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)