AGAINST THE GRAIN
Coaches who have won by defying conventional wisdom point out how to succeed while being different.
By Nate Dougherty
Nate Dougherty is a former Assistant Editor at Coaching Management.
If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then football coaches are a most sincere lot. There are few secrets on the football field, so if a strategy works for one team, countless other teams inevitably follow suit.
However, there are coaches who have found success by taking less traveled roads. These coaches buck the prevailing trends and eschew common offensive or defensive schemes.
Some choose to use a lesser-known scheme because they believe it best fits the skills and talents of their players. Others do so for the strategic advantage that comes with being unconventional. Whatever their motivation, they have found success by not being the same as everyone else.
Some of these unconventional systems date back to the days of leather helmets, while others are as new as officials using instant replay. Regardless of the age of their systems, these coaches have found that the benefits of being contrary can be substantial. As with most things in football, these rewards do not always come easily. But by doing the proper planning, getting players to buy in, and sticking to your guns, a contrary approach can be a winning one.
Making The Switch
Although some coaches have a philosophical attachment to a particular offense or defense, in many cases the main goal of using a contrarian system is to be different than everyone else. This can mean running anything from a wide-open passing attack like the one Head Coach Mike Leach has developed at Texas Tech University, to old-school ground-oriented offenses like the Wing-T or Double Wing.
The first step to choosing a contrarian scheme is determining what everyone else is doing so you can shift the opposite way. For example, defenses geared toward stopping common sets like the One-Back or Power-I, often struggle to adjust when they encounter a new formation.
“If you look from team to team, you’ll find there’s a certain line split used by most offensive lines,” says John Reed, a former high school coach and author of a book on the Single Wing offense. “If everyone else is using two-foot line splits, you want to look into a system that uses either tighter splits or wider splits. If most teams have only one option to take the snap, you want to have three. You want to figure out what your opponents are doing, especially the stronger teams.”
Once you’ve identified the prevailing trends, you can explore ways to run counter to them. Because many of the atypical schemes available to choose from were developed decades ago before falling out of favor, old coaching books are one of the best sources for information. Reed has found a treasure trove of knowledge waiting in libraries and used book stores, which are an excellent starting point for a coach looking to use a retro system.
Some coaches, like Western Illinois University Defensive Coordinator Thomas Casey, look within, searching for an atypical scheme that will best fit their players, rather than just trying to be different. Casey’s unit runs a 3-3-5 defense which places a priority on speed and athletic ability rather than size. For teams lacking the prototypical hulking defensive linemen, the formation offers a chance to put their 11 best defenders on the field, regardless of size.
“When I coached high school football, I’d hear great things about a defense and want to try it, but as I’ve matured I’ve found it’s more important to have a system that fits our athletes,” Casey says. “Trying to find four quality defensive linemen is difficult, so instead we design a defense that takes advantage of our best players.”
Not all contrarian offenses and defenses are relics of the past. Some schemes, like the Double Wing, can be learned by watching how-to videos created by coaches. And chances are there’s a coach in your area willing to show you how to get the scheme up and running, as well as how to avoid common mistakes. At Willamette University, Head Coach Mark Speckman often gets questions from coaches looking to run a variation of his Fly offense.
Though Speckman used to closely guard the trade secrets of his energetic, motion-centered offense, he is now more open, even teaching it at clinics.
Regardless of what system you choose, Speckman warns that a few film sessions or practice visits are rarely enough to understand the nuances of a complicated offensive or defensive scheme. “A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous,” he says. “There’s a coach I’ve known a long time who has sat in on a lot of my clinics. One day he told me, ‘This is the third time I’ve listened to you teach the Fly offense, and I think I finally got it.’ This offense takes some time to learn and sometimes coaches think they can pick it up after watching a couple of practices, but eventually they learn it takes more of a commitment.”
Leach also suggests hitting the books and talking to coaches who use a particular system, but adds a caveat. “Read as much you can, but don’t accept everything at face value,” he says. “What works for one coach might not work for your team. It’s best to actually watch someone else practicing and running the scheme, and draw information from them firsthand.”
As uncommon schemes pick up adherents, the pool of knowledge increases. At the University of New Mexico, Head Coach Rocky Long uses a 3-3-5 defense he learned as an assistant to Joe Lee Dunn in the early 1980s. Because so few college teams used this formation when he began, Long didn’t have many opportunities to talk shop with other coaches. But as it’s become more popular, he’s found that answering other coaches’ questions has actually helped him fine tune his system.
“Ten or 15 years ago, when it was a lot newer, we were more secretive,” Long says. “But now, our staff learns a lot about the system by discussing it with others who are looking into doing something similar. They’ll ask questions we haven’t asked ourselves or remind us of things we did well in the past but have gone away from. That type of exchange among coaches is good for both parties, and it’s good for the game.”
A Wing And A Player
Once the decision to run a particular system is made, it’s important to remember that installing it requires much more than simply swapping out some pages in your play book. New systems will often requires players to take on new roles.
When Bob Bourgette, Head Coach at Kennedy High School in Burien, Wash., switched to the Wing-T in 2002, he knew some personnel changes would be in order. To run the system effectively, Bourgette needed an agile quarterback with great hands who would be able to disguise hand-offs and basically serve as a point guard for the offense—even if that meant using a player who had never played quarterback before.
“There are always people who can fill roles for any scheme, but sometimes you have to search hard to find them,” Bourgette says. “Your ideal quarterback might be the guy who was your tight end the year before. This year, we’re moving a wide receiver to quarterback because he’s got great speed and a great knowledge of the game.”
For players used to filling traditional roles, some coaxing may be required before they fully grasp how they’ll now fit into a new scheme. For example, Willamette’s Fly offense calls for receivers to go into motion and take a lot of hand-offs, something most of the team’s wide outs did sparingly, if at all, in high school. Speckman says many receivers initially consider themselves too small to run the ball between the tackles, but eventually warm to the idea of becoming dual-threat players.
“We had an all-league receiver this year who was strictly a run-and-catch wide receiver in high school,” Speckman says. “When he came here, we told him, ‘We’re going to throw you the ball, but we’re also going to hand it to you.’ Although he really saw himself as a wide receiver, the more we worked with him and told him he was just as good as a running back, the better he played. He became a very versatile player for us.”
Flexibility is an important trait for coaches to have, even if it means reworking the playbook itself. While players can be coaxed into new roles, it’s up to the coach to identify what each player can and can’t do, and adjust accordingly.
“Make some educated guesses about your personnel, then see how those guesses play out during training camp,” Speckman says. “You might discover one aspect of your attack isn’t as good as you had anticipated. For instance, maybe your perimeter can’t be blocked as well because this year’s receiver isn’t as good a blocker as his predecessor.
“Sometimes, you have to go to plans B, C, and D,” Speckman adds. “There have been plenty of times we’ve had to go quite deep for plans based on how our personnel shaped up.”
At Texas Tech, Leach’s changes mirror the turnover of players filling each position. “You might have players more adept at doing certain things, so you’ve got to take a look at who you have and what they bring to the table, then tailor your playbook based on that,” Leach says. “We want the ability to attack the whole field and get the ball in everyone’s hands, but if we have a really good option runner one year, we’ll put in more option plays.”
In all but the rarest cases, coaches using an off-beat system will have to build their players’ knowledge from the ground up. Since they’ve probably never seen a Wing-T offense or a 3-3-5 defense, players will be experiencing something unfamiliar.
When introducing a new scheme, it’s a good idea to keep things simple, both for the players and the coaches. Though his players often ask to learn the more advanced concepts of the 3-3-5 defense, Casey keeps his foot on the brakes in the early going.
“The more you can keep it simple and do a handful of things with a high level of execution, the more successful you’ll be,” Casey says. “I’ve been teaching this package since 1993, and I’ve learned it’s best to introduce the core concepts and not go into a lot of the details at first. Once the kids have those basic concepts down pat, you can augment that knowledge base and introduce more advanced aspects of the defense.”
To help players focus on learning the basics, Leach suggests keeping the playbook thin and avoiding the temptation to throw in every play that catches your eye. “The difficulty isn’t in finding plays, it’s in selecting the right ones and narrowing them down to the ones that fit,” Leach says. “It’s tempting to do more and more because there’s so much good stuff out there. But what you really need is a small package that you can execute well.”
Working The Plan
Even after the unfamiliar becomes routine, the work continues. One of the ironies of running an atypical scheme is that the more success you have with it, the more familiar it becomes. Thus an approach that gains its strength from opponents’ unfamiliarity requires constant adjustments to keep it fresh. As opponents begin to key in on certain plays, it’s time to modify your contrarian approach to make sure it remains that way.
“In order to be truly contrarian, after two or three years you have to look at your approach and modify it a little bit,” Reed says. “It’s like an arms race—as soon as someone invents a tank, someone else comes up with an anti-tank weapon. Good opponents might not respect your scheme the first time around, but in the offseason they’re going to try to find ways to stop it.”
As opponents become more familiar with your scheme and learn how to counter it, game-day adjustments also become more important. Anticipating how other teams might counter your approach and having back-up plans ready are important considerations.
“You can find out in the first series or two what they want to take away from you,” Speckman says. “Maybe they’re keying on your tailback or focusing on your tackle outside game. So you’ve got to be ready to go to your belly offense and your trap and run inside. It’s a chess game. If they take away one thing, you’ve got to find an opening and come back and attack it.”
While tweaking your game plan is often necessary, it’s important not to go overboard with in-game adjustments. “You need to be constantly tinkering, but if you alter your entire approach, you’re going to lose a lot of games,” Leach says. “If there’s a better way to run a play, you’ll find it. I don’t think making a bunch of wholesale changes is productive for your players or your team.”
Staying The Course
Critics, of course, are part of the landscape for football coaches. Because very few teams use atypical defensive schemes, Long says those who do typically attract even more skeptics. He usually counters their criticism with a dose of education.
“Some people will assume that if they haven’t seen an idea before there must be something wrong with it,” Long says. “There are great football minds who do things a lot differently, but some people won’t believe in something until it’s successful.
“If the critics truly want to understand what we’re doing, and is not just spouting off for the sake of spouting off, we’ll try to educate them,” Long continues. “Those who understand the game will see why our approach will work.”
According to Reed, if a contrarian scheme fails, it’s usually not the result of things going wrong on the field, but more likely because a coach loses his commitment to it in the face of critics. “You should be wary of pseudo-coaches—the radio guys and boosters who may see the coach as using a dated or desperate approach,” Reed says. “If you run one of these schemes, it’s going to take a few years to get really good at it, and you will hear some criticism along the way. But the problem typically isn’t on the field, it’s in the guts of the coach running it.”
Though his team has had great success with the Wing-T, Bourgette encountered his share of nay-sayers who didn’t like his change of pace—especially parents. He says coaches won’t ever silence all critics no matter how well they perform, so they need to grow a thick skin.
“I just tell any parents or other critics this is what’s going to happen with this offense and this is how we’re going to execute it,” Bourgette says. “I let them know we have the same interests in mind and they need to trust me when it comes to making football-related decisions. It may sound abrupt, but you need to tell them off the bat, ‘This is what we do. We’ve had great success doing it, and we’re going to continue to have success.’”
