Coach ,

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

“The leader is one who, out of the clutter, brings simplicity.”

-Albert Einstein

Today’s Coach Excellence Series focuses on evaluating and evolving your systems. Years ago as we began our process of simplifying our systems, we posted Einstein’s quotes in our staff room to remind us of the focus of our work. We kept our players, the learners, the top priority.

While I will illustrate the process using offensive systems as the example, this process can certainly be replicated for defense and special teams.  

Start your offseason process here.

Over the 30 years I have been involved in coaching, I have been a student of the game studying anything I could get my hands on. A big focus for me became understanding structures and terminology, and within that I applied the knowledge I acquired as a language arts teacher.  

It became a quest to be efficient with language and the structure it was used in for the learner. My friend Dan Gonzalez said it perfectly in speaking of this as our duty as coaches in one of his books,  

“One of the most prominent areas where a coaches commitment to players can be exemplified is in the structure of language.”

One of the first areas where many teams either limit themselves or overwhelm their players is in their formation system.  I see two approaches taken to this which become problematic.

1. Simple formation system - a limited amount of formations are used to keep player memorization to a minimum.  The thought is to allow players to get aligned fast with little strain on their learning.
2. Enormous formation system heavy on memorization.  The thought is to utilize many formations in order to stress a defense.  

Ultimately, both of these present challenges. In the simple system, an offense can become limited in what it can present to a defense, and the defense can hone in on how to align to and stop the different concepts or plays the offense runs.

The enormous set of formations presents challenges to learning.  Players ultimately get confused and many times the coach has trouble getting those into a game plan and settles on a limited set of formations used.

I have done both and been frustrated with both.  There came a point in my study though where I noticed that the  X, Y, and Z were made to memorize several different formations with different names but the exact same alignments.  

In order to cut their learning, we limited their alignment to what we referred to as a “Surface.” In the first year we used it, they were limited to learning 6 pairs of words.  Prior to this they needed to understand where 54 different words aligned them. 

We then had to place our other two players. At the time we were an 11 personnel based team, but we still  began the learning of our system from a two back set which provided us with a ton of flexibility and ease of adjustment.  These two players had to know the numbers 0-9.  (As a side note, numbers in this system could also be replaced with words).

We feel strongly about being multiple, simply with what it can do to gain a matchup advantage for our best players. Here’s an example

Why have this much flexibility? There are considerations year to year and week to week as I explain here.

The entire structure in the course “Creating a Structure for Offense - Formations, Motions, and Personnel.”

Within the course I also include a set of questions for you to audit your offensive system and better understand the learning burden on your players.  Regardless of what kind of offense you run, these questions will help you start a process in which you streamline the learning for your players and ultimately improve your system. 

The overhaul of our formation system provided us with something that our players found both easy to learn as well as fun to play in.  Our most dynamic players especially liked how we could utilize the system to get advantageous match-ups. Coupled with our motions and personnel system, we had multiple ways to stress a defense.

As a bonus with Black Friday coming up soon, I have bundled the course with our templates from our game planning system.  Get both here and save.

If I can be of any assistance in helping you evolve your system for 2021, please let me know.

Always be growing!

Coach Grabowski