Finding Your Top Plays for Your Offense

One of the most important parts of coaching is knowing what you do well and what you need to improve. Too often coaches are so focused on expanding their playbook during the offseason that they do not spend time determining what their true strengths are and what they can do to maximize them.

Finding Your Top Plays for Your Offense

The first step to understanding your strengths and weakness is to look at the efficiency of each of your play calls. This requires some time up front but pays huge rewards down the road as you begin to gain clarity on the identity of your team and how to build on it.

The best way to determine efficiency of a play is to go measure the percentage of times that play produced an efficient result. In Hudl you can make a separate column for efficiency which will allow you to label each of the plays. As you go through each play you simply mark yes or no. Any running play that lead to a Touchdown, First Down or a gain of over 4 yards is considered efficient. Meanwhile any passing play that resulted in a Touchdown, First Down or a gain of 6 yards is considered efficient. While this isn’t a perfect way to measure if a play met its goal or not, it does provide you with a great framework that can give you an informed viewpoint of your plays as a whole.

Once you have measured your efficiency percentage for each of your major concepts it’s time to look at the results. More often than not you will find there is one to two concepts that stand out as your most efficient play calls.This is especially true when you do the break down by concept and by formation. This gives you a very clear picture into what your team is good at and where it struggles.

While it’s easy to stop at this stage if you are truly planning on igniting your offense for the upcoming season, or game, you need to use this analysis. The best way to do this is by looking at when your most efficient concepts were not successful. As you go through each concept look at if the cause was a missed assignment by your team or a call by the defense and keep track of each.

When you have taken an analysis of the things that cause your top concepts to be inefficient, you can begin to form a course of action. For the mistakes that are made by your players you should spend the upcoming offseason looking for drills and techniques that will correct this problem. When you see a defensive call that stops a play, you can build in a play that is designed to counter this defensive correction. This will give you a series of plays that provide answers to the most popular defensive corrections to your offense.

While this process is described for a Postseason breakdown, it can be very effective as a mid-season breakdown as well. It’s important to understand what your true strengths are so you can build off of these strengths. At the same time it’s also critical to understand how the defense will look to take away these concepts and look to develop answers.

(See Also) Getting the Most out of Coaching Clinics