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AFM Magazine


Quality Control – Planning Your Off-Season

by: Keith Grabowski
Offensive Coordinator Baldwin-Wallace College
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The equipment has been shipped out for reconditioning, awards banquets are complete, and you’ve gotten over that awkward feeling in the week or two following the season where from 3pm-6pm you felt like you should be doing something else. Now is a great time to do some quality control and analysis work before you head into the clinic season.

Coaches who are successful year-in and year-out are great organizers. Planning precedes organizing. In order to plan effectively you must perform quality control in the all areas.

We all have the self-scouting reports that are generated by the editing systems we use. Those are a great starting point for pinpointing some areas which may need attention. I mentioned in my online column on AmericanFootballMonthly.com how we used data taken from three seasons against the top opponents in our conference where we struggled. It really allowed us to focus and plan our off-season development as coaches in terms of what we needed to learn in order to make our offense more successful.

In the run game, I found 32 different run plays were called over the eight games included in the study. Our average gain and run efficiency were poor. Looking at the numbers, there wasn’t even a play or two that could be labeled as a base running play. Obviously, we had focused too much on scheme and we weren’t getting the execution we needed. This prompted us to reorganize our offense and tweak our structure and terminology so that we could create some flexibility to grow and adapt in the future. We also became a concept-based team using the structure to create a teaching process so that our players could learn and play fast in a multiple offense.

The process of quality control of your systems in the off season should allow you to both streamline what you are doing and better install and practice it in the next season. Our search for a more effective running game allowed us to consider all we did in teaching, installing, and practicing our system. We developed our answers to problems we anticipated and prepared for those as well. When that season ended and our quality control process unveiled more concerns, we went into the next off season knowing what questions we needed to get answered.

I discovered a very simple way to think about this process in an out-of-print book by Donald Fouss, Effective Football Coaching: Game Winning Techniques for Preventing Mistakes and Errors. He states, “While most coaches recognize the necessity of planning and organizing, many fail to follow-up with control measures. To control means to check or regulate, referring to all facets of the plan, and it is up to the head coach to determine where the control will take place, what it must do, how elaborate it must be, and how effective it will be. Control involves constantly checking progress against plans so that we can regulate and adjust, if necessary. Maintaining control will help us anticipate problems in most cases and will enable the coaching staff to make adjustments so that the outcome is successful. Control monitors performance and corrects it when necessary so that planned and actual performance coincide. Control is merely closing the planning loop.”

Fouss provides a clear model for directing the off season development of your offense, defense and special teams systems. Dividing this work among your assistants will keep them engaged throughout the off season. They can take ownership in the development of your systems as well.  

You really are not limited in how you analyze your season. It may be as simple as your receivers coach breaking down each route and looking at it very technically. Do all receivers run it the same way each time? Are adjustments necessary for a particular route vs. the different leverage and techniques of defensive backs? What team(s) do you know that run it well? What do they do differently? How do they drill and practice it?

An OC can look at the use and effectiveness of all the schemes and concepts that are carried. Runs can be broken down by their efficiency. How many times do they gain four yards or better? For us, we consider a run efficient if it is gaining four yards or better at least 55% of the time. What runs had the most negative yardage ? If a run is not efficient, then the coordinator should delve deeper. Is there a technique that is being done incorrectly? Was it a personnel issue? Should the run remain in your offense or can those reps and drill time be better used on something else.

The same would go for a passing concept and its effectiveness. Are there plays that you practice and never use? Again reps and drill time are at a premium during the season. How effective were those passes against different coverages?

A coordinator should certainly look at the amount of offense that is being carried over the course of the season and week-to-week. In his book, Developing an Offensive Game Plan, Brian Billick talks about overage in an offense. A certain percentage is acceptable, but if you are carrying offense that you never use, you are wasting valuable time and repetitions.

A defensive coordinator can evaluate the effectiveness of fronts, stunts, blitzes and coverages.  You can most likely pinpoint what teams were trying to do over the course of the season to attack different aspects of your defense.         A defensive coordinator can also look at the effectiveness and efficiency of each coverage. For example, how often does a certain pressure sack the quarterback? These are useful numbers as you plan and prepare for the next season.

Finding weaknesses or problems in your systems doesn’t necessarily mean you need to scrap it. Again, the analysis provides control. That control now sets the focus for your planning. Many times it’s learning more about a specific technique and how to practice it. It could also be learning a simple adjustment to make that inefficient run better against a certain front.
    Here are six steps for implementing quality control in your program:

1.  Run the reports that are available in your editing system, or, if necessary create a spreadsheet which you can sort to analyze data. What does the data show?

2. Identify areas of concern both from your data and from post-season meetings with your assistants. What concerns or issues did they have from week-to-week over the season.

3. Develop the plan. What are you going to do with the data? Is it time to completely re-tool what you are doing or only make small tweaks. Make this decision as a staff and move forward together.

4. Identify resources like books and videos that can help. Look at clinic schedules and speakers who will be worth listening to. Also identify your local resources  – colleges or other high schools – that you can go and attend clinics. Set up your professional development schedule accordingly.

5. Bring back all the information and present it to each other as a staff. What did you learn that can help you?

6. Design a plan for implementing your new knowledge so that your systems will improve on the field.






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