Offensive Line Progression    
–Discussion:  Reason “O” line is so important – can’t move ball without good offensive line. Discuss that a perfect stance required.  (Discuss stance if necessary, etc.) Discuss Speed off ball is important.

–Coach tell all team count. – go through cadence.  Have team clap at the correct snap count.  If someone claps early, explain off-sides – (or late) – explain missed opportunity to get out ahead of ball, etc.  Goal is everyone claps at same time.

–Then–everyone down–test their “perfect stance.”  (push and pull to assure good base, etc.)

–Speed off ball – give snap count, test speed off ball (3 yds) with no block. – make sure all coming out low, as fast as possible out of stance. After satisfied with that.

–Block on dummies – (as many as have) – teach your “perfect” blocking technique on the dummie – we use the “flipper” / head around technique so players have to “get into” their defender…  Have each kid demonstrate several times on dummie.

–Match up kids with other same ability kids.  Ball behind offense on ground.  Game of protecting ball by offense and getting to ball by defense.  Offensive line practice using above blocking technique. (head on blocks for now – no gaps…)  Give offense count.  Watch!  See who needs help! – (We work at Offensive line maintaining 3 seconds before defense gets to ball – then moving to 5 seconds.)  Then rotate – Defense now on offense and vice versa.

Team that holds defense off the most times wins.  Loser has to (fill in the blank) – That way defense doesn’t “sand bag.”

After doing this a few times, you can go through full progression in 10 minutes.  Allow a lot of time (we use 30 minutes / practice) when beginning to assure everyone blocking correctly and gets the concept.  A lot of “1 on 1” in the beginning.

Heads Up Linemen Drill

• Place four cones on the field in a diamond shape.
• The two “points” of the diamond are about 6 yards apart, with the other two cones in the middle  a few yards away from each other, serving as both boundaries and a line scrimmage.
• Two linemen lineup head to head, one on D and on on O.
• Defense’s goal is to tag the cone behind the O lineman, while the Offense’s goal is to drive the D linemen back to the cone behind the D lineman.

The two “points” can be moved horizontally to simulate different pursuit/blocking angles.

Some coaches like to insert a live RB and LB element, however I like to keep it simple to make optimal coaching time and opportunity for the two linemen to improve (less kids to watch at once).

5 Minute Box Drill
4 cones make a box 20 yards x 20 x 20 x 20.
The kids form a line at one of the cones.
On “go” the first player sprints 20 yards to the first cone, then karaokes to the next cone, then sprints 20 yards again – but at about 5 yards in between this sprint section there is a coach on a bag and the player has to hit the bag properly and at full speed, then release into the remaining 15 yard sprint.
The last 20 yards is a 10 yard side shuffle – hop over a bag and bear crawl to the finish.  Then get back in line.
As each kid gets to the first cone you send the next in line.
We run the kids through this sequence 5 or 6 times in 5-8 minutes.

It’s great for conditioning and also for reinforcing blocking technique, and the side shuffle hit position.

There is a coach between each cone who reinforces the proper technique or yells encouragement.  Adding the “hit the bag” drill with immediate positive reinforcement when they do it well seems to re-energize them.

Coaching Tip
One of the drills we are doing this year I took from wrestling camp.  We slide side ways, bend our knees and keep our hands on the ground.  This keeps the kids low and conditions their legs.  I like it because of the LOW aspect.

Deer Hunter Drill

• Make a big (10-15 yds in diameter) circle with cones.
• No one is allowed out of the circle during the drill.
• Pick 3-4 of your known fastest players (your “hunters”).
• Put pinnies on them, and put them in the middle of the circle with backs touching.
• All other players are scattered around the circle.

On the whistle, the hunters go after the rest of the team in what basically amounts to a game of tag.  What makes the drill beneficial to a coach is that it gives you a great opportunity to see what kind of speed and moves your new players have in a very short period of time.

It typically only takes 3-4 minutes with my team of 50+ kids, so we run it 2 or 3 times at the end of practice.  When the same kids keep showing up in the last group of survivors, that’s usually who you want to get the ball to during the games.

The first thing to remember is that on offense and special teams, you’re going to have a dynamic gameplan, depending on how the game evolves. Whereas on defense, you want to determine your clock management strategy before the game, and stick with it until the end.

When you’re trying to determine your clock management strategy, first you’ll have to determine how you believe your team will perform.

There are five categories that you could potentially be in: blowout favourite, favourite, slight favourite or underdog, underdog, and blowout underdog.

If you’re a blowout favourite, or just a favourite, you’re going to want to speed the game up, to give your team as many possessions and chances as possible to take advantage of their higher skill level. If you’re the underdog, you’re going to want to slow down the game, limiting the number of possessions between both teams and increasing the fluke factor in the game.

A great way of explaining this to your players is the example of the weighted coin. If heads represents a 20:1 favourite, and tails represents a 20:1 underdog, to whom is it more advantageous to limit the number of coin flips to 2? 200?

The answer is 2 for the underdog, and 200 for the favourite – again, because the favourite should be trying to increase the number of possessions, and the underdog should be trying to limit them.

There are a couple of other reasons to push the tempo; for example if you’re simply just a better conditioned team than your opponent. Or if you’re going up against a team that likes to try a lot of exotic blitz packages, the hurry up can force them into much more conservative playcalling, not to mention limit defensive substitutions.

There are quite a few reasons to slow down as well. If you’re playing in a hostile environment, you can slow down to take the crowd out of the game, or if you’re playing in weather conditions that are advantageous to your opponent.

As well, if you’re short on players or not just in as good shape as your opponent, limiting possessions will be to your advantage.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future articles, make sure to let me know in the comments section below!

Full Extension Is Key

throwing pattern. But there are three fundamental aspects of all of their games that every quarterback needs to practice.

Extension

Sometimes, when a player is trying to make up for a lack in arm strength, they will tighten up their elbow, almost shot-putting the ball. This is going to limit your throwing power and accuracy drastically, and something you need to correct in players early.

Teach them to extend their arm fully, keeping their hand on top of the ball as they release. This will give them the ability to get more arc on their deep throws, and more zip on the ball on their short to medium range passes.

Whether their release comes right over the top, a-la Peyton Manning, or perhaps closer to a 45 degree angle, similar to Troy Aikman, the full extension is key.

Elbows In, Shoulders Square. Stay Compact.

Staying Compact

Another key, especially in terms of avoiding fumbles and getting the ball out of the pocket quickly, is staying compact.

While your arm should be fully extended on the release, the rest of your body should be in a balanced athletic stance, with your shoulders square and knees slightly bent.

From the moment the ball is hiked there should be now wasted motion from your quarterback – no lazy feet, shoulder rolls, flailing the ball around – you want your quarterback as efficient as a heat pump.

A Quick Release

There are a lot of things out of your hands as a coach and player. Not everyone is going to be blessed with incredible athleticism or a rifle for an arm, but every player is capable of developing a quick release.

A quick release will make it much tougher for defenses to react to you, and will become more and more valuable to the player as they get older and the level of play increases. In fact, I should probably say more and more necessary.

Release - High and Quick

I will be putting up some drills that focus on each of these individual aspects shortly, but it’s important to stress these three concepts to your players.

When you develop all of the characteristics in a quarterback, he learns a little magic word that is a quarterback’s most important trait – efficiency. This isn’t so much a technique so much as a mindset that your quarterback needs to have with every single thing they do. You cannot over emphasize this.

Later on this week, we’ll look at some drills that will help improve your quarterback’s ability in these three areas – and many more! In the meantime, take a look at these quarterback drills I put up not too long ago!

Box Drill
This is a good drill to use at the beginning of practice and can be set up and run by the kids as one of several receiver stations if you have a lot of kids.

Set up four cones in a 10yd by 10 yd square.
Put receivers in one line behind one cone facing up one side of the square.
On the whistle:
1. The first receiver sprints to the first cone,
2. Does a quick footfire to settle his feet,
3. Slams his outside foot,
5. Turns his hips towards the next cone with a good dead-leg turn and
6. Sprints to the second cone.

This process continues for the next two cones.
The next receiver goes once the man in front of him has reached the first cone.
Once everyone has gone through once, the line should go through again in the opposite direction.

Conditioning Drill
Here is a favorite conditioning drill of ours. Not only a great conditioning drill but keeps them low, especially on 5 yd version, and it is fun!

1. Split the squad in smaller teams (we have 20 players so we do 4 teams of 5 players)
2. Split that team in 2 at 1 end and 3 at the other end, where the teams are approx fair in teams of speed
3. Put 3-4 tennis balls at 1 end, either 10 yards or 5 yards away
4. Relay race to run and pick up the tennis balls one at a time and must set back down on the line by the other team
5. Can have them do this once or twice to win the race

Not only a great conditioning drill but keeps them low, especially on 5 yd version, and it is fun!

Preseason Conditioning
Currently we are doing conditioning practice.  We are not allowed to make contact of any kind not even pads for the first 10 days so we do pure conditioning.

I divide the kids into 6 groups, usually done from the 6 lines as we stretch.  I then have 6 cones spread around the field about 40 yards apart with a coach at each location.

We do 3 min at each location doing some exercise before sprinting to the next location.

It takes about 20 minutes and will really wear them down.  Some of the exercise we do are: squat and jump, sit ups, push ups, up – downs, lunges, leg lifts.

High School Transition Drill
When coaching youth teams, we try to mold are players to make a smooth transition into are local high school program.

We found that the drills that help us the most were containment and angle pursuit drills with work on making the runner go to inside and not letting them get to the outside.

Pursuit drill was so effective that some teams almost never made it too far past the line. What we would do is to go half speed, have a coach or runner hit the sideline and go then have the D turn and find their angle of pursuit.

After a couple of walk throughs we made sure everybody had it down, we would go full speed with no tackling involved no need to have a whole team cream a runner during practice as long as they excite the angle correctly we would save the big hits for the game.

No Sled Drill
As an alternative to using the sled for our offensive line drill, we use an opposing line of players.
If there are six linemen in the drill we have three on offense, three on “defense”.

The offensive players start in three point stance and fire off on the snap count using proper stance, hand technique and driving feet.

The “defensive players” are there to provide passive resistance to the offensive players.  They use no hands against the offensive linemen but force the offense to really drive hard to move them backward.

Offense drives the defense backwards until the whistle.  At this point the offense becomes the defense and vice versa.

The two groups drive each other back and forth.  It allows for a lot of reps, smaller groups and a way to keep a better eye on each individual’s technique.

No Cones Drill
This is my most popular drill with the players. I take 5 or 6 drive way markers (reflectors on a 3ft fiberglass pole) & set them up in zig zag patern about 5 yrds apart. This gives the boys a target to get their hips around.

I feel it works better than the cones and they can’t just step over it. Good cut drill strengthens the ankles & hips. You can also add ball carrying along with pass drills.

King of the Hill
We use a small blocking dummy that is 12 inches wide and about 4 foot long.
We place two players head up at the middle of the dummy.
They are on offense two plays and defense two plays.

If the offense stays square and drives his opponent off the dummy he wins.
If the defense stands the offense up and holds his ground he wins.
Winner moves to the next round and so on until we have the king.

We match up the players that are equal until the last two rounds. Usually when we get the final 4 they are pretty even.

I have found this competition is very entertaining and very helpful to me as I can make sure their technique is correct.

I added a feature toward the end of last season–I bring the backs/receivers over and they get into the competition by cheering and screaming as each lineman advances. When we get to the final 4 we make the backs/receivers choose who will win and if they choose wrong they have to do 3 gaser’s.