2012 In Review

Whew! Well, it's over. Having lost the league championship, yet finishing 7-1 on the season, many would say that was a great year. I think, however, that this past season has been one of the most unbelievable rides I've ever been on. I want to take time out to share this with you, and maybe you can see some of my shortcomings and some things we did to take advantage of some of our situations etc. Hell, analyze my situations and see what you'd have done differently, I'm all for that. Whatever you can take from this season, I'd be glad to, and whatever you can add, please, by all means shoot me an email at footballislifeblog@yahoo.com.

Lessons Learned
The first thing I learned is that the Unbalanced Single Wing (UBSW) is a pretty cool offense.  My hat's off to Dave Cisar's system as we were able to install it from the ground up and had great success with it.  We ended up having the Power series, the Spin series and Jet series in at the start of the season and never really added anything after that.  Our Jet series really came alive in the latter part of the season once folks had film on us and knew what we were going to be doing.  The other thing is the UBSW is one of the most fun offenses I've ever coached in (yes including Flexbone).  The simplicity of it is so simple, yet because so many folks have not seen the offense in decades, it creates quite a bit of confusion for the defense.  Anyhow, it was very fun to coach in, and I got numerous questions from parents, coaches and even the officials!

I have had tragedy strike during football season, but none like this season.  I've never lost a player, and I've never had this much tragedy strike.  Losing two parents, and a player in the span of four days was the most incredibly terrible thing I've had to witness as a human being.  Then having to put it all together and put it out there on the field was pretty tough too.  I was amazed at the resiliency of the young men I coached.  I actually think THEY helped ME deal with it all.  Then in the end, we lost a player to a very serious back injury, that may have ended his football career.  Thankfully enough, the young man will walk, however football is probably out for the rest of his life.  In all this tragedy I felt like the young men were able to keep it together, keep things in perspective and lose themselves in the game, exactly like I would have them do.  I can't say enough about the quality of the young men I coached this year, as our character shined through time and time again this season.

I have to learn to enjoy the season more.  I have just went through a 7-1 season, in which we set the record for best season in school history, and I feel as though we failed.  The season ended two weeks ago, and yet I cannot come to the realization that we did good, despite not winning our league title.  I'm not sure how you ever get over what we had happen at the end of the season where we come up short on a goal we set out to accomplish, but if you have any suggestions, send them my way, as I'm still hurting.

The 46 defense is a great defense, but it does have its limitations.  I found out exactly what those were this season.  The seven technique in that defense nearly got us killed this year and I didn't have that kid to fill that position.  A year ago, we in our league we faced no 21 personnel teams whatsoever.  The breakdown was as follows:

• 5- 10 personnel teams
• 2- 20 personnel teams

So as you can see the need for a dominant seven technique was not needed.  In comes the 2012 season, and boy look at how things change:

• 3-21 personnel teams
• 1- 11 personnel team
• 3- 10 personnel teams

Much different mix than a year before.  Anyhow, the addition of the tight end to the scheme really hurt us as I just did not have that player to sacrifice at the seven technique position.  Now, normally I'm a four man front guy, but I work for somebody and he likes the odd front, so I ran the 46 with 3-3 personnel.  Well, I moved to a true 3-3 for two games to try and stunt/blitz my way into some things, and I did not care for this at all.  The kids liked it, but we were sloppy with our execution of the blitzes and when you are sloppy in the 3-3, the holes show up BIG TIME.  So then I moved back to my old staple, the 4-2-5.  I played cover 3 with it and mixed in some man to man, and things started to tighten up.  Now I have the blessings of my boss, I get to run whatever I want next season.  Looks like I'm going back to the ol' 4-2-5!

Be ready for anything.  Here I was cruising along as a coordinator, and BAM, all of a sudden I got the head coach title slapped on me.   Three weeks before the season comes up, my boss, the head coach, has a mild heart attack. Now, I'm freaking out because this is a guy who has been a mentor of mine for years and is the epitome of a class act. Now I'm sitting there in a hospital room with him telling me, "You're it, go coach em' up kid". To which I dang near soil myself! Now, I've been a head coach in career twice, and I have to say this, I didn't care for it to be honest. The politics, the whining parents, the nagging administration, it just wasn't for me. I like my job as the defensive coordinator as I'm free to do what I want, when I want, and how I want. Sure, you do have some of that freedom as the head guy, but there's just too much political BS involved for my taste.  Anyhow, things went smooth and I didn't have much in the way of headaches from the parents, but then again winning cures everything.  Just be ready for anything, you never know what you will face, or what you will come up against.  In retrospect, looking back on the past season being able to do what we did with the tragedy we had AND an interim coach, I'm really quite amazed. 

Be ready for anything grasshopper...

Don't do too much.  I really put too much on my defense at times.  Our offense and special teams won us a lot of games, which is the EXACT opposite of how my other successful teams have won (in the past I've been more like UF is now).  Anyhow, winning is winning, so I'll take it, but not playing solid defense came down to me.  I have to do better in that department and keep less on the defense and just "let them play".

Special teams are special.  Our special teams unit single handily was the most outstanding unit on the field this season, with our punt team and kickoff return team leading all groups.  We returned a school record (and league most) 8 kickoffs for touchdowns this season.  Punting-wise we averaged 43.4 yards per punt in JUNIOR HIGH (yes, my punter was a stud) and we converted EVERY fake we attempted this season (four for four).  We only had to punt a grand total of 10 times this season, which is a third less than last season (34 times).  We did give up one blocked punt this season and had one bad snap, which was our total from a year ago, so we did not get better there.  We did not allow a single kickoff return for a touchdown as we followed the "onside every time" philosophy this year (that's after giving up 4 KOR's for touchdowns the year before).  Now, we did not have a very accurate field goal kicker, so we did not even have a field goal team, but we averaged a dismal 43% on our two-point conversions this season, which must get better.  All in all, I was impressed with our special teams, and our ability to flip the field position on our opponent was second-to-none in our league.

Get everyone involved.  Another lesson I took from Dave Cisar, was to get as many players involved as you can.  Our retention rate was unreal this season.  We had 44 kids show up day one, and by the start of the first game we had all 38 uniforms filled, and did not have to have cuts (we had three kids quit, one get hurt, and two others did not have the grades).  By the end of the season we finished our final game dressing 34 players due to injuries.  NOBODY quit after the initial 38 were selected.  This is after a season in which we finished with 22 kids after starting with 28 (four quit, 1 was kicked off, and 1 was injured).  Our ability to get everyone involved both in practice and in games was essential to this retention rate.  Another thing I implemented was the "Buddy System".  Each eighth grader was responsible for a seventh grade teammate.  They exchanged phone numbers and had to answer weekly questions about their partners in front of the team.  I think the Buddy System really helped our overall team chemistry and kept us from having individual "cliques" within our group of 38. 

Tackle everyday.  The head coach and I disagreed on this originally, but since implementing this in his absence he has seen the light.  We were AWESOME tacklers this season compared to last.  Last year it took three to four guys to slow a ball carrier up, whereas this season we had several guys make solo tackles.  On film, the biggest difference is that the first guy would get the ball carrier down instead of holding on why the others got there.  We literally tackled everyday for the first month of the season.  After that we tackled on Monday and Wednesday with Monday being full bore tackling stations, and Wednesday being fit and freeze only.  The last two weeks of the season we tapered off to just fit and freeze type drills on Monday only. 

Alignment and Assignment and Fit-and-Freeze drills are essential at this age.  I have always been a big team guy.  I want to see reps and I want to see them live.  Well, in researching practice methodology over the past few years, I have found the good ones don't do this.  They do a lot of FNF and AA drills instead.  I cut our live team time on offense in half this season and we rarely went live on defense.  Offensively we did FNF on Monday, with live team on Tuesday and all plays on air on Wednesday, which included simulating game situations.  Defensively, we did FNF on Monday, Inside Drill on Tuesday and Seven-on-Seven on Wednesday.  Now if a team we were facing had very little passing threat we would do a live defensive team on Tuesday and then do Inside Drill on Wednesday.  Special teams we did at least one live per week.  Early on in preseason we did all of them live, but as the season progressed we cut that down to 2 a week, then at the end we did not do any live special teams.  FNF really improved, not only our technique, but our younger players confidence as well.  There's a lot you take for granted when it comes to coaching and one thing was my players level of development, and boy did I undershoot it.  That was clearly evident from my coaching last season.  This season was much better as we took the approach that our players knew absolutely nothing about the game and we were starting at the ground floor. 

The No-Huddle offense is the way to go.  I have dabbled with no-huddle in the past, but not like I did this season.  Now we were no Oregon, but in our live team sessions we averaged about 25 plays a session, which is better than a play a minute.  We had two speeds, regular and 9-1-1.  9-1-1 was our hurry up stuff and we really did well with that.  In three out of our eight games we scored right before halftime using our up-tempo pace and the largest amount of time we had was 1:18.  In game three we scored on a four play 61 yard drive with 55 seconds left in the half and one timeout.  In game five we scored on a five play 77 yard drive with 1:09 left and two timeouts.  In game seven we scored on a five play 48 yard drive with 1:18 left to go and one timeout remaining.  These were points we'd not have gotten last season, and in games four and seven they were the difference in the game.  If you are still huddling, you are wasting a lot of time, and I don't mean in the games.  The benefit we saw from going no-huddle is not in the games, but in practice.  We doubled our reps on practice, by far and in the games you automatically have a two-minute offense built in.  We can't go hurry up because a lot of our players play both ways, but still, we went no-huddle to improve efficiency in practice time and eliminate wasted time. 

Things to Improve On

Practice efficiency.  There was still a lot of wasted time in practice.  Now, mind you, we were practicing for easily two-and-a-half hours a year ago, and cut that down to two hours on average this season.  Still, there are areas where we need to improve and be able to get these kids home at a decent hour.  I have pushed and pushed, but the coaches I have are not really taking to the up-tempo like I am.  I don't have the luxury of firing anyone either as I was glad to have the other two helping me.  Anyhow, I will continue to work with them and push for MAXIMUM efficiency until we get it.

Relaxing.  I have a tough time turning off football, and even though this is Junior High football, I still constantly watched film, breaking things down and even took things so far as creating scouting reports (our league allows us to scout and trade film).  I also have a tough time detaching from the game, even in the off-season.  I simply cannot get my mind off the game, and I have to, or else I'm afraid burn-out is coming.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Finding a kicker.  Holy cow, thank goodness we onside every time, or else I'm not sure what we'd have done.  Also, we could have used a couple of field goals, that thankfully didn't come back to haunt us during the season.   I need to learn more about the individual technique of kicking, as to be honest I'm clueless.

Getting over the wall.  Our player development went good for the first six games.  Then we seemed to hit a wall where nobody really improved except for the younger players.  This concerns me, because it's the second year in a row I felt this way.  I even felt as though some of our players went backwards in their development, which is a really bad scenario.  Several players plateaued about that time in the season, and our toughest games were towards the end of the season.  I need to find ways to keep the young men motivated for an entire season, and keep developing their skills.  I know there comes a point in the season where getting any better is slim to none, but you CAN improve at least a little bit every day...right?

Handling a loss.  My favorite quote is one I live by..."I hate to lose even more than I love to win".  This is me in a nutshell.  A win to me is a win, nothing big about it, you did your job, you won.  A loss is failure though, and unacceptable.  I have a hard time coming to grips with losing, and when you lose the league championship on the last game of the season when you've gone 7-0, it really becomes are a hard pill to swallow. 

Dealing with officials.  I guess I'm getting a bit crotchety in my old age, as I had a few of those yeller' hankies thrown on me this season.  However, I must say, our referees made the NFL replacement refs look like officiating scholars.  Anyhow, this does not bode well when teaching young men about dealing with adversity.  I'm sure that official did not need me to bite his head off, I should merely "explain" my point of view, rather than trying to stuff it down his throat.  Point taken!

Do you kiss your mom with that mouth?

Well, that's my 2012 in review.  I feel with what my little guys went through this season, and where they came from, it has been a success story.  I'd love to have a trophy to put in the case (believe me, we need one, that damn thing is bare), but the memories of this season will go down as a special one in my book.  I have to say, watching young men conquer adversity like this bunch did, was quite a site to see.  I only hope next year we can do the same...

Duece

P.S.- For those headed to the playoffs, now's not the time to let up, keep on keepin' on!!!  Good luck!

Using the Punt as a Weapon

Many coaches look at punting as the raising of the white flag when on offense.  Some coaches even look at punting as what you do when you've failed to move the ball.  I look at punting as an opportunity to stress my opponent even further.  For years I was like the others and simply aligned in a standard tight punt formation, punted the ball, hoped like hell my guys covered well and got the defense on the field.  Well, not anymore!  I'm going to take you through some of the evolution of my punt teams to where we are today and show you how you should relish the chance to punt the football instead of looking at fourth down as a failure!

Loco Punt
A few years back in American Football Monthly magazine, there was an article on the Loco Punt.  I can't remember the specifics, but I remember the scheme being very simple, fake friendly and utilized directional punting.  What I really liked about the Loco Punt was not only the directional punting, but the fact you punted towards a split receiver, who could release and get down field quickly.  I also liked all the fake potential the Loco Punt had as well.  Here is the base formation:

The punter started by initiating a "shift" call which took the WB and moved him on the LOS and dropped the RE off.  Once set, the RE would then go in motion and align as a wing to the left side of the formation as shown below.

The motion would really get the defense to working now, as they had to honor the change of strength, which is something not many defenses deal with well, when facing a punt team.  The more and more we ran this, the more punt safe defenses we saw.  The final formation is shown below.

From here, if the defense did not adjust we could either punt the football or run a sweep fake to the side the defense did not adjust to .  If the defense over adjusted, then we could run a sweep fake to the side they left open.  There was also a pass fake to go along with it as well.  All of these fakes, coupled with the shift and motion, made life miserable on the return team.  This was my goal all along. 

The punt protection and coverage schemes were also very simple, so much so we really only repped them once a week.  The fakes made us known around our league as a team that fourth down didn't always mean we were going to punt.  The last season I was in charge of the punt team we had a punt fake success rate of over 75 percent with 7 or less yards to gain (it helped our punter was also an option QB)!!!  Needless to say I was sold on the idea that punting was "giving up".

The Wildcat Punt
Well, enter my new job, where last year I really only dealt with defense, and now this season due to our head coach being sick, I'm now in charge of just about EVERYTHING!  So, I got a chance to go back to the punt team.  Well, we have chosen to run Dave Cisar's Unbalanced Single Wing Offense and one formation in his playbook is very similar to the good ol' Wildcat.  I looked at that formation some time before deciding to go with some things, but here's what I came up with and so far we've been DEADLY with our punt team.

All of the above is our normal alignment for our Wildcat package with the exception of the depth of the punter.  I have chosen to shift into this look from our base look so our Punter aligns at three-and-a-half yards back, and then shifts back to his normal ten yard depth (this is junior high football, if it were high school I'd be back at 12-13 yards).  From the get-go you can see the defense is forced to honor the three receivers by covering them man-to-man, or else risk the quick throw for the first down.  Being unbalanced we have our BB look for any overloads by the defense before signaling all clear and ready to punt.  Ideally, we are going to punt the ball if we get four defenders strong and three defenders weak (as shown above).  When we punt, the blocking is simple, as we have adopted Cisar's GOD (Inside Gap, On, Down) blocking scheme for our punts as well.  So all the players on the LOS block using this GOD rule, and they do so for a two count.  The BB releases outside and walls off any defenders coming outside the PT.  So the blocking for the above front would be as follows:

Now I know what you are thinking, wait, the DE on the punt team's left side has a free run to the punter.  Well, we rugby punt, so on the snap we are putting distance between the DE and the punter immediately.  The other little addition we had to add was that the LOS players treat the LB's as though they were in their inside gap (since most of Cisar's stuff does not involve OL blocking LB's, we had to improvise a bit).  The blocking back simply takes the outside rusher wherever he wants to go and the punter either goes around the block and punts, or steps up inside and punts.  Either way the edge rusher cannot be right.

Coverage is also very easy, and since most teams can ill afford to give up six players to double team the three gunners you have presented them, you now have easy free releases down field for the RE, LE and the WB.  The coverage for the Wildcat punt is shown below:

The RE will release outside and works to the outside hip of the returner.  The WB has a 2 way go, but must end up in the middle of the returner (he does not pick a side).  The QB will work to the inside hip of the returner, and must get an inside release (we've had him fake outside then come underneath vs. press looks).  The BB will secure his block and then will work to the punt-side hash mark and is a 1/2 field safety.  The punter punts the ball, and will signal if it's a bad punt and then will drift back to the opposite hash mark and play the 1/2 field safety away from where the ball was punted.  All other players, after securing their blocking assignment, will take a natural pursuit path to the football.  Having the three gunners has allowed us to remove some of the traditional "lanes" many of us were schooled on (and some of struggled at teaching) because we are essentially having the hounds flush the prey to the hunters.  Lanes don't really matter all that much, although we do work them, however the idea here is get your block, then fly down field to the ball. 

The fakes are the key essentials to the Wildcat punt as well.  If we want our punter to read the punt return team's reaction to our scheme, we give him a "green" call, which stands for green light if the punt return team bails out in coverage.  The punter will see this and simply tuck the ball and run for the first down.

We will also look for overloads by the defense and call our fakes accordingly.  We have three of these, two runs and one pass.  The first fake is simply our sweep to the right, shown below.

The OL simply blocks the GOD rule (inside gap, on, down) with the right guard pulling and wrapping while the BB leads.  This call has been made because the defense decided to give us four players to our two-man surface.  Depending on who you have at punter either the punter can call this fake or the coach, but either way you have caught the defense guessing, and now are making them pay for it.

If the defense chooses to overload the strong side of the formation, we simply check to the sweep to the weak side.  Since we rugby punt, many teams will try to do this overload, but it leaves them extremely weak to the short side of the formation.

The BB will shift over to the weak side and we will snap the ball once he is set.  Again the right guard pulls and the BB leads the play. 

If the distance to go is greater than you want to run for it, or the defense has remained balance, yet you still need the fake, the pass fake is a good way of moving the ball down field.  The RE will clear the zone by releasing outside as if covering and running a "go" route.  The WB, will also take his normal release, but will run an out route instead of covering (this route is usually wide open because the safety has been trying to block the WB all night long covering punts, he does not expect an out route here).  The QB, will drag across the formation looking to come out on the strong side about two yards deep giving the punter an outlet receiver if he gets in trouble.  The line blocks with hinge protection and the BB slides out and blocks the first threat outside the PT.  The punter gets the snap looks to punt for two steps then rolls out looking to hit the WB at the first down marker. 

So far teams have quit trying to line up and get a return on us and are staying back and playing defense.  This gives our punt team a huge advantage because the rush is slowed, and there is nobody to worry about returning the football.  So far we are averaging a little over 35 yards a punt and have given up zero punt return yards!

Duece