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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):
(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:
Thread Rules (yes, this thread has rules):
- 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.
- 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.
- Post about Development or Recruiting or Scheme.
(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.
