I heard a college coach the other day talking about his first spring ball scrimmage. He told his players that the only thing he would be evaluating is how hard they play. Not how well they knew their plays, or how correctly they lined up, or even how well they executed, but only how hard they play. That just shows the importance of getting your guys to play hard. But what does that really mean? Does it mean playing hard 75% of the time? 100% of the time? Or getting most of your guys playing hard all of the time? Of course, that would be the goal,100% of your players 100% of the time.
So it just got me thinking about this subject (it seems like I do that a lot), just thinking about things. I started thinking about the overall goal of playing hard. In my mind that would be when all eleven guys are playing hard on every play of the game. Let's say your team has seventy five plays in a game, half on offense and half on defense. Of those seventy five plays you evaluate how many times in that game you actually got all eleven guys playing as hard as they can. Now I realize that could be very hard to measure. It would have to be subjective as you watched the game tape. But let's say after watching the tape you determined that of the seventy five plays, you found that there were ten plays that all eleven of your players played as hard as they can. How good is that? Maybe just getting eight or nine to play hard every play is pretty good, I’m not sure. Then, those three guys that kind of “took the last play off” played like crazy the next play, but two or three guys that played hard the last play took this next play off. There were also ten plays that ten out of your eleven players played as hard as they can. Or, let's say you had five plays in a row that only six or seven guys played as hard as they can. What is actually realistic? So I guess what I'm asking is what would be a realistic goal to determine how hard our team is playing and how many of you out there actually put a number on that? Heck, high school coaches can only watch so many hours of film, we have a full load of classes to teach. When I was coaching I never really sat down and evaluated this number. So, I would be curious as to what the norm is out there. Have any of you ever evaluated this number and determined how it can be quantified?
There are tons of great resources on www.chiefpigskin.com but I don’t recall anything on this subject area. Perhaps some of you can share your ideas here or on Chiefpigskin. Anyway, I’ll just keep sitting around thinking about things and in particular football. That’s what I love anyway!
Hey Coach.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting topic. I am a firm believer that in high school football effort trumps talent. Most of the time it is as simple as which team blocks and tackles the best. One of the way we graded film last year was counting loafs vs. knockdowns (knockdowns being great tackles, pancake and cut blocks, wedge busting, etc.) The goal each and every game was 5 loafs and 40 knockdowns as a team. Our record last year was 1-9 and needless to say the actual loaf to knockdown averaged around 40 loafs to 10 knockdowns. In the game we won there were 20 loafs and 24 knockdowns.
when you say "Maybe just getting eight or nine to play hard every play is pretty good, I’m not sure." that is the hard part for me. What I expect is our team to perform like the Navy Midshipmen and have 0 loafs, but what is a realistic expectation? Should I lower my standards or should I keep pounding the table about playing hard and effort?
I think you are on to something with regards to evaluating players on how hard they play. We kept a week by week list of loafs vs. knockdowns in the locker room. My hope is the hard working kids start to push the loafers to become better football players.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. Obviously, our goal is to get all eleven playing hard every play of the game. I like your evaluation tool and it might be a good topic for a thread on the forums on Chiefpigskin. Why don't you start one up and maybe we can get other coaches thoughts.
Delete