Nascar Tempo: The Great Equalizer

I want to take a few minutes to talk with you about Nascar Tempo, and the value of tempo to your offense. Nascar Tempo isn't a speed we play, it's a way of life. It's how we live. What does this mean? 

Everything we do we want to do with a sense of urgency. You want to have no wasted movements. You want to always be moving from one point to the next, and doing so expediently. Tempo is about being early and on-time. Tempo is about hustle. Tempo is about being determined and focused. 

As an OC, I wanted to find any advantage possible to score as many points as possible. But more important than points scored, was setting ourselves up to win the game. We had to score more points than our opponent. There were seasons where our defense struggled and we had to score more points on offense to win. There were other seasons where our defense was the strength of our team, and we wanted to do everything we could to help our defense. That meant not putting them in bad positions. But at the same time, we always wanted to score. Nascar was always a part of our offense, but we used it strategically based on the situation we were in. 

I look at our fastest tempo as an opportunity to play fast, but we don't just want to play as fast as we can. We want to mix up our Tempos or modes for teams to defend. I recently asked one of my quarterbacks from several years ago if he remembered how many tempos we used. He said sure coach, "fast, faster, and ludicrous speed." That made me laugh, because I showed them the luriscious speed scene from Spaceballs. 

We didn't always play as fast as we could, but had the ability to. There were times we played faster than others. We wanted to have the ability to change speeds. Today I want to talk with you about playing at our fastest tempo, which most people call Nascar. 

Benefits of Playing Fast

I look at Nascar Tempo as the great equalizer. We have the ability to keep the defense off balance, and not allow them to gather themselves between plays. We want to be able to dictate the pace of the game and get the defensive players out of their comfort zone. Defenses also don't have time to substitute. If they try to substitute players, they will have too many on the field. Here is an example from a game where the defense had 13 players on the field when the ball was snapped. They also weren't able to get lined up. 

As you can see, they couldn't get guys off the field or get lined up. 

What Are You Going To Do About It?

At this point your season has ended, and unless you won a championship, chances are your season didn't end the way you wanted. Every year around this time I would visit with my dad who was a retired coach. I would tell him all the things that went wrong, and he would always say the same thing. "What are you doing to do about it?" He didn't phrase it as a question, as much as a declaration that you need to grow and adapt.

As you come out of your holiday break, there is something very important every coach needs to do. You need to take a very deep dive into your program, and decide what you need to do to make it become the best it can be. You need to do this without pride. You need to look at things without letting your emotions or your ego get in the way. 

At the end of each season, I made a list of things that kept us from being our best. This list focused on the following areas: 

• On the field
• Schematics, Personnel, Situational Awareness, Play Calling
• Were we putting guys in a position to be successful? 
• Were we prepared for the situations we faced? 
• Practice
• Organization, Practice Schedules, Install Schedules, Scripts, Time on Field
• Game Day Operations
• Travel, Itinerary, Pre-Game, Pre-Game Warm-Ups, Coach to Coach and Coach to Player Communication, Box Logistics, Workflow, Half-Time Operations, In-Game Adjustments 
• Off-Season
• Program, Logistics, Set-up, Strengths, Weaknesses
• Are we getting guys out of their comfort zone?
• Are we getting stronger, faster, and more explosive?
• Spring Ball
• Organization, Set-Up, Practice Schedules, Install Schedules, Field Set-Up
• Returning Personnel
• Evaluate Personnel, Rate On Board, Who Are Dudes, Who Could Be Dudes, Best Leaders, Position Changes
• Character, Leadership, and Program Culture
• Define our current culture, character level of athletes, how will we improve leadership?

The hardest part of this process was looking at things and not justifying mediocrity. Ultimately, this is how you find the weaknesses in your program that are holding back the success of your team. This brings us back to the question, "What are you going to do about it?"

Once you identify areas of weakness, you need to build a plan to attack these areas of weakness. Depending on where you are as a program, you may have several weaknesses. It is difficult to attack them all. One thing to caution is to be careful that you don't treat the symptoms without treating the disease. During the season you are often going to apply band-aids to stop the bleeding. The off-season is the time when you can go through chemotherapy and treat the actual disease that impedes development.

What I mean is this... Often there is a deeper issue that causes problems within multiple areas of your program. Poor leadership can affect the effort and attitude of your players. This affects their learning. You might focus on improving your meetings and how you teach concepts, but this will only treat the symptom. You have to find the disease within your program. If you treat the disease, the symptoms will go away. 

10 Things Offensive Coordinators Should Do At The End Of The Season

At the end of each season, there were a number of things that helped us to use the season as a catapult for future success. No matter how good or how bad the season went, we were going to need to analyze what we did, how we did it, and who we did it with. We were then going to find areas we could target for improvement. 

In my 20 plus years as an offensive coordinator, I found there were 10 things that I had to do at the end of each season. I call this the end of season analysis. This was developed early in my career and evolved over time. These 10 things gave us enough information to use to improve as coaches, and helped our program to improve offensively. 

1. Run a Self-Scouting Report

    The first thing I did was run a self-scout report. I analyzed our formations and personnel groups, down and distance tendencies, run/pass tendencies, field zone tendencies, and time remaining tendencies. I also broke down our first 3 play calls for each game. While we ran a self-scout report each week, I wanted to look at it after the season as well. One thing I looked for was how well we scouted ourselves during the season, and find where I was tendency heavy. 

2. Make Cut-Up Lists

    After our self-scout report, I made cut-up lists. I made lists by concept first. Next I made cut-ups by formation. Then I put together a red zone cut-up, goal line cut-up, and a backed up cut-up. I then put together down and distance cut-ups. Then we made a cut-up of sacks and negative plays. I wanted a cut-up of turnovers. I also wanted a cut-up of positive plays, touchdowns, explosives, and momentum plays. I did this so I could go through and watch things in groups. Then would mark good and bad plays. These would be watched later by our staff to talk about changes we needed to make in our teaching. 

3. Watch Every Play From the Season

    One of the most valuable things we did was watched our cut-ups of every play of the season as a staff. We did this nearly every year. It typically required early mornings and some evening work to get everyone together. We would talk about each play call, evaluate the call, and talk about what was good and bad about the execution. While we do this, we will take notes on things we need to work on as we begin to prepare for the upcoming season. We also take notes on what defenses did against us, and adjustments they made.

4. Make Notes On The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

    I make a list of what we did well, didn't do well, and things we need to make changes to for the upcoming year. I will make a list of everything from concepts to techniques. I will look at everything on a very detailed scale, drilling down to the small details so we can correct things and improve. 

What About A Partial Scholarship?

It is exciting when a school says they are going to offer you a scholarship to play football at their university. All of the hard work in the classroom, weight room, and on the field have paid off. Whether you are a 5 star D-1 athlete, or you get an opportunity to play at a smaller school, you are part of a very small percentage of athletes who will get a chance to play at the college level. You are a part of an elite group. Less than 5% of high school athletes will have an opportunity to participate in college sports. The transfer portal and additional covid years of eligibility have only made it tougher to earn scholarships.

If you received an offer from a Division 1 FBS university that is either a Power 5 or Group of 5 school, your scholarship will cover all of your tuition, room and board, books, and additional expenses. Any financial aid you are awarded will be stacked on top of that and go into your pocket. But what if you receive a D2, D3, or NAIA offer? What about FCS schools? What does that mean financially? 

I wanted to write this specifically for the student-athletes that are not going to a Power 5 or Group of 5 school. Let's go through each of these and talk about what they mean. 

FCS schools have up to 63 scholarships they can award. Not all FCS schools give out 63 scholarships. To fund a roster of 95 to 115 players and only 63 scholarships to use, they are not going to give every athlete a full ride. They are going to give out many partial scholarships so they can field a full roster. Your offer may be only a partial scholarship, and this is something you must ask. 

NCAA Division 2 Schools have up to 36 scholarships to give to potential football players. Not all Division 2 schools use their full allotment. Very few, if any, athletes are given a full scholarship to a D2 school. Many D2's give out small scholarships to freshmen, and increase the dollar value based on playing time and contribution to the team. 

NAIA schools have up to 24 scholarships. Like D2 schools, they are going to divide these scholarships among 75 to 100 players. Many NAIA schools have limits to how much institutional aid an athlete can receive on top of their football money. 

D3 schools do not give out any scholarship offers. When you are "offered" by a D3 school, they are essentially telling you they will have a roster spot for you. They do not give athletic scholarships, so you will only get financial aid not related to athletics from a D3 school. 

While junior colleges can give up to 85 scholarships, not all use their full allotment. At many junior colleges your football scholarship is partially determined by how much federal financially aid you will get. This way they can recruit more players. 

In each case above, you are most likely getting a "partial scholarship." This means you are going to get a scholarship to cover some part of the cost of attendance. Scholarships are as small as $250 a year. Some partial scholarships are $5000, or $10,000 a year. The key is that the scholarship is only going to cover part of your cost of attendance. 

What does this mean for you, and what do you need to do to put yourself in the best position possible? 

1. Before you sign, ask to see the financial breakdown. Ask the school to show you the numbers. Many times I have heard from parents who thought their son was getting a full ride, only to find out they were getting a scholarship worth $1,000 or 2,000 dollars. The college can give you an estimated breakdown of costs if you provide them your income and family size information. If you have filled out the FAFSA, they can give you a very accurate picture of what your financial obligations will be to attend their school. YOU MUST SEE THIS BEFORE YOU SIGN!

I have seen many young people sign their letter of intent, only to find out later they were going to have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, take out student loans, or a combination of the two. If you are going to a D2, D3, or NAIA school, expect that you will have to pay some money out of pocket. 

Balancing Relationships With Accountability and Discipline

One of the most difficult things a coach must do is balance relationship building with building accountability and discipline in your program. There are coaches who are powerful relationship builders, and other coaches who are very good at building and developing discipline. The truly elite coaches are able to develop a perfect balance between the two, knowing when they must be more relational, and knowing when they must build discipline through accountability. 

You have probably heard coaches referred to as strong relationship builders. Their players will run through a wall for them. This is a powerful testament to the ability of these coaches to reach athletes. Building relationships is important to being a successful coach and running a successful program. One of the pitfalls of relational coaches, however, is when they struggle with holding their athletes accountable. They especially struggle with holding their best athletes accountable.  

When you build relationships but don't have accountability, you basically have become a "friend" to your athletes. They already have friends, and so do you. Kids don't need a friend. They need someone who will challenge them, and bring out the best in them. This doesn't happen through fiery speeches, or from coaches jumping around and being excited. 

Here are the six issues that come from coaches being relational, without having accountability. 

• Your athletes will make undisciplined mistakes.
• Your athletes will quit when they face adversity or get behind.
• Your athletes will not know how to respond to coaching.
• They won't understand what is happening when someone holds them accountable. 
• You will lose to people you shouldn't lose to from a talent standpoint.
• You will have more players quit during the season. 

How many of you have seen this at some level within your own teams? I have been a part of programs where you have great relationship builders, but the program lacks standards and accountability. Everything you do matters. You are either developing accountability, or you are developing entitlement. There is no in between. You can't talk people into being disciplined, and you certainly can't develop discipline and accountability by being a "good" guy. 

I also was in a program that was led by someone who didn't do a good job of building relationships. He thought that discipline was developed by being a jerk all the time. His players feared making a mistake, which made them robots on the field. They also were miserable and often quit in high numbers. Program retention struggled. Being too far on one end of the spectrum will lead to failure.

Strike A Balance

The key is strike a balance between relationship building and setting standards and holding people accountable to the standards. When a program has a very relational head coach but lacks discipline, you will only go as far as your talent will take you. You will not have consistent mental toughness. You will be really good when things are easy to moderately difficult. But when we faced someone who was mentally tough and more together as a team, you will lose all of your self-discipline. You will find yourself with a group of veteran players who hav a sense of entitlement. They know they wouldn't be held accountable, and this will lead to losing some games you should have won. You have to be continue to build strong relationships, but you also have to love your players enough to set boundaries and hold them accountable. 

The ultimate goal is for every single player in your program to develop self-discipline. But before people can develop self-discipline, they need to have someone hold them accountable to develop that discipline. 

So What Do You Need to Do?

Correcting this imbalance isn't easy, but is also not rocket science. It is actually very simple in theory, but difficult in that relationship builders have to get out of their comfort zone. Relationship builders struggle with making people uncomfortable. They want to please people and make them happy. In itself, this is not a terrible thing. But when you don't have a balance with standards and accountability, you limit the potential of your team. The hard part about this is that you are going to have to be willing to change, and change is hard. I recommend having a mentor who is strong in this area that can help you go through this process. 

First, you have to have a set of standards that are unwavering. You set clearly defined standards and expectations that will raise the level of the performance of those in your program. You need standards for the classroom, weight room, and on the field. Your standards are not going to adjusted to the individual, because they don't rely on ability. These standards all are things that take zero talent. What do you stand for? If you stand for nothing, you will fall for everything. Your standards are bigger than football. Your standards will carry people through life. The best part about your standards, is they take zero talent or ability.

Some examples of academic standards would be: