We had one goal on defense. That was to get the ball back as quickly as possible. There are four ways to get the ball back.
We wanted to do everything we could to get the opposing offense off the field and to get our offense on the field. One of the most important factors in doing this was being prepared.
The first key to preparation is to have good data. We never went a game without entering data on our opponent. If coaches share the responsibility of entering the data, you can knock out a game in less than 15 minutes.
If you are a young coach who has the responsibility of entering data, take the responsibility serious. The data you enter is going to be the difference between knowing what a team will do and not knowing.
Once we enter the data, we then focus on the two keys to stopping our opponent.
We want to stop their dude, and take away what is is that they do. We want to make sure that they aren't going to beat us with their best player or their best play. If they are going to score it is going to have to be with someone else running something else.
The data we enter is going to give us two things. First, it is going to give us tendencies. A tendency is something done 65% of the time. I want to know what it is they do most frequently. We are going to look at down and distance tendencies, field/boundary tendencies, personnel tendencies, field/zone tendencies, backfield tendencies, and formation tendencies. We will first look at run/pass tendencies for each of these.
Below is an example of run/pass tendencies for 3 games. This is from a company called Recon Sports
All we did was take the data we were already entering, upload it to Recon, and we had beautiful reports that helped us to be better prepared. Instead of spending hours with pen and paper, and filtering and sorting excel spreadsheets, these reports were ready to give us the tendencies we needed. This helped me to know what defensive calls would be good in certain situations, and what calls might not be as good.
