# Making a Winner In Youth Football, Analyzing Your Previous Season

Making Changes In Systems in Youth Football

After each and every season most good youth football coaches try to figure out ways to enhance their teams or coaching methods. Most remember to reflect a bit currently of year on the past season.

Most of us ask ourselves;

Did I perform a good job?

Did my team do in addition to they need to have?

Did we meet our goals as defined before the growing season started?

Where are areas we didn't do perfectly in?

What could I did differently?

Should I be making any changes?

Once that is completed, we determine where our deficiencies were, prioritize the deficiencies because they relate genuinely to reaching our goals and then search out solutions to deal with said deficiencies. I'm not speaing frankly about adding in additional football plays, I'm speaing frankly about doing an assessment and review of the season.

**Below are a few things we're doing in 2008:**

**Changes We Made In The Past**

Back the 90's I coached the only path I'd ever known, "I" formation power and option football. We found a small shotgun spread package being an augment to the "I" and we ran a simple base 5-3 on defense. We ran exactly the same [ข่าวฟุตบอลไทยวันนี้](https://ufa800daily.com/ข่าวฟุตบอลไทย/) offense and the same drills I'd run as a youth football player in the late 60's and in the 70's as a High School player. We even did some of my old College drills for good measure. Unfortunately, our offensive production was always tied straight to the levels of talent we'd and often how big is our offensive line.

Whenever we had great talent and some size, we won and won often. Whenever we didn't, we were average or worse. On defense when we started our best 11 on defense and didn't sub on defense, we were usually in many games. But when we did sub to get several of those two way starters a rest or get our weaker kids some snaps, we'd struggle. Of course when we played the very best teams, we wouldn't do very well.

**Insanity**

You know what they say about people that do the same thing over and over again, but expect different results don't you? That's usually the classical definition of the phrase "insanity." Unfortunately this indicates is if a number of our fellow youth football coaches suffer with this player decimating affliction. They keep doing the same old thing year after year while finding yourself with same frustrating poor or choppy results. In my own first several years of coaching youth football, I experienced the above post season assessment. My answer was always that I needed better football players as the solution to my problem. My thoughts were that I needed was a better x player, better y player, kids with more motivation, more size etc etc. It absolutely was always the kids fault, I recently needed a "good team" and we'd do well.


What turned my head far from that "lottery" mindset was that in the league I coached in then, exactly the same teams with exactly the same coaches won year in and year out. Some years these teams had talent, but usually the talent levels they'd were very average. Within the organizations that have been consistently winning, there have been specific head coaches within those organizations that always won, no real matter what team they took. Humbly, I stumbled on the final outcome that coaching and scheme really mattered in youth football and I needed to make some changes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said "A foolish consistency could be the hobgoblin of little minds" ;.Wise and humble people make changes from what they do if what they're doing isn't yielding the outcomes they want. One would hope that goes for anyone coaching youth football as well.

I'm now along the way of doing research to correct regions of deficiency within our program. I'm working to produce better ways of communicating with my coaching staffs. I feel we're not leveraging the talents of each coach in addition to we're able to or utilizing the initial expertise each of our coaches innately has as an individual being. I'm looking for answers everywhere; from great coaching legends to the captains and innovators of American Industry. We're also leaning too much on our coordinators to accomplish all the essential reads, adjustments and game planning. There has to become a far better and efficient means of doing things than we're doing today.


As our organization has matured, we now have a few guys that have some experience under their belts and we're getting a few knowledgeable new guys in to the program. We want to use their input where it makes sense while making sure that all our youngsters are "maxing out" on the initial expertise each folks coaches bring to the table. This can be a big differ from when we first began and had a lot of skeptical rookie "daddy" coaches. While we probably perform a better job of this than most youth football teams, we desire to be the very best at it, that is our standard. One of the great benefits of speaking at all of the Nike and Mega Clinics is I get to sit in on other speakers sessions. I get to see (research) how various successful High School and College teams do things. I've been fortunate to listen to coaches like Bobby Bowden, Pete Carroll, Jim Tedford and Les Miles in addition to top High School and Lower Division College coaches. Maybe more importantly I get to talk to 1000s of youth coaches at these clinics and needless to say through e-mail as well.

By performing a better job in this area our youngsters could have a better experience, progress instruction, be better prepared and do have more fun. Coaching youth football is all about X's and O's but it's also effectively and efficiently communicating with your players and your coaches. This can be a neglected area in many programs that will reap big payoffs. I assure you we shall work out how to accomplish it better and share that information with you once we have proven it works and have all of the bugs worked out.

**Other Big Change Stories**

Many coaches look at their goals, do research and develop alternate solutions to reach those goals. Many of you think of Tom Osborne as "Mr. Option Football" ;.Well that actually isn't him at all if you look at his history. He was earned by Bob Devaney to add spice to the passing game of Nebraska in the 1960s. Bob Devaneys Unbalanced T formation running teams of 1967 and 1968 had struggled. Those teams complied back again to back 6-4 seasons that included a homecoming day 12-0 loss to lowly Kansas State in a game NU had just 1 first down. Osborne, counting on his prior NFL receiver background, earned a spread passing attack and "I" formation base running attack and dumped the run 90% of that time period T formation.

**Spread Passing Attack**

Osborne recruited future NFL quarterbacks, Jerry Tagge, Dave Humm and Vince Ferragamo to lead these offenses and NU threw the ball. In 1970 NU was a 50% run 50% pass team, and were split virtually down the middle from 1969 to the late 70s. NU won National Titles in 1970 and 1971 applying this "spread passing" system. Johnny Rodgers even won the Heisman Trophy in 1972 as a receiver at NU. But while Osborne's 1970 and 1971 team had won National Titles (both teams had incredible defenses), his teams in the mid and late 70s were getting beat every year by Oklahoma and often didn't fare well in Bowl Games. While NU's teams were winning 9-10 games every year, that wasn't the target, the target was to compete for National Championships.

**Change to Option Football**

Osborne studied the landscape of college football and in 1980 he decided to produce a colossal change to option football by recruiting Fort Worth Texas native Turner Gill. Not only would Gill be NU's first option quarterback, he would be NU's first starting black quarterback. Osborne had done an in depth statistical study of the offensive production of college football and it's correlation to wins. He looked at the forms of kids he had available locally in addition to the sort of kids he could recruit nationally and chose to take the then risky plunge into option football.

**Change Yields Big Results**

In the first 90's Osborne also made huge changes on defense. He went to an attacking 4-3 with smaller and faster players, an enormous differ from the 50 bend but don't break strategy of the previous 20 years. Most of you realize the way the story ends, over 250 wins in 25 seasons, 3 more National Titles and named to the College Football Hall of Fame. Would Osborne be where he is today if he hadn't made the big change to option football in 1980? I doubt it and certainly the Nebraska Football legacy could have been a much different one.

While I don't compare to the worst of College coaches, let alone one of the finest, we made the same wholesale change a number of years back. Eight seasons ago I chose to go on to the Single Wing Offense and a much different practice methodology, a 180 degree turn from what I knew. We went from having up and down seasons to going 78-5 and consistently winning and retaining the majority of my players. Had I stayed using what I knew before and just recruited or expected better players or added a few more football plays, undoubtedly we could have been suffering with exactly the same up and down results. The kids are better off for it and I know I am too.

Let me know when you have other topics you want me to deal with at
For 200 free youth football coaching tips or to register for Dave's free Youth Football Tips newsletter please head to:

Coaching Youth Football Well Copyright 2007 Cisar Management.

Republishing this article is allowed if this paragraph and links are included.

**Dave Cisar-**

Dave has a passion for developing youth coaches to allow them to subsequently develop teams which can be competitive and well organized. He's a Nike "Coach of the Year" Designate and speaks nationwide at Coaches Clinics. His book "Winning Youth Football a Step by Step Plan" was endorsed by Tom Osborne and Dave Rimington.