were more than the coach telling what was right or wrong, but rather the players learning to verbalize what they were seeing while understanding the fix.
• Walk through periods before warm-up.
• Individual periods focused on working at little things (WALT).
• A high tempo and crisp practice focused on the details.

All of these are illustrated in the iBook with plenty of examples.  Our position manuals for each position are given a chapter each.  Each is constructed around teaching the player the techniques that the will need to succeed in all of the different scenarios they will face in a game.  This is a great resource for any coach, and of course it’s unlike anything else out there.

Get The Zone Offense:  Create a Structured System on the iBookstore.  My first iBook 101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays includes great content that reflects this coaching method as well.