More considerations on developing your systems

In response to a coach asking about an "Ideal Passing Offense."

I totally agree [with Coach Huey's response that the primary goal of an offense is to get the ball repeatedly to your best player's].

Your "system" is just a framework from which you can run your individual "offense" in a given year, based on your personnel. This is one reason that most teams like to be "multiple spread teams" or "multiple one-back," because the theory is that in a given year the focus of the O should change based on who you have. For example, if you have a powerful RB, you will probably want to line him up in single back, 6-7 yards deep--maybe even I or offset I--and run the power schemes etc and use that to set up your offense.

A great example if you are a spread offense team is when you have a running QB vs. a dropback guy. I tend to think counter-intuitively: I like to put dropback QBs under center and running QBs in the gun. Your "offense" still involves the same plays whether the QB is in the gun making fakes and running laterally on bootlegs, sprintouts, QB reads, etc, or more traditional rhythm dop passing, play action passing, etc. A fan (or hopefully an opponent!) will look at your offense though and think you are completely different.

It is easy to see that your offense is the same, the only difference is if you call your formations with "gun" in them or not. Then, in practice you emphasize one thing over another.

In the end, you have to install something you can effectively coach. Whatever you end up doing, make sure that you and your coaches believe in it and have a firm grasp of both the schemes and concepts, why and how they are used, and, most importantly, how to teach them to your kids. The biggest challenge in moving from say the wing-t or traditional I-back offense to a pass oriented or even balanced O is identifying what your players need to learn and how best to teach it in a limited amount of time, at the expense of not teaching or spending much time on other things--even things that formerly you spent a lot of time on.

Look at a Texas Tech, who is almost entirely committed to the pass. If you study them or talk to their coaches, the reason they focus so hard on the passing game at the expense of the running game is not because the players can't learn a lot of different running schemes (though this is a factor), but moreso the amount of practice time they would have to spend learning how to execute them, what kind of skills they would need, and having enough practice time to master those skills.

As a final note, the counter-argument to this is that adding a few more concepts, or a more aggressive run game or balanced attack would make the job of pass blocking for the linemen easier, or even passing itself easier. This is further argued that at some point your players don't "get any better," at a given skill, say pass blocking, than their ability would allow, so you are better off teaching something new. All coaches and systems seek to balance these two opposing forces. Further, most agree that the lower the level you coach at the fewer "things" you are going to try to do, since you must spend more time on the fundamentals and specific skills the players must learn.