June 17-22, 2024 Weekly Roundup
All the happenings this past week.
Good morning and welcome to this week’s roundup.
A quick preview on two posts coming this week:
Teaching Defensive Structures: Space (Monday)
Learning to Teach Shallow Cross (Friday)
Be sure to subscribe to get them in your inbox when they come out.
Article of the Week:
Teaching conceptual football is a tool for being able to teach one thing and getting more than one thing out of it. If you can teach a concept that you can present schematically in multiple ways, then you can create complexity in your scheme without teaching complexity.
The coaches over at
recently have been discussing the Ohio Bobcat’s defensive scheme and they released a good post on an “X” blitz path from the inside LBs that the Bobcat’s use over and over. They use it in a simulated pressure to a 6 man pressure and play multiple coverages behind it. But for their inside LBs, it’s the same path every time.This is the definition of getting the most bang for your buck schematically, and can be applied in any defense or offense.
Here’s the article:
Video of the Week:
Time is limited. So, studying how other people use their time to install and teach their scheme is always valuable. Football is a game about the fundamentals but there are so many other things your players need to be minimally viably competent at — so the study of how coaches get those competencies covered throughout a practice, week, or season is a never ending one.
Note: Coach Mitch Johnson’s Shallow concept will be the “feature” of the week this upcoming Friday. We’ll go over what makes the play work, what doesn’t, and the key coaching points. Make sure you are subscribed to get it in your inbox Friday morning:
Check out the video here:
Book Recommendation
I wrote about this book many moons ago, but want to bring it to your attention again because it is such a delight.
Beyond the book going into tremendous detail, Rice delivers an interesting argument about “balance” in an offense. Is balance about your run/pass ratio, ball carrier distribution, or something else? Rice’s argument is that it’s more about the threat of the run or pass before each play. It’s an interesting perspective, and honestly, seems a little ahead of his time. Great read if you can find the book online to purchase, or you can read my summary here.
Posts from This Week:
Teaching Defensive Structures: Numbers
This will be part 1 of a series building a teaching method for anticipating where the ball will go post-snap through the pre-snap process. You can boil football down to many things, and today and in the rest of this series we will boil it down to numbers, space, and leverage.
Why This Empty Bunch 3 Verticals Concept Didn't Work
Starting today, and on all Tuesdays moving forward, we’ll look at why a play didn’t work. While it’s important to look at plays that work out, the study of plays that don’t is just as insightful. The goal of this series is to look at plays as if we wanted to make them work. Plays are time consuming to come up with and install and you find out how to mak…
How Ole Miss Gets the Slant Open
The slant is one of the best routes in football. It’s quick and since the WR is on the move the route always has the ability to break and gain a lot of yards. In the 2023 game against Texas A&M, Ole Miss ran an empty concept with two slants on the two receiver side that isolated the defender over the inside slant. A&M had a post safety, yet no underneat…
Why This Bunch Empty Screen Worked
Empty formations are evidently the theme of the week as today we are discussing an empty bunch screen that the Texas Longhorns completed on their first play of the game against Alabama. Take a look here at the play and then the breakdown is below: For the QB, it was an “easy” play number one on the script when you’re playing the Tide in their own home. C…
Teaching QBs to Watch Film
A big factor in the QB’s development is learning how to watch film. Football is chaos and the film room provides a reprieve where the QB can safely analyze what happened and we can debrief. We try to have the QB watch the film and talk to us rather than us watch the film and talk to the QB.
When "It" Works, Do "It" Again
Coach Dub Maddox, creator of the R4 system, is the OC at Union High School in Tulsa, OK and they are a great watch every week because of his creativity. Today, we are looking at 5 creative plays in their regular season matchup against the Jenks Trojans in the 2023 season.
Tomorrow’s post will be part two on Teaching Defensive Structures and will go over the last frontier: SPACE.
Until tomorrow,
Emory Wilhite
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