Development vs Recruiting vs Scheme **IN YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE**

slugboy

Moderator
Staff member
Messages
11,491
Some of us have played college sports, and many of us have played in high school. Some of us have coached at some level. We've discussed scheme vs. recruiting vs. development.

Thread Rules (yes, this thread has rules):
  1. The point of this thread is to bring personal experience into the discussion. We'll limit this thread to our personal experiences as a player or coach.
  2. No guessing at what Collins or Johnson or Gailey or their predecessors are doing or did unless you worked for them as a coach, or they coached you personally.
  3. Post about Development or Recruiting or Scheme.
I played in high school. I played at a smaller school, and played Corner and WR. I topped out at 6', 180 LB. For a while I played at Rover, which plays a lot like our Nickel. I wasn't a great athlete, and honestly I was mainly just grit, but I learned a lot about the sport.
(If you played in college, I won't be offended if you snicker here).

We had a good team, and we had a pipeline of players from the youth football leagues. Our team had some development, but we mainly relied on players already knowing how to tackle and run and block. Repetition was on the sleds and running routes. We were OK in the weight room, but S&C in my day was "3 sets of 10 at squats and bench and pull ups and curls and so on".

Our coaches were used to getting a new crop of ready-to-play players every year, although the freshmen usually weren't strong enough. You'd occasionally have a RB, WR, or DB play varsity as a freshman. What fundamental teaching did happen, happened in JV. At varsity, you saw coaches talk about lining up correctly as a DB, getting your hips right, and keeping your eyes in the right place and making the right reads.

We watched film, but it was mostly "that was a good play" or "what were you thinking there?" or "Mike, you screwed up again--when are you going to learn to beat your man inside?". With the QBs, you saw some technique training with throwing and a toss sweep, but not much with handoffs. We practiced that and maybe in spring heard "turn your hand this way".

We learned tackling technique without pads, on the mats in the spring. We refined it by individual tackling drills against someone who outweighed you by 30 pounds--you learned to tackle that way, or you hated life.

I rarely if ever saw a coach take a player aside for individual instruction. When I did see individual attention, it wasn't fun for the individual.

In short, my experience was seeing a team where the players were expected to know what they were doing. Other teams we played took players from weaker youth leagues and coached them up--some of them did that very well. From my experience, most of them relied on the players they got.

We swapped to a full house backfield when I was a freshman, because we had more good backs that we could use and we wanted all three on the field. That did give us a schematic advantage--the other teams hated that. They knew they couldn't key on one back.

The short version of what I experienced:
  • Not a lot of player development, aside from the kinds of drills everyone does
  • Relying on the coaches at "lower levels" to get the players to you ready to play and knowing almost all they needed to know
  • Some fitting of the scheme to the players you had, but within the bounds of what the coaches knew and were comfortable with
  • The teams we did play with unusual schemes usually didn't beat the teams with better players. Aside from the air raid teams, we hated playing them.
So, while we talk about development and scheme, my experience is that there was some, but the teams with development well above and beyond the average in player development were rare.
 

JacketFan137

Banned
Messages
2,536
i didn’t play football past HS but i knew guys and still know guys that are at some big time programs and have ins with boosters at two extremely prominent rivals that we play yearly that see a lot of success. i also played baseball at a very high level

what i can tell you is great coaches don’t approach every year the same. college football has a ton of player turnover (now more than ever lol) so part of being a great coach is knowing how to approach THIS YEAR’S group of guys. something you’ll see from saban over the years is sometimes he’s chewing out guys and going crazy and some times it’s a lot more calm. not all players respond the same all the time so if you aren’t willing to adapt then you’re probably not gonna see long term success

i would also say as far as recruiting vs scheme is knowing what you are able to recruit. typically the most successful philosophy in sports is best player available. take the absolute best athletes you can get in terms of speed, size, strength etc (ideally good kids that you learn are coachable and won’t be distracted by college life throughout the process too). take what you have and work around that.

again, using saban as the model since he’s the greatest, when hurts was there it was a lot closer to an old run and shoot offense. a lot of read options and play action, then tua was closer to an air raid with a little bit of running from tua because they had some crazy WR talent like jeudy/waddle/ruggs then mac jones was basically a statue but they had an incredible WR corps to let him sit back and cook.

now obviously it’s different when there’s a little more recruiting constraints (a la academies and actual academic institutions) where it can be more beneficial to specialize, but historically best player available is the way to go. that’s also not even to say strictly go off recruiting stars. you gotta have some good scouts
 

4shotB

Helluva Engineer
Retired Staff
Messages
4,938
Based on my limited experiences playing and coaching sports plus my time teaching (which I think of as being somewhat similar), if this were my livelihood I would focus on these in order: 1. Recruiting 2. Development 3. Scheme.

A good coach or teacher can make each and every person or player better but there is a ceiling to what a person (and thus team) can accomplish. So I would focus on getting individuals with higher ceilings first and foremost.
 

takethepoints

Helluva Engineer
Messages
6,096
I played football back in the Dark Ages. I played both high school (big Atlanta version) and small (believe it) college. I had to quit after the beginning of my sophomore year due to a knee injury that wouldn't come around. (There was, of course, nothing like modern treatment tech; it was all whirlpools and braces. and it didn't work.) We were a Div 3 school and thus "didn't recruit". Remarkably, almost everybody in our starting lineup had been recruited originally by an SEC/ACC school and had found that they were a step too slow or bit too light to stick. Our head coach had a web of contacts all over the Southeast and get them to send us players who then got "academic" scholarships. (There's oodles of scholarship money that goes unclaimed every year and our aid people were very good at finding what was necessary.) The staff had to get the players to visit and then convince them to come on board, but the money was always there, if necessary. The only active recruiting effort in the usual sense I knew of was for our tailback who played for the private school up the road. Bill was 6'3" 220 and ran the hundred in 10.5. We had plenty of competition, but it turned out he wanted to go to a small school. And, yes, he was recruited for the scheme we ran.

Did the coaches teach us how to play? Well, to some extent. I was an OL so it was assumed that I knew the blocking techniwque they were using. I didn't and they tried to convert me. It didn't work so I went back to spearing (put your face guard on your opponent, bring up your arms, then steer him where you wanted). This was, of course, really dangerous, but I could block pretty well so the assistants didn't mind. The people who needed the most work were the backs; none of them had a clue how the O worked. There the coaches earned their money.

Player development? Shoot, I was the only guy on the team who lifted weights when I played. 'Nuff said.

We ran a single wing. Nobody knew how to defense it and we went 10 - 0 the one full year I played. And we kept it up the year after.

Well, enough with the old timer stories.
 

jgtengineer

Helluva Engineer
Messages
2,969
I didn't play long enough in college to talk one way or the other on this one. But from highschool experience my school was a perennial doormat before i got there and my freshman year won three games. Basically the previous coach had been living off the state championship Ted Roof won him. He retried from coaching before I started and we got a a new staff from all over south georgia. The staff came in and had to work with what we had (average offensive linemen from the previous steam were big and immobile) We ran a flex option with very little option because the inherited QBS couldn't do it. Either from a reading perspective or were just to slow.

Eventually we went to more of a gun/pistol option out of the flex that used short passing and power/deception run schemes. Offensively we were your standard undersized scheme based offense that focused on technique blocking while we worked in the weight room.

Defensively however, we were all scheme. We ran a 3-5 stack which played more like a 3-3-5 base nickle with two nickle back/lb hybrids on the end to present a 5 man front or rotate to 4-4 or 3-4 looks. Our secondary coach call the coverages our interior coach call blitzes and controlled the front 8 and we were very boom or bust to go with a ball control offense. Freshman year this didn't work well, sophmore year we went 4-6. But junior year and senior year we made the playoffs.

So in my experience Scheme, development and we couldn't recruit for anything anyway. But we routinely had 155 lbs nickle backs tackling d1 caliber players one on one due to using proper technique.
 

4shotB

Helluva Engineer
Retired Staff
Messages
4,938
to zI didn't play long enough in college to talk one way or the other on this one. But from highschool experience my school was a perennial doormat before i got there and my freshman year won three games. Basically the previous coach had been living off the state championship Tef won him. He retried from coaching before I started and we got a a new staff from all over south georgia. So in my experience Scheme, development and we couldn't recruit for anything anyway. But we routinely had 155 lbs nickle backs tackling d1 caliber players one on one due to using proper technique.
I think this post (great one btw) confirms my experience… a competent coach (teacher) finds it fairly easy to make significant or quantum leaps . However, you mentioned reaching the playoffs. Once there I assume you were put out by teams with equivalent coaching but better athletes ( is this a fair assumption?). Which is why I say recruiting is priority one for any competent coach who is in a situation where he/she can recruit.
As a math teacher with the least amount of seniority at my school, I get the kids who hate math for whatever reason. I find it fairly easy to move their college board scores and I do that frequently. The AP teacher doesn’t show the same progress.However, her kids would outperform mine by miles in a head to head competition. She is not a better teacher than me and I don’t think she would argue the point. She just “recruits” better math students.
 

jgtengineer

Helluva Engineer
Messages
2,969
I think this post (great one btw) confirms my experience… a competent coach (teacher) finds it fairly easy to make significant or quantum leaps . However, you mentioned reaching the playoffs. Once there I assume you were put out by teams with equivalent coaching but better athletes ( is this a fair assumption?). Which is why I say recruiting is priority one for any competent coach who is in a situation where he/she can recruit.
As a math teacher with the least amount of seniority at my school, I get the kids who hate math for whatever reason. I find it fairly easy to move their college board scores and I do that frequently. The AP teacher doesn’t show the same progress.However, her kids would outperform mine by miles in a head to head competition. She is not a better teacher than me and I don’t think she would argue the point. She just “recruits” better math students.

Junior year no it was a mirror match (option team etc) with another team we lost in overtime, senior year we made it to the quarter finals and lost to Lowndes in their undefeated year. so that one can be "better players" but pretty much that same team came to our house the next year and the team beat them without a QB on the team just running smash mouth option so *shrugs*.
 

JacketFan137

Banned
Messages
2,536
Junior year no it was a mirror match (option team etc) with another team we lost in overtime, senior year we made it to the quarter finals and lost to Lowndes in their undefeated year. so that one can be "better players" but pretty much that same team came to our house the next year and the team beat them without a QB on the team just running smash mouth option so *shrugs*.
lowndes has steroids in the baby formula. i’ve seen some great teams from the city have to go down there and get absolutely trounced. they always have grown men playing for them lol
 
Top