r/footballstrategy

Hey, everyone! There isn’t a question wrapped up in this. It’s just an appreciation post!

So, I never played football growing up. It was essentially the only sport I never competed in, and as much as I regret it now, I simply didn’t understand how much I would grow to love it.

I attended a major SEC school and enjoyed football casually as a fan, but something shifted around my junior year of college. I bought one of the older Madden games, and despite its considerable pitfalls, I started learning strategy from it. I would sit in practice mode and run reps of gap and zone runs, check the alignments of defensive coverages, observe the line block different fronts…and I took notes.

I took that interest to the live sport. I attended my SEC team’s games while writing on a literal notepad in the stands like a weirdo. I tracked personnel groups and tendencies to the best of my ability. I started watching NFL all-22 film. I found old playbooks online and tried (emphasis on “tried”) to understand Sabanese pattern match coverages. I lurked on this Subreddit for years and learned as much as possible from y’all.

Somewhere in that mix, my wife (bless her) finally got tired of me pausing the TV all Saturday and said, “You know what? You should try coaching.” Well, I took her advice.

I’m assisting an 8U program that’s running the good ole double wing! I’m already having a fantastic time. I’m learning many of the fundamentals that film and books couldn’t teach me and that I never experienced as a player. Most importantly, I’m having a blast with the kids! I take care of really sick kids for my day job, and interacting with them outside of that environment has been so emotionally healthy for me.

We all start somewhere. This is my beginning, and y’all have been and will continue to be an important part of that journey. Thank you. :)

some teams rely heavily on route-running TEs as key targets in passing situations. think LaPorta, Kittle, Pitts-style archetypes. they can present huge potential mismatches and cause headaches for defenses. but if your defense can entirely shut them down 1-on-1, you can erase a very important threat and throw a wrench into the offensive gameplan.

enter the obvious fix: roll out your team’s stud offensive tackle as a 5th down lineman and line them up directly opposite the TE at the 6. their role will simply be to use their blocking abilities to jam the TE at the LOS and prevent them from being able to run any route. you can still rush 4 other linemen, knowing a downfield threat has been completely eliminated. and because the action happens well within 5 yards of the LOS, no penalty is committed.

as long as the OT’s ability to block is better than the opposing TE’s ability to shed blocks, this is an easy win. and your best OT has the ability to prevent EDGEs from shedding blocks; unless their TE is somehow a better EDGE than true EDGEs, he loses the matchup. he gets completely jammed.

there’s nothing he can do

Hola, quiero profundizar más en los sistemas defensivos pero más allá de las covers, las distribuciones de los jugadores en nickels y dime.

Pongo un ejemplo para que se me entienda

Se cuántos jugadores y más o menos en qué ocasiones se distribuye en una 3-3-5 os una 3-4 o 4-2-5 pero no sé qué diferencia hay entre 3-3-5 mint VS Penny , 4-2-5 under,over G o even. No sé donde puedo estudiar más esa profundidad y aplicarla en que situaciones .

Entiendo la primera capa de la defensa pero quiero profundizar más para poder enseñar de manera correcta

I’m just curious and wanted to see if anyone has a simple way of doing it, trying to get some ideas before the season starts.

Hello, I got an opportunity to be the TE coach at a D2 school in my area. I was wondering if anyone has any advice for me. I assisted coaching high-school football before this but it was super part time and now this opportunity is the real deal and i want to be prepared and also grow my understanding of this great game in any way i can. Thanks and look forward to hearing from some of you!

I’m a first year middle school OC and I have been given play calling duty. My base formation is pistol one tight three receivers I’m trying to find some passing concepts that I could use with my tight end/ H back

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Hi guys,

I am wanting to dive a bit deeper into the X’s and O’s of the running game. I’m relatively new to football, just a couple of seasons and want to learn how to analyse a game rather than just be an armchair fan.

How am I best going about it? Focus on one particular type of play and its variations at a time? Or Focus on a few of the main ones and look into the more niche plays later?

What’s the best way to go about this?

Any advice is appreciated.

Cheers guys

I’m 6’6”, and this is my first time ever playing organized football. I’m playing tight end at the JUCO level, so everything is pretty new to me.
The biggest thing I’m struggling with is understanding the wording of the play calls. Some of them are really long, and I don’t always know what each word means or which parts of the play call actually matter to me as the TE.
For those of you who have played before:
How did you learn what each word in a play call means?
Is there a system for breaking down long play calls into smaller pieces?
What’s the fastest way to memorize an entire playbook?
How long did it take before reading a play call became second nature?
I’m willing to put in as much work as it takes. I just want to learn the smartest way instead of trying to brute-force memorize everything.
Any advice from coaches, quarterbacks, tight ends, or anyone who’s learned a playbook would be appreciated.

I’m thinking about joining a rugby club and doing that as a benchmark since I tried applying to my community college’s team before but I was ghosted after saying I have no experience with any sports. My university does have a rugby team however I don’t want to overload myself with my job, academics and the sport all at the same time since the players will be held up to certain standards with their grades.

Hello I am trying to walk on to my colleges football team as a freshman .We are an FCS program, I played Long snapper in highschool and have been practicing with my Colleges starting long snapper this summer. Unfortunately I may not make the cut later on as a Long snapper due to some recent roster changes. What other positions can I play at given that I am 6,1 and 215 pounds. I have been lifting all summer and will start doing more speed focused drills. Thank you and I will take any suggestions into consideration.

Been working on a football prediction project and couldn't find a dataset that had

the actual context needed to model match outcomes — just raw results everywhere.

So I built one from scratch on top of the International Football Results dataset

by Mart Jürisoo (the well known one on Kaggle with 49,000+ matches going back to 1872).

What I added:

**Elo ratings** — built from scratch, updated after every single match across 150

years. Both teams' ratings, their difference, and the expected win probability

going into each match.

**Rolling form** — win rate, goals scored, goals conceded, goal difference, clean

sheet rate, both-teams-scored rate, scoring rate, and win streak. Computed at

three lookback windows: last 5, last 10, and last 20 matches. For both teams.

**Head-to-head history** — based on the last 10 meetings between those two specific

teams. Some teams have persistent edges over specific opponents that their general

form doesn't explain.

**Fatigue signals** — days since each team's last match and the difference between

the two.

**Penalty reliance** — fraction of each team's historical goals that came from

penalties, pulled from the goalscorer dataset.

**Shootout composure** — historical penalty shootout win rate for each team, from

the shootouts dataset.

**Tournament context** — World Cup, qualifier, friendly, neutral venue, competition

importance weight, confederation.

The thing I spent the most time on: every feature is computed in strict

chronological order using only data that existed before that match was played.

State updates happen after each row is recorded, never before. No lookahead,

no leakage anywhere in the 102 columns.

102 features total. 49,094 rows. result column (H/D/A) included as the label.

Drop date and result, plug into any classifier.

Dataset is fully documented with column descriptors for every feature.

Link: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kriishgulati/football-match-results-1872-2026-with-ml-features

Built on top of the original dataset by Mart Jürisoo — full credit and link

in the dataset description.

We are looking to purchase tablets and some software for our weight room. We have about 100 kids in the program. When I played in college, we used teambuildr so as of now we are looking at purchasing that and some iPads for each station in the weight room.

Anybody that uses weight room tablets, what software do you use? Is there anything I need to be considering before purchasing?

Howdy guys!

So, this will be my first year as a JH Head Coach (2 year coaching period.) and I was just trying to think of some ideas of the best way to figure out what some of these kids can do.

I obviously have a good idea of where the returning 8th grades be but, anyone who has coached JH knows, the jump from 7th to 8th grade can be staggering in physical sense😂

I’m just trying to think of someways to get an idea of who can run a route, catch a ball, who has a good arm, etc.

But, I want to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a combine or as if they are “trying out” for a specific position. If that makes sense?

Appreciate any input you guys can provide!

I’m coaching OL this year and we will be running the wishbone offense. My predecessor ran a zone blocking scheme and so I’m quickly throwing that in the trash can for a gap scheme. I’m focusing my attention on a GOLF rule set to attack 2nd level backers but also a GOO duo set to create double teams at the line; I’m expecting our line to be the smallest in our football league.

Question: Is anyone doing similar concepts with their team and do you implement 1 rule across the entire line for a given play or do you combine rules based off the position? For example, does your TE or End Man follow a different rule compared to the rest of the line? I’m trying to think of exceptions to my rule to incorporate pin/pull, double teams or combo blocks…. Like an audible for the line

Thanks

I used to play defensive back in college but it was 3 years ago, now I got my 1st gig as a DBs coach for my high school ala mater. Anything that anybody in this group wish they knew right before they started?

I'm sure you don't want to beat up your body or your own teammates before the game. Still you probably need to do some live tackling to get acclimated to game speed. Usually it's light practice the day before the game but I don't know how intense the days before. I'm sure you want to be smart vs. mindlessly beating each other up.