Reports from the San Angelo Coaching Clinic: Part 1

I’m back from the San Angelo Coaching Clinic and let me tell you, if you’re a coach and you’ve never been, you’re wrong; plain and simple. This was a meeting of the greatest minds in High School and College football and if I hadn’t taken anything away from it, I would have known I was in the wrong profession. In this entry we are going to talk some serious football and I’ll try to cover as many different things that I learned as my memory will allow me.

I should start by telling you about the drive up as it was not exactly the way you want to start out a LONG drive like the one from Austin to San Angelo. First off, I picked up one of my fellow coaches (I’ll refer to him as Coach J from here on out) whom I’d never met before. If you’ve ever made a long trip with a stranger, you know that it can only go one of two ways. Either it’s a complete disaster and both of you hate each other for as long as you both live, or, there is some good old fashioned bonding that takes place out on the open road. Luckily it turned out to be the latter and Coach J turned out to be a really great guy. As it turned out, we had a lot in common so it made the trip pretty pleasant. He played football for my high school’s rival and we even played one another during our senior years.
We left Austin around 9pm in an effort to make it to San Angelo later that night because check-in for the clinic started at 7am the next morning and neither of us wanted to miss a minute of the action being the eager young bucks we are. In retrospect I wish someone would have reminded me about the story of the old bull and the young bull sitting up on the hill looking down at a pasture of cows. The young bull turns to the old bull and says, “Let’s run down there and have our way with one of the cows and then run back up!” The old bull turns to the young bull and says, “How about we walk down there and have our way with all of them.” Moral of the story is patience is a virtue and had I waited to leave for San Angelo the next morning I probably would have saved myself a whole lot of money. You see, driving in Texas at night is always a dangerous prospect due to the roaming wildlife who seem to find their way onto highways at night. I had a particularly unfortunate reminder of that very fact at about 11:30pm that night. I hit a raccoon going about 65mph and while the raccoon may be splattered all over TX – 71, it still won. When I rolled into San Angelo that night and parked my car I got out to see the damage and was surprised at how little body damage there actually was. Upon further inspection though I found that I was leaking radiator fluid and even as mechanically un-inclined as I am, I knew that wasn’t a good thing. Lucky for me, the Chevy dealership was right next door to the motel I was staying at that night so I took it over in the morning only to find out that the raccoon had knocked my compressor into my radiator and destroyed both. OUCH! Enough about my car troubles though. I got a rental for the rest of the time we were in San Angelo and after an intense but chewing or two, I was able to get my car back in time to return home with Coach J on time!

So back to the real reason for this blog…Football! As I said earlier, this clinic had some of the best and brightest minds in football presenting on a myriad of topics. Everything from press coverage in the secondary to teaching very specific o-line technique was covered and the people at Angelo State University were able to bring in experts on every imaginable topic. The conference started off with a bang when Carl Pelini, the Defensive Coordinator at the University of Nebraska spoke on Winning with Great Defensive Fundamentals. He began his presentation the way most of the college coaches did, by sucking up to the football coaches of the state of Texas; a pretty smart and necessary move for a university who is no longer going to play schools from Texas and will thus have a harder time recruiting from Texas. Careful there Nebraska, sometimes you actually get what you wish for. Anyway, Pelini continued by saying that the fundamental key to his defense was stopping explosive plays. Duh right! Well, there’s more to it. He defined explosive plays as runs over 15 yards and passes over 20 yards which to the average person may not seem all that explosive. To the Pelini staff though, they design their defense to limit those kinds of plays and he said the way they have found success is by keeping two safeties up high 95% of the time. Moreover, Nebraska will create a new blitz package for every single opponent and no two will be exactly the same. More times than not he will install that opponent specific package on Wednesday night!!! Why so late? Well, Pelini basically said that his staff never asks kids to do something that they aren’t already physically familiar with. He may ask them to blitz from different positions on the field or use specific timing but the actual blitz its self is never different. With that said, he and his staff spend a lot of their time trying to figure out how the offense identifies the Mike Linebacker, especially on 3rd down. Once they crack that code, Nebraska can build a blitz scheme that will confuse the offense as to who the Mike Linebacker really is and that helps Nebraska create confusion in the pass protection, making for much more effective blitzes. Another great point that Coach Pelini made was to never blitz into a formation you can’t win against. Blitzing for blitzing sake is a common mistake coaches make in his opinion. He also said that the defense doesn’t have to have a bunch of different formations that they can line up in as long as you are really solid with one. For instance, during this last round of Bowl Games, Nebraska played Arizona and shut them out. Arizona ran 70 offensive plays and Nebraska called the same front and coverage on 68 of those plays! That’s outrageous!

More quick coaching points from Carl Pelini:

1.) Always have an automatic check that the players are really comfortable with so that if an offense comes out in a formation they are not comfortable with or have never seen before, the kids have a good go to defensive call.

2.) Spend no less than 30 minutes every day on individual technique. Many times in the rush of a crazy week of preparation, the first thing that gets cut from the practice schedule is individual time and in Carl Pelini’s opinion, it’s the last thing you should cut. Kids with good fundamentals will win their individual battles regardless of their alignment.

3.) Never let a kid pull up early during a drill in practice because he’ll do it in a game. This is part of the old cliché of you’ll play how you practice. I happen to really agree with this point though because it goes much deeper than just that one play. If you as a coach expect a certain level of physicality and won’t accept anything less, you create a culture in your locker room that doesn’t accept anything less. That kind of culture is usually the difference in close games. More on this later as Mack Brown touched on this very subject.

Check back later for more from the San Angelo Coaching Clinic. I'll have posts that cover Lary Zirlein's (NFL o-line coach) , Hank Carter(Lake Travis Head Coach), Nick Saban (Alabama), Mack Brown (Texas), and Jason Garrett. I'll also talk about how I met some of my football heros and of course more football talk.

And remember, "Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it." ~Heywood Hale Broun (Sportswriter)

In my first entry I promised a look back at how I got to this point so now I want to make good on that promise. I guess the best place to start is always at the beginning, and for me, the journey of becoming a football coach probably began when I was really little. I virtually grew up with a football in my hand! Some of the earliest home movies of me are videos of my dad and I playing catch with a small rubber football in our living room, much to my mom's disliking. There is even a funny moment caught on camera where my Dad throws me the football and instead of catching it, I kinda knock it down. My Dad says, "Hey, you're supposed to catch it!" And I reply, "But that's what the Aggies do!" More on Aggie football woes later!

Baseball may be America's sport but in my house football was king. While most fathers and sons were playing catch with baseballs and gloves, I was pretending to be Micheal Irvin (pre-cocaine issues) and my Dad filled in admirably as Troy Aikmen. If you'd have asked me then, I was going to be the next great wide receiver! Unfortunately at seven, I didn't know that you had to be over six feet tall and fast. I wasn't there for the discussions but I'm sure my Dad had to play some major bargaining chips for me to start my football career. By the time I was in 5th grade my father had convinced my mother that it was time for me to strap on the shoulder pads and play full contact football in the Pop Warner leagues. My first team was the Pflugerville Panthers! In our Yellow and Gold glory we beat just about every team we played until we got to the playoffs where we met teams from San Antonio. To this day I maintain that some of their players had children of their own in the stands. Those were some BIG dudes and we got whipped!

Like most kids in Texas, when 7th grade rolls around you enter "The Program." Middle School football is essentially the breeding ground for future Friday night superstars and I was no exception in that I joined the middle school team. We ran dumbed down versions of the offensive and defensive schemes the high school ran so that, in theory, by the time we reached high school we would already have a basic understanding of what we were supposed to do at the varsity level. When I reached high school, in a different school district than where I started, I'd already been playing football for four years.

Throughout high school I established myself as a solid player. Too good to keep off the field but frankly never good enough to really stand out. I played Quarterback, Punter, Linebacker, and several positions across the offensive line but when it was all said and done, none of the colleges were knocking on my door. My last game as a senior in high school was fittingly against the high school where my football career started, the Pflugerville Panthers. They beat us badly in an emotional game where I was pitted against some of the kids that I grew up playing with in Pop Warner and Middle School. My playing days ended that night but my love for the game did not!

After high school I went off to Texas A&M and joined the Corps of Cadets. As a member of The Corps, I went to every home football game that Texas A&M played and had pretty darn good seats to watch as a once proud program went through some of its darkest days. Everyone, from the newest spectator to the oldest hand in football, had an opinion on what the Aggies needed to do to turn the ship around. It was at this point that coaching football became of great interest to me. I wanted to know what was going on at Texas A&M and how it could be fixed. I wanted to break down the X's and O's and see where things had gone so horribly wrong. I still don't know the answer to that question but maybe over the next few years I'll figure it out.

As college started to wind down I began wondering what I wanted to do with my life. I thought about coaching football and teaching history or government but I knew that if I went that route, I'd probably never become the millionaire that I hoped I could become. Instead, one of my professors approached me one day and asked if I would like to meet with a representative from an international winery and interview for a job. As a freshly turned 21 year old, a job with a winery selling booze sounded like the perfect job! After a couple rounds of interviews and some wining and dining with the big wigs in Dallas, I was sold! I was going to go be a wine connoisseur who sold first rate wine to all the finest places in the world. Only thing was, I had to start at the bottom like everyone else. I wasn't opposed to that idea, everyone has to earn their stripes, so I moved to Houston and was given a sales territory out in Katy, Texas. My job was to sell as much wine as possible (often of dubious quality) to grocery store chains by whatever means necessary. After a year of running around Houston selling cheap booze to Walmarts and Krogers the glamour and fortune that I had envisioned seemed farther away from me than the Great Wall of China. I was tired of promising things that my company had no intention of delivering on. I was tired of forcing wine into grocery stores that didn't want it. In short, I learned real fast that it takes a certain kind of person to be a good salesman and that I was not that person. I want to make it very clear that not all wine salesmen are like that. In fact one of my best friends is a pretty successful wine salesman who seems to have done it the right way. I just happened to be "blessed" with a management team who played fast and loose with the rules and that just didn't appeal to my idealistic sense of self. As I drove home one morning after having spent the last 24 hours straight preparing for a corporate survey of one of my stores it hit me. All the freakin' money in the world just isn't worth doing this. What is it that I love? What is it that I can see myself doing for the rest of my life with a big smile on my face? The answer had always been there. Football! It was at that point that I decided I was going to go back to school, get my teaching certificate, and do what ever it took to become a football coach.

So here we are. I'm the newest member of a brand new coaching staff for the Four Points Falcons in Austin, TX. In the next few days I'll be leaving the liquor industry for good and embarking on a journey I hope will last a life time. In about a week, I'll be headed up to San Angelo for my first coaching clinic where Mac Brown, Nick Saban, Jason Garrett, Wade Phillips, and so many other top notch coaches will be talking and teaching football. To say I'm excited is the understatement of the century!

In the next few installments of Confessions of a Coach Bob, I'll be going over what I learned at the San Angelo Coaching Clinic as well as continuing to talk all things football. We are a few months out from the beginning of the season so bear with as blog updates will be sporadic until things get going full scale.

And remember: "Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football." - Bear Bryant while at Texas A&M

High School Football has become a year round sport in Texas. August to November (and sometimes a bit longer if you've got a great team) marks the regular season. Next comes the off season where there is really nothing off about it. During the athletics period the kids hit the weight room and the track and a few times a week they work on basic fundamentals for their positions. Then you get about 3 weeks during the spring for intra-squad, full-pads practices. Almost as soon as spring ball is over, the 7 on 7 tournaments start. 7 on 7 is a pass only version of football. It totally eliminates the running game and allows teams to keep their skill players sharp in the passing game. The whole team doesn't participate only Running Backs, Receivers, Tight Ends, and Wide Receivers. These tournaments last for a good portion of the summer and then before you know it, its August and thus time for two a days and the regular season to kicking off.

Something that I think is worth noting is that with the emergence and proliferation of 7 on 7 tournaments all across Texas, we've also seen the proliferation and perfection of the Spread offense in College Football. Look at Texas Tech under Mike Leach or Texas with Colt McCoy at the helm. Even the traditional ground oriented teams like Texas A&M have installed 4 and 5 receiver packages and use them frequently! Where good play calling balance used to be 60% run and 40% pass, we now see the opposite. Teams used to run to set up the pass, now they pass to set up the run. 7 on 7 has had a huge impact on how football is played in this state and across the nation. What I find even more extraordinary is that all this change has really taken place in the last 7 or 8 years. When I graduated high school in 2003 there were a few 7 on 7 tournaments and schools may or may not have participated in them. Now, virtually every school that has the space hosts a tournament and participation is seen as virtually mandatory in order to keep up with the Jones's. As a result, we are seeing Quarterbacks, Wide Receivers, and other skill players come out of high school and be able to step into sophisticated collegiate offensive systems seamlessly. Its Amazing to me that more than 100 years after the invention of this game, we are still seeing the it evolve in such drastic ways. But I digress.