I have a confession to make. Maybe my favorite part of the football "year" is January-March. That’s research and development season for our offensive staff. I think you can win games in these months, and I think we have. Because I am a football nerd this is a glorious time. First of all it’s clinic season. You don’t have the stress of the season and aren’t as busy as the Spring Training and summer months. There is time to reflect, study, and evaluate in a clear-headed, far less-biased way without the pressure of practice schedules, scripts, gameplans, etc. Everything looks good on the board. It’s an optimistic time.
But I think you have to be systematic to make this time period useful. We give assignments for offseason study. It keeps guys involved and interested and creates a sense of accountability. For example our OL coach has been studying Oklahoma (like most of the country). I studied the LA Rams bunch package. We may tell someone else to make our fast screens better. What techniques are people using? Who is the best at it? What are we doing right or wrong? I try to make sure and study teams or ideas that are a little more obscure since we are obsessed with being different. You have to be willing to think outside the box. I read 5-6 books on the Wing-T this offseason. We are not a Wing-T team. Why? Well 3 things I was particularly interested in were improving our speed sweep package we have used for over a decade, improving our goalline/change of pace package (which is essentially an unbalanced wing-t belly package), and also making plays look alike/better packaging plays as a series. Who does a better job with that than Wing-T teams? I also try to stay abreast of the latest defensive ideas, because some defensive guys are, if possible, even more fad-oriented than offensive guys. Here’s how we lay out the process:
We won’t be using 9 out of 10 things we learned. But they can go in the archives and may be something we can use later, even years down the road. In all, I filled up a couple of notebooks with probably a couple hundred ideas. That’s the fun part. In part 2 we’ll talk about how to talk yourself off the ledge and not actually use all of the cool stuff you learned during clinic season, as well as show how we organize a scheme map.
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