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5 Tips for Breaking Down Film

If scouting is the lifeblood of baseball, watching film is what makes football tick
by: Patrick Finley
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Every coach starts somewhere. Whether it the first year of freshman football in high school or on a Pop Warner team or in a coach’s meeting, most football coaches can remember the first time they started watching film.

For Matt Kelchner, it started at home. Kelchner, head coach of Div. III Christopher Newport, still remembers seeing grainy football film for the first time. It was at home. His father, a college coach, would bring home a film projector and shoot images from his team’s last game on the wall. Kelchner, who was born in 1959, first starting seeing these films in the mid- to late-1960s.

Kelchner was going through it – with his dad – before he probably knew how to run a film projector. And that’s the thing with analyzing film. If scouting is the lifeblood of baseball, watching film is what makes football tick. And while there are many, many similarities between how coaches analyze tapes, there are a few tricks some coaches use to get a slight edge.

Even if it doesn’t change the result of what happens on the screen.

A Constant

In football, especially these days, every game could mean the difference between keeping your job and losing it, between getting promoted or staying where you are. And, of course, the difference between a win and a loss.

“The wheel was invented a long time ago,” said Kirk Ciarrocca, the offensive coordinator at Div. I-AA Delaware. “As you go from place to place, you take things with you. You steal a little bit, you just learn from the people around you.”

In most college programs, a game plan is set either Sunday or Monday, but usually Monday, a day players have off from practice. Graduate assistants have by then already cut up the tape, usually with a sophisticated computer system, and coaches spend most of Sunday and Monday sorting through the footage and designing a plan of attack. At many larger programs, and especially against conference opponents, this can be done weeks in advance.

“Sometimes we only look at one or two tapes,” said Jeff Durden, the offensive coordinator at 2004 Div. I-AA champion James Madison. “We’ll find a game against a team similar to our team. We also always watch their most recent game, to see what they’ve been doing lately.”

Gain an Advantage

Even though basic film watching is a coaching staple, most coaches do some little things differently. Whether it’s a product of trying to create an advantage or just a necessity given their size and the talent of their team, coaches each have their own ways of doing things.

Some have been picked up along the way – Durden studied under Colorado State head coach Sonny Lubick and Ciarrocca learned at film-watching the feet of former offensive coordinator and head coach Jerry Berndt. Valdosta State defensive coordinator Ashley Anders was a graduate assistant at Auburn under Tommy Tuberville.

Here are five tips for analyzing film:

Tip No. 1: Put the Work In

Whoever said that time is money must have had football in mind. There are precious few hours when coaches are allowed to be with their players, so coaches must be as prepared as possible, as quickly as possible.

If there’s any advantage to be gained when it comes to films, it would be time. Quite simply, the faster coaches – or graduate assistants – can put together basic tapes, the quicker coaches can watch them and develop a game-plan.

“It’s an awful lot of work – it always has been,” Ciarrocca said. “You’ve got to be thorough. We watch all the tape, just like everyone else does. Because you know your opponents going to be working hard.”

Once Ciarrocca has the basic tape, he spends at least 12 hours every Monday developing a game plan. If he’s rushed, the scheme won’t be as thorough as it needs to be, and the opponent gains an advantage. “Hopefully we can came up with stuff to put kids in a position to be successful,” he said. “Not doing that, that’s what makes us uneasy.”

To help expedite matters, it’s important to hire a graduate assistant or assistant coach, depending on your situation, with a working knowledge of whatever computer-based system you’re using.

Anders sees his graduate assistants as invaluable. Because they’re the ones cutting up the tape each week, he thinks as them as resident experts on a given team. “A lot of times, I’ll go ask them what they think, whether they saw a team doing something as often as I did,” Anders said. “That’s good for us because they know what they’re doing – our GA’s are great – and good for them because it helps them, too.”

Durden tries to keep it simple. He limits his film splicing to about 15 or 16 different categories, somewhat pedestrian when compared to larger programs. He also is smart enough to relegate responsibility to other coaches. He’ll hand the tape of the defensive fronts to the offensive line coach, tapes of the coverages to the wide receivers coach and tapes of blitz packages to the running backs coach. At the same time, he’ll put together the overarching offensive game plan.

He’s found that he can get more analytical by having the coaches below him in the pecking order look at the nuts and bolts of each clip. And all of this is made possible by the efficient compiling of the tape to begin with. “When you don’t have to write things down after every play, you notice a lot more things,” he said. “The higher up you get, and the less note-taking you have to do, the more abstract you can get with it.”

The same goes for Kelchner. He defers to his assistants on some issues of scouting, but monitors the overall scouting by looking at their final cuts of the film. “As a head coach, I can always override an assistant,” Kelchner said, “but I give our staff a great deal of opportunity to make their cases or points regarding what they’ve seen.”

And that’s where coaches can get an advantage.

Tip No. 2: Find an Editing Style That Works For You

Kelchner, Durden and Ciarrocca all have different preferences when it comes to an editing a film. All three think that their way gives them an advantage. Kelchner doesn’t like to replay his tapes; he feels that he gets a better idea of the flow of the game by watching it all the way through. “I try just to watch the flow of the game and how it was played,” he said. “Sort the fans’ view of the game.

Anders likes doing the same thing. Often, he’ll watch four or five games all the way through each week, “Sundays, I want to watch the flow all the way through,” he said. “I get a feel of what they’re doing during the game just to get a feel of the game. Why did they do this? Some things jump out as to what I can do to them.

“I keep track of what they’re doing mentally. I might watch four games on them. As soon as I do that, then I go to my cut-ups.”

Ciarrocca watches tapes of plays that are cut immediately after the end of the play. He doesn’t see the opponents’ reaction after plays; he doesn’t think he needs to. “You have to analyze it without overanalyzing it,” he said. “There can definitely be some paralysis by analysis if you think too much about it.”

Durden says he tries to watch the tendencies of certain players. In short, if he can find the worst player on the field, he feels he has an advantage. To do this, Durden watches everything from the way a player reacts to a given play to a player’s body language.

“That’s the art of it,” he said, “not the science. Finding that one guy you can pick on.”

Tip No. 3: Scout Yourself

It’s not unusual for coaches to run a “self-scout” tape, one that shows their recent games and might make more apparent their own tendencies. It also speaks to one of the basic tenets of coaching – convincing your players that if you do what you’re trained to do, no one can stop you.

“We spend more time on ourselves than on our opponents,” Durden said. “We try not to get caught up in what people are going to do to us.”

Ciarrocca agrees that a good scheme – not to even mention a game plan – can make up for some of a team’s weaknesses. “The right system, applied correctly, can allow your players to play to their maximum ability,” he said. “And that has nothing to do with whatever the other team is doing.”

By establishing this aura around a team, a coach can make up for some of the pitfalls of just relying on scouting. For example, playing against a new coach or a team with a new coordinator – or even a team in their first game of the season – makes it impossible to get accurate footage of what to expect them to do.

“That’s what’s not good, when you don’t have much to go on,” Ciarrocca said. “Then you just have to make sure that what you’re doing, works.”

Tip No. 4: Focus on Players, Not the Scheme

Schemes and blitzes are pretty basic stuff. Durden said that he hasn’t seen much from a basic defense that has surprised him in years. College coaches have long ago learned the difference between a 4-3 and a 3-4.

That said, players are what makes a team shine, not the system. When Durden worked for Lubick at Colorado State, Lubick often would focus on a player’s ability – or inability – to change direction. Find the guy that can’t shift on the fly, Lubick thought, and you’ve found your guy to attack.

Anders said he’s not surprised much anymore by an opponent’s offense. “You’re always going to have a tweak on the offense,” he said. “Everybody’s got their own twist on their play. They may make one block a little bit different or have a different alignment.

“But scheme-wise, I haven’t seen a new inventive offense in a while. A lot of times, it’s personnel. What lineman do we wanna blitz? Do we want to blitz away from the running back? Things like that.” It’s not rocket science, but it’s important to remember – players are the one’s making plays, not the X’s and O’s.

“If you have good players, that’s the key,” Ciarrocca said. “Any good system can react to whatever the other team is doing. We can react to a lot of things.” Those talents can be best used when recruiting players off of film. Good film analysts during game week are probably the best talent scouts.

Tip No. 5: Don’t Be Afraid To Adjust

Every program has its strengths and differences. Embrace them.

Durden’s James Madison team has good players, but is nowhere near as deep as some of the best programs in the country. He simply can’t simulate his opponent with a scout team filled with walk-ons – who aren’t as athletic as Div. I walk-ons – so he doesn’t even try.

“We can’t simulate the speed of the game with our two’s and three’s,” he said, “So every week, we take 15 minutes a day or so and have our first-team offense act as the scout team, just to replicate the speed of the opponent. We do that on defense, too.

“At a place like Oklahoma, they can just run the scout team. We can’t.”

At Div. III Christopher Newport, Kelchner adjusts to teams by simply looking at the quality of the tape. Does the tape follow league protocol? Does it show the whole field, including substitutions, first-down markers, the scoreboard? Does it show all the plays? Are jersey numbers visible? Is the film grainy? These things give Kelchner a feeling about his next opponent. It might not be scientific, but it’s a good indicator of what’s ahead.

“These details usually tell me a lot about the opponent’s overall operation,” he said. “I can usually make a fairly sound and accurate assessment of the opponent based on those details. If the film quality is poor, it’s usually a good indicator of the program’s quality.”

And that leaves Kelchner to think he might have an edge. And isn’t that what film watching is all about?








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