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Your Take: Review What You Do

by: Charles Welde
Offensive Coordinator U.S. Grant High School (OK)
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Self-analysis is critical to year-to-year improvement.

It doesn’t matter if your team won 12 games last year or 2 – the winter off-season period is the time to review what you do. Every aspect of your offense should be critically reviewed, from the individual drills your position coaches use to the plays you call and why you call them. Here is the process we use to critically analyze who we are vs. who we think we are.

Our offensive staff establishes scheme goals for our team in the spring. Scheme goals are different from team goals and any production related goals. We don’t talk numbers, percentages, or wins. Our scheme goals are more general. Here is an example of some of our scheme goals going into the 2011 season:

1.     Improve our RB screen and make it a staple of our offense.
2.      Increase our yards after contact.
3.      Throw the ball to the RB more out of the backfield.

The first thing we do when we “review what we do” is to compare our scheme goals to our end results. We want to find out why we met the goals we met and why we didn’t meet the goals we didn’t meet. To do this we review our entire process for each goal. We started by reviewing our goal to improve our RB screen.

We played 10 games in 2011 and called our RB screen a total of 14 times, which isn’t exactly a “staple” of an offense. Breaking down the numbers even closer, we found we called this play two or three times in each of our first three games and then only once or not at all in the each of the following seven games. As the season progressed, we got further away from it.        

There can only be two explanations for this:

1.     The play was successful but we didn’t call it enough.
2.     The play was unsuccessful so we stopped calling it.

Of the 14 times we called the play, four of those were incomplete, four resulted in sacks, and six were completed. Based on the results, the reason we did not meet our scheme goal was because the play was unsuccessful. So, we stopped calling it.

The next step in our review is to find out why our RB screen was unsuccessful:

1.     The players did not understand the concept.
2.     The drills did not teach the skills necessary to         perform the play.
3.     The play required the players to perform duties outside of their skill set.
4.     The integrity of the play is schematically         flawed.
5.     The players’ knowledge of the play was not         thorough enough for them to adjust to various fronts and blitzes.

After watching a cut-up of all 14 plays, we discovered that our linemen were leaving too early and the resulting pressure on the QB was forcing an early throw. The real killer, however, was the FB’s block in our slide protection. In fact, three of the four sacks were attributed to the FB. He was waiting for the DE to come to him instead of attacking and “taking the air out of the block”.

As a result of reviewing what we do, we redesigned our 10-minute screen period. Starting this spring we will have the FBs working a 1-on-1 pass rush drill with the DEs and OLBs at full speed. The OL will work their Set-Punch-Release Drill against a live defense, and will not be allowed to release on the screen until prompted to do so by a coach’s command. We will also add an element of competition to the drill, rewarding the DL for sacks or pressures. When we get into the 2012 season, our screen period will be all individual on Monday and Tuesday and then 11-on-11 on Thursday and Friday as opposed to four 10-minute team periods which we did last season. It is important for us to not just review the success of the play but also the amount of time we practice it compared to the amount of times it is called in a game.

After reviewing our scheme goals, the next thing we do is analyze our offensive statistics from the previous season. Here we are looking for the extremes. We want to see in which categories we performed statistically well and in which categories we performed statistically poor.

In 2011, we averaged a very meager four completions per game. We utilize a ground- based attack so that number wasn’t terribly shocking, but it was still below our acceptable range. If we average 65 plays a game and utilize a run/pass ratio of 80/20 we should have about 13 pass attempts per game and around 7 to 8 completions. Using our review method, we critically analyzed all of our incompletions. We attempted 109 passes in 2011 and completed 34 (31%). As a staff, we watched cut-ups of all 75 incompletions and charted what issues contributed to our lack of success.

The biggest detriment to our passing game in 2011 was QB accuracy. Of our 75 incompletions, there were 23 instances where there was an open receiver but the ball was not thrown accurately enough for a completion. As we repeatedly watched the 23 “bad throws” it became apparent that our QB either had a poor drop on those throws, or did not have his “points” aligned towards his target. Those realizations lead to a complete overhaul of our QB individual period. We reviewed every drill, scrapped the ones that didn’t show up on film, and built in more time for the QB coach and the QBs to work on footwork. The second biggest detriment to our passing game was dropped passes.

As with the QBs, we did a complete review of our WRs individual drills. We charted how many minutes we dedicated to catching balls in practice and how many actual catches each player got in a typical practice week. We reviewed the techniques we taught and reached out to college coaches to validate our methods. The end result of our review was an increased number of concentration-related ball drills and more overall time dedicated to catching the ball in a controlled environment with an emphasis on hand placement.

Every football team has their focal points. It is usually one of the first things mentioned in your playbook. The bottom line is that the numbers don’t lie. If your points of emphasis on paper are not your points of emphasis in your statistics, it is time to review what you do. At the end of the day it is all about getting better.
 
Charles Welde is the offensive coordinator
at US Grant High School (OK). He can be reached at coachwelde@hotmail.com






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