Your Math Teacher was Right
You will need to know this as an adult!
Great…now that I have your attention let’s get down to business. Yes this is a football related Substack and we are going to talk a little about math. However we are going to talk about math today in the way it was intended for us as adults and that is to make our day to day lives easier. How does that relate to football you may ask well pull up a chair it is time to enter the Dairy Raid classroom and talk about addition through multiplication.
As many of you know I am a football coach, but my coaching situation is unique in that I coach in Europe. It’s still the same game but I am presented with a lot of unique challenges with two majors ones that have really steered a lot of my coaching decisions over the past twenty years.
First being the time commitment my players have to the sport. School sponsored sports do not exist in Europe, at least not at the same scale as in the US, so everything here is club based and needs to fit around my players school and/or work schedules. I’m limited now to two or three practices a week and have to accept that sometimes my player’s personal lives have to take priority over football. That means I have to teach the same game, but with a lot less facetime and expect the same result so simplification is key. I have to limit the amount of scheme I can use while making sure what I have works with everything else to create a cohesive game plan.
The second major challenge is that with a couple exceptions I have spent my entire coaching career coaching in non-English speaking countries. Now I am lucky in that every country I have been to English is taught starting at a young age by the time the kids reach the age that I coach them most of them are at various levels of fluency. However for what they may understand in vocabulary they may lack in subtext. Also asking them to speak and think in their non-native language is a benefit to me more than it is to them although sometimes playing football in English simplifies the task for them as well. Back in 2005-06 I coached in a small town in eastern Finland and we quickly changed all the terminology to English when the kids realizes that saying “Red 27” was much quicker in the huddle than “punainen kaksikymmentäseitsemän”.
So the unique challenges of time and language have put a limitation on what I can do system wise as it has forced me to think carefully on my vocabulary and my approach to building a system. I want to convey all the information I need in as few words as possible. It’s how I can turn Jon Gruden’s famous “Stanford Green Rt Slot Spider 2 Y Banana” into “Brown 26 Spider”, but also how I can build an entire offensive series around those 3 little words because I use the approach of “addition by multiplication” to build my offense, and you can see a similar approach in the Longo offense.
“Brown” in my system is a base formation (trips bunch). I can tag the formation to move single players around (WEAK move the RB to the weak side, BIG move the H-back into the backfield, etc). Instead of having to think of a new formation name for one person moving I just came up with a tag that can be used on every formation to move that one person. 26 is the play/blocking scheme (OZ stretch right). I can tag the play with an action that keeps the blocking scheme the same but might change the backfield action or add an RPO (Spider is an RPO) so instead of the entire offense needing to learn a new call for a couple tweaks we have a tweak that only the ones who are being tweaked need to know.
And this is what we are seeing as the Badgers’ offense grows from week to week. From the very vanilla Week 1 to where we are now their is a progression. A new RPO, an new backfield action, the same play out of a different formation or motion, etc…the list goes on. So when we see a new backfield action used on a different blocking scheme it really makes you think of the possibilities. That’s why today I have highlighted a run play ran vs. Purdue and the myriad of possibilities that could come off of it.