Strength and Conditioning - Big picture

The head guy at my alma mater is someone who's on a different level compared to most folks.  He's something else, he really is.  The football program there is undefeated in league the last two years, with only one league loss in the last three, three playoff appearances in a row including a run to the finals last season (which was supposed to be a rebuilding year), and is looking at winning his 6th section championship sometime in the next two years as his rising Jr class is STACKED with talent, several of whom got significant varsity playing time as sophomores.

How has he done this?  It's hard to point to any one thing, honestly.  He brought the Wing-T with him and is running for 400+ yards a game with it.  He has ~40 kids on the team at all three levels of the program.  He works his players as hard as anyone else in practice and demands accountability from them like no one else I've ever seen.  That said, in my opinion, the biggest impact on the program has been the change in the weight program.

His workout style is different from anything I've seen in a football program.  They do Upper Body on Monday, Lower on Tues, Core on Wednesday, Olympics on Thursday, Shoulders/Competitive Games on Friday.  They rotate three times through eight different exercises with minimal rest in between.  It's essentially a body building split with superset/circuit training infused with lots of stability exercises.  Explaining it doesn't do it justice, however.  It's organized chaos with hustle, energy, and lots and lots of sweat.  If an overweight kid has a half decent work ethic, the weight melts off his body and his body composition completely changes after a year of going through the weight program.

Recently on Coach Huey I asked about this program and if I was missing something compared to the traditional style workouts that I'd seen other people using.  The resounding response I got was this: the results being achieved were because of the kids committing to working their asses off, his ability to drive them to work said asses off, and teenage physiology being fantastic for building muscle/losing weight.

So if this fairly unique workout style isn't the key, then, what do we learn from this?

1-What you do isn't as important as how you do it.  Countless hours are spent debating what we should/shouldn't be doing in the weight room, but really, as long as your program is organized and safe and your kids are working hard, you'll get good results.

2-Change your lifts up, avoid settling into a routine.  One of the best things that Coach B does is he's constantly having them do new and different exercises, which helps keep things fresh and therefore keeps the energy/enthusiasm good because the kids never know what's coming.

2a-Corollary: Don't necessarily do new/weird stuff just for the sake of doing it.  One way to incorporate point #2 is to have a PROGRESSION of exercises to develop their abilities, as well as keep things fresh.

3-Get bodies in the weight room.  You don't know who you're helping when they start coming in and you don't know how you're helping them.  Some kids need football more than football needs them and some kids look like Jane but lift like Tarzan (and vice versa).  Football teams need depth and they need to have second tier players (not your stars, but not your scrubs) who are strong, healthy, and mobile athletes.  I truly believe that the team with the better second tier players will usually come out triumphant.

4-Incorporate competitive games/drills during the off season.  You'll learn about your players by putting them in new/different settings.  You'll see who you can count on, who you can't, who your winners are, and who is a competitor.  Just make something up, it doesn't nearly matter as much as having them get after each other.


Bottom line: get them in the weight room, push them hard in an organized program, keep things fresh, keep it fun.

The ‘Jack’ Backer…

(Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Versatility)

     Discussions on Coach Huey frequently revolve the differences between a 3 man line (3-3, 3-4, whatever) and a 4 man line (4-3, 4-4, etc).  One of the points that is frequently used to tout the benefits of a 4 man line is the fact that you really only need 2 'true' DL to play the DT spots, the DEs can be OLB bodies and still have great effect.  The point is made that in a 3 man line, you need 3 'true' DL to play the DT spots.  For the record, I'm not disagreeing at all.  In fact, I think this is a very good point.
     The development of my approach to the 3-4 has been tempered by my desire to do certain things that I know requires flexibility within your scheme and athletes.  I want to be able to run what I consider to be the "standard" 3-4 fronts: Under, Okie, and Bear.  However, I want to be able to get into a 4 man line with some degree of ease without terribly complicating things for the athletes.  Problem was, I ran into issues with this because of how it conflicted with certain beliefs/preferences I have.
     I don't like using left/right personnel.  Too simple, too exploitable, too passive, any of these and more.  I just do not like the idea in my head.  Plus, it messes with teaching at times.  I don't necessarily like strong/weak personnel because I don't want to get thrown off by teams that are 'tempo to the line', such as my alma mater's current approach of being an up-tempo wing-T (not Gus Malzahn style, but hustling to the huddle, getting the play, and SPRINTING to the line).  I like field/boundary personnel as a compromise between left/right and strong/weak personnel, but there's no shortage of learning involved there.  Teaching the front 5, in particular, to run fronts, stunts, and blitzes from several fronts on both sides of the offense is a load...
     I came to this conclusion during this season after playing a team that was running a no-huddle offense that alternated between full house T and split back 20 personnel by subbing straight from the sidelines to the formation.  I couldn't match their substitutions and get a good call in for the situation.  Luckily, I had a kid playing OLB/DE who could move back to ILB in some situations and play in the interior.  He was passable there, next year he's going to be a fearsome DE if they can't teach him to play ILB better (a position that will ultimately benefit his team more).  That kid knew 2 positions and was smart enough to recognize when to bounce between the two of them.
    I realized that creating a hybrid position, a DE/OLB or warrior/ninja, offered the opportunity to do several things:

• Play field/boundary fronts with personnel that wasn't just left/right
• Play a complementary even front to the standard odd fronts, specifically an "Over" front variation paired with the "Under" front.
• Focus learning into a select position, one that had athletes specifically prepared and chosen for it.

Thus, the concept of the 'Jack' backer arrived into my head.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None...

    Not necessarily. Most offenses will have a certain position that is an essential position to their success. That position will almost always need to be multi-talented and/or cross trained in order to perform that position. Common examples can be H-Back, Tight End, and, most of all these days, Quarterback. Quarterbacks are asked to run, throw, think, and lead. Tight Ends must block and catch, H-Backs must motion, block, catch, all sorts of niches to be filled. Do smart offensive coaches throw inexperienced sophomores into these positions? Not willingly, no.
     A relative of mine is a very successful coach at a school about an hour away and is known for producing 1 outstanding receiver and 1 outstanding QB just about every year. Is he lucky to have some amazing athletes playing for him? Oh brother, you better believe it! But they are also developed well, particularly the receivers. At least one reason why is that there is an unofficial 'apprentice' program within the receiver ranks. As juniors, they play to the QB's blind side and learn the position at the varsity level, develop the skills, and hopefully punish the coverage. As seniors, they line up to the QB's throwing arm and catch lots and lots of passes.
    A friend was successful using a similar philosophy when coaching defensive backs. Juniors typically played corner, seniors typically played safety. For what he was asking the safeties to do in their cover 4 scheme, he needed players who saw the game 'slow down', players who made great reads and understood the checks and adjustments within the defense. Conversely, he joked that his corners started out as 'trained monkeys'. He drilled them and drilled them and drilled them to remove thought or confusion, which helped them slow things down and then allowed them to learn beyond their roles. Because they had played corner as juniors, they moved inside to safety as seniors with an understanding of how the corner position worked within the scheme and therefore had a more thorough understanding of how it all fit together. This 'apprenticeship' wasn't 100% consistent, but it worked out well for him.
     With the concept of the Jack player, the apprentice method can apply in two ways: 1-A player starts at another position and switches to Jack later, or 2-A player develops behind an existing Jack. For the first method, you must have an understanding of what you are looking for in a position. What kind of skill set is necessary to play there, or at the very least what kind of production must you get from that position? For me, this position needs to be able to do 3 things well: 1-Drop into coverage from the 50 front, 2-Pressure from the edge, 3-Play the edge vs the run. #1 and #2 ask for a degree of athleticism and agility, #3 seems to ask for strength and size.
     I would love to have a kid every year who measured in at 6'1, 205 and played like his momma had been insulted by the opposing running backs, but that's not the reality of our profession. Our players change shape and size every year. You can find someone to perform #1-2 fairly easily by looking to your LB and safety positions. But having such a player hold up against the run may be an issue if you don't have a body that is developed enough to take the constant banging on them from offensive tackles. This is where the Jack back and Sam backer tie into one another so well.
     The requirements for each position are close to the same, but the truth is that the Jack requires a more physical player vs an often physically greater opponent. In the Under front and the Over front, he is playing vs an offensive tackle, who will often be larger and more physical than a tight end or fullback (if he's worth a damn, that is).

     The OLB opposite him, the 'Sam' backer, is a position to use to develop players for the 'Jack' spot. More often than not, the Sam will be playing in space against athletes that are more comparable to him. Taking an athletic junior OLB with room to grow and develop and playing him at the Sam spot allows you to prepare someone to move to the Jack spot the next season. With a year of practice under his belt, another year in the weight room, and relevant game experience, he will be ready to move into a position that requires him to play coverage, rush the pass, and play in the trenches.
     By creating such a versatile player, you are then able to create opportunities within your defense to increase variety without necessarily increasing difficulty for MOST of your defense. By installing the Jack Open (Under), Jack Closed (Over), Jack Field/Boundary (Under or Over depending on formation) fronts, you create a lot of variable looks without changing much because of the pre-established versatility of your Jack backer. Consider the following diagram of Jack Field:

     In both diagrams, the Jack is next to a 3 technique and opposite a shaded nose and a 5 technique. In both diagrams the W is reading a guard covered by a 3 technique, the M is reading a guard with a shaded nose, and the S is paired with a 5 technique. The R is on the same side as the J and the W in both and the F is to the TE side in both, reading the same person in both. The run fits are consistent for just about every single position and there was minimal adjustment after the call is made. As soon as the huddle call is made, every player knows where he needs to be and can start to get aligned already, with or without the offense, eliminating problems usually associated with both no-huddle teams and tempo to the line teams.
    While this is delightfully consistent for the defense, for the offense it presents a problem. Is the defense going to align in what appears to be a 4 man front or a 3 man front? Are they going to be set to the field or to the formation? Will they be playing cover 4 from 2 high or 1 high 'robber'? You can be multiple and variable within a scheme like this. But the real benefit is that by taking one position and asking a lot of that single position, you are allowing other positions to have a simpler life. Simple keys, simple assignments = better, faster, more aggressive play.

So… What Should I Do?
    More than anything else, I'm hoping this makes you think a bit. Consider ways to take what you do and what you ask of your players and see if you can't find one position that would better your defense and better your scheme by demanding MORE of them. Maybe it's an ILB that plays as a flexed DL some times, maybe it's a safety that alternates between up high and down low, I don't know. But think about what you could do by taking that player and asking more from them and think about how you can prepare them for that assignment. We all have a 'best player' on our defense, someone that makes things click. What I'm proposing is that perhaps we should be guiding our 'best players' to a specific position, a specific role that can maximize what we want to do.

My Argument For Coaching The Whole Person

It's Not Enough...

In a recent thread on Coach Huey, an argument sprung up surrounding the role of coaches within kids lives. Everyone was very assured that they, in fact, were correct and it was more than a little bit heated, which was unfortunate. It began with a video being posted of QB guru and expert Darin Slack, where he passionately lays out his case for the kids to become aware that the QB position is "Not about you". This is an interesting issue to me because I feel that it closely ties in with Viktor Frankl's book that I recently discussed/introduced.

We're Famous For Our Masochism

Football coaches are particularly famous for the amount of time, energy, money, etc that we put into our passion. My uncle, a very successful coach who lives about an hour away, has more or less forsaken the idea of having his own children because he could never find a woman who could come to terms with the fact that every year he has a family of around 150 children. Every volunteer coach I know gives up money they could be making in order to be there. Every teaching coach I know has taken a voluntary vow of poverty (almost extreme poverty in our district) as part of the gig.

Every offseason we go to clinics, we visit colleges, we have informal sit-downs over BBQ and suds, in an effort to do the things we do BETTER than we've done it before. We buy DVDs, we read books (!), we visit message boards and post stupid questions that we know are dumb but we ask anyways, because we want the learning and the knowledge. But WHY does all of this matter?

It's More Than Football

There's no crime in being an excellent technical coach. I dare say that it's my dream to be considered an expert at producing great technicians in any position. Teaching the technical skills necessary for the game is critical, we cannot roll a ball out and have the team scrimmage for a half hour and expert meaningful improvement. Tim Murphy, one of the most successful coordinators of the double-wing offense, an offense that is largely used to beat up and roll over and physically assert oneself on the opponent, is a fantastic coach of the offensive line.

But the problem for me comes down to this: we cannot only coach the technical skills of our players. We have to coach the whole athlete, all of them, not just coach what we need them to be able to execute. We have to address their personal deficiencies in addition to their athletic ones. We must take EVERY aspect of them and do our damnedest to make ALL of them better, because not doing so is not enough.

You're Overstepping Your Bounds

Maybe. But I don't think so. There's a reason why we have interscholastic sports and it's not fundraising. The purpose behind interscholastic sports is in the meaning of the word extracurricular, which is what sports are. They're for the purpose of going BEYOND the curriculum, they are there to teach something that will not and cannot be learned within the walls of the classrooms.

Now I am not saying that we must all become avatars of His Holiness, Sir Timothy Tebow or disciples of Joe Ehrmann, but we need to have a goal within our programs to improve every aspect of our players, not just their technical skills and physical ability. You can do this in any number of ways, from outwardly preaching and proselytizing, to selecting a scheme that develops the kinds of character you want, to running an offseason weights program that enhances these things, the options are numerous and varied. But you need to do something. Failing to address your players inadequacies or deficiencies is unacceptable because we cannot be content to simply produce more football players. Football will end one day, but their lives will stretch much further and be much more influential. When football is over, our work at creating the best technical player is done and gone, but our work at creating the best PERSON will continue and carry on for quite some time.

Copy-Paste-Fin

These are my final thoughts from the last response in the Coach Huey thread and I think it fits nicely here:

At the end of the day, it cannot only be about the football. If it's only about the football, then I will have wasted every moment of every day that I've spent working on football, both as a coach and as a player. There has to be more to it than just football or this world would've been better off without me, and that's one thing I won't have.

Simplicity Vs Detail

Something that’s been on my mind a lot recently has been the idea of keeping things simple vs allowing complexity. Part of it is the conflict between my two defensive backgrounds: in high school I played in an Under Front 4-3 that was 100% quarters, 100% of the time, whereas in college I played in the 4-3 version of the TCU 4-2-5 (No 3-spoke secondary, but A LOT of conceptual carryover) which was a “scheme for smart kids” as our DC phrased it. There’s something to be said for both approaches, which is what I want to examine in this post.

Simplicity

A common phrase you’ll hear around sports and football in particular is that “You can’t teach speed”. Another that I’ve heard and used is “Luck follows speed”. Either way, when playing defense the importance of playing fast, in addition to being fast, cannot be underestimated. Some of the best collegiate defenses over the last few decades have been predicated on speed and the ability to run to the football, thereby constricting the playing field and making breakaway plays occur less frequently. One of the best examples of a speed defense wrecking absolute havoc on an offense would be Miami’s woodshed beating of Nebraska in the 2002 Rose Bowl. Miami’s defense, loaded with future first rounders and oozing speed, athleticism and quickness, swarmed all over Nebraska’s I-Option.

The reason I mention all this is that one of the best ways to get your boys to play fast (which is almost as good as BEING fast) is to simplify and remove thought. The more thought that happens, the slower the boys will play and the worse your defense will perform. When all 11 guys KNOW their assignment, KNOW what they’re supposed to be doing, and aren’t processing, but are just reacting, you’re doing something right. The idea is to have kids entering a zen-like state of play where conscious thought doesn’t exist anymore. For my high school team, we had 1 front, 1 coverage, and very few adjustments. I learned almost everything I would need to know as a middle backer by the end of my sophomore year. By the time I was a senior, I was helping our HC with the gameplan.

By simplifying your scheme, you allow for this kind of automatic play which should minimize ‘busts’ in coverage, incorrect run fit reads, and mis-alignments. You’ll have an easier time identifying your problems because the number of things that can go wrong are significantly less.

The main problem I have with this approach is simple: when you’re good, it’s good and when you’re bad, it’s bad. I don’t mean to suggest that less talented teams simply MUST have more complexity to their schemes, but I do think that if you’re less talented you will have problems if you take the simplicity route. When you have 5 future college athletes on the same D, such as my senior season, you’ll do special things against most teams.

Complexity

In college I played in a scheme that was darn near impossible for freshman to start in at some positions because you just couldn’t learn everything you needed to learn. Obviously, you have this kind of luxury at the collegiate level because you are drawing from 4 classes of athletes, whereas in high school you really only have juniors and seniors.

At heart I’m a pretty simple guy and that generally gets reflected in most aspects of my life. If I could get away with it, I’d wear a white collared shirt and blue jeans with sandals every day. I’d eat cereal, sandwich, and steak & veggies for my 3 meals a day if I didn’t think I’d end up looking like Mark Mangino. Any girl I’ve dated can tell you that it’s a great thing for them because I only spend money on food, gas, and them.

Football-wise, I’m not much different. I want a defense that protects it’s LBs, stops the run, forces turnovers, and suffocates the offenses. I don’t really care in what form that comes in, I just want good defense. Offensively, I wish I could coach a flexbone or split back veer offense. Run the same basic stuff over and over and over and have the defense be wrong and wrong and wrong. Don’t get so complicated that you have nothing to hang your hat on, nothing vanilla to fall back to.

Our 4-3 Under with Quarters coverage lasted a long, long time under my HC before he left to take another job and stayed around under our former HC. Our former HC was over matched for the position and lacked long-term goals. Our athlete development suffered, the talent well dried up, and the scheme suffered. In order to compensate, the defense had to add complexity. In adding complexity, the scheme became more compromised. Eventually our former HC decided to burn it down and start over, enter me.

The irony of the situation is that I’m now running a fairly complex 3-4 defense for my alma mater. We were left trying to compensate for our sub-par athletes with a scheme that was predicated on simplicity, so we embraced the horror. Our guys had to learn not one, but TWO coverages. They had to learn to slant AND to play shades. They had to learn a 3-man front, a four-man front, and a bear front. They had to make their own adjustments on the field based off of film study and intuition. They had to learn SIX blitzes after having three for most of their career.

The dangers of complexity are several. One, mis-alignments are bound to happen and will frequently happen in moments of stress, confusion, or importance. It’s been my experience that those moments usually are some kind of horrible combination of the three. Two, limited practice time means limited experience at each new thing. Practicing our 3-man front, four-man front, bear front, different coverages, blitzes, and whatever else might come up over the course of our weekly practice is almost impossible. A lot of times we’d go into a game only having seen or repped certain things once, if at all. I frequently had to tell my guys “We knew they ran it, but we just didn’t have time to practice it all”. Three, THINKING. I dunno about you, but just hearing what my guys are thinking on a day to day, moment to moment basis is frightening. Considering that, the idea of them thinking about what they’re doing on the field is just horrifying.

The benefits? We were unpredictable, adaptable, flexible, and, at times, dominant. We finished the season with the second best defense in the league, fifth best defense in the area (3 counties), and best season in at least 4 years. Our guys had fun running a defense that was very similar to what they would watch on Saturday and thought they could see on Sundays. The troubles of complexity and ensuing stress created a lot of issues, but it never got boring for our guys when they were constantly being challenged to do something different than the play before and the one before that. At one point in a game this year we ran a different front, stunt, and coverage on 3 consecutive plays, something unheard of in prior seasons. For us, considering where our program is at and where we want it to be going, we wanted to run a defense the kids found fun and exciting, which this was.

Where I Stand

If I had my druthers, I’d run my defense very similarly to how TCU runs their 4-2-5 with a 3-spoke secondary that is divorced from the front 6. But, at this point in my career I’m married to the 3-4 scheme that I’ve created. So, I’m torn between my own natural desire for simplicity and the complexity that I’ve created for myself. I love my 3-4 that I’ve created, but it is learning intensive and there are some instances where we’re just hoping everything goes well. I love simple defense, but I worry over what would happen when we face a team who’s categorically better than us or has us figured out. Right now, I’m a complexity guy, but I’m looking to get back to what makes me feel comfortable, which is simplicity and execution.