"Organize Your Thoughts"
Continuing on the theme from yesterday, "football is chaos," I found a gem of a video by NFL Films on longtime OL coach, Bob Wylie.
Coach Wylie tells his players, "Organize your thoughts."
He then gives them the steps to do so:
1. Who do I have to block?
2. What can the defense do to me?
3. How am I going to get the job done?
It's interesting to find someone else come to a conclusion that you too came to separately. Recently, I wrote about the new pre-snap "process" I was using as we went into spring football.
My three steps were/are:
1. What are we trying to do?
2. What is the defense trying to do?
3. What’s our best chance at gaining some yards?
Different words, but it's interesting that this is basically the same idea as what Coach Wylie told his players.
In fact, I like the way Coach Wylie organized his thoughts better than mine. Asking "What can the defense do to me?" frames mindset for the player better. Because what is the goal of looking at the defense? Only to anticipate what they might to do our play.
The QB should start with our play and goals of the play in mind. That requires him to know not just his responsibilities on the play, but also the "why" behind the play.
He additionally needs to know what our personnel and formation mean to the defense. Furthermore, the situation matters too: time on the clock, down & distance, and field position. Knowing these things will give him the mindset he needs to interpret what the defense is doing.
When the QB moves to the question of "What is the defense trying to do to us?" we ask him to identify the Middle of the Field as either Open or Closed and whether the defense is in Man or Zone. Combined with the first question of "What are we trying to do?" there are a lot of thoughts for the QB to organize in his mind.
I'll go into how we organize these thoughts in a later email. If you've got a better way to help your QB "organize his thoughts," don't be afraid to hit reply and let me know.
Anyways, here's a link to that video of Coach Wylie starting at the "organize your thoughts" line:
https://youtube.com/bob-wylie
Emory Wilhite
P.S. This article is an interesting read about the "process" of teaching tackling that applies to what we're talking about here as well:
https://blogs.usafootball.com/blog/8485/the-methods-and-importance-of-teaching-tracking-part-one