Letter From AFM

On the way to the office recently, I heard a very interesting story on ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning”. In a conversation about coaching, one of the Mikes told about how Bill Belichick had sought out Urban Meyer, who was just starting at Florida, to talk about his spread offense. Belichick had just won his third Super Bowl with the Patriots the month before, but he was intrigued by Meyer’s innovative system and wanted to learn more. The two coaching luminaries have since become close friends and, along the way, have influenced each other’s coaching philosophies.
While it might seem odd that a three-time Super Bowl winning coach would call on a college coach for advice, the point is that the most successful coaches never stop learning. And now that the off-season is here, at least for most of you, it’s the ideal time to take advantage of the resources available to you to learn more about your craft.
Chief among these resources are the series of coaches clinics offered in cities around the country and featuring the greats of the game sharing coaching wisdom and experiences with attendees. The Nike Coach of the Year clinics, for example, are conducted in 20 cities and feature 70 FBS coaches including names such as Meyer, Saban, Carroll, Tressel and Brown, covering offense, defense, special teams, motivation and more. If you want to learn from coaching legends, the Nike clinics are a great place to start.
Of course, AFM a learning resource, too. In upcoming months, we will examine trends in offense and defense that are being used, with success, by programs around the country. This month’s topic is the no-huddle offense, which is gaining in popularity every year. We talked to three FBS programs that eschew the huddle and found that, like much of coaching, communication is the key. We follow up our examination of the no-huddle with a piece that gives you a blueprint on how to transition it into your offense.
Also this month, we feature the first of our guest columnists, renowned sportscaster Len Berman, sharing his opinion in our “Your Take” column. If you have an opinion that you’d like to share with the coaching community, on any football topic at all, please feel free to send it to Rex Lardner, AFM’s Managing Editor, at rlardner@AFMmedia.com.

New College Football Resource - Exclusively From AFM

This month, AFM launched a valuable new resource for everyone in football, the AFM College Directory, which is a searchable database of over 11,000 college football coaches at nearly 900 colleges and universities. That’s right. AFM has built an online directory of virtually every college coach in the nation, including every FBS, FCS, D-II, D-III, NAIA and Juco football program. Head coaches, coordinators, position coaches, strength and conditioning coaches and recruiting coordinators are included for each school. If you need names, email addresses or phone numbers of athletic directors, SIDs, trainers, video coordinators or equipment managers, the AFM College Directory has them, too. Plus, information in the directory will be updated weekly when personnel changes are made. No other directory can offer that.
No organization has ever built such a comprehensive college football resource. It’s ideal for high school coaches who want to get their players noticed by recruiters at all levels of the college game or coaches that want to keep up-to-date with the latest changes in the college coaching ranks. For any company that does business with college football programs, it’s priceless. And it’s available to everyone for a low subscription price.
The AFM College Directory. Check it out at www.afmcollegedirectory.com.

Happy Holidays from all of us at AFM!

John Gallup
Editor and Publisher