Wojciech Weekly Innovate to dominate – thinking outside the box The common stereotype is that American Football is not rocket sci...
Wojciech WeeklyInnovate to dominate – thinking outside the box
The common stereotype is that American Football is not rocket scienc . I have to agree that the only common factor between football and astronomy is the “Black Hole” in Oakland. On the other hand high football IQ is in my opinion almost equally important to on-field success as physical attributes.
For Coaching the cerebral aspect of the game is crucial you have to analyze data, find trends and take critical decisions in the span of seconds. As most of you enjoy the offseason I want to give you some food for thought and am looking forward to your feedback on your approach to innovation in football.
The Hardware
This is the most visible aspect of football innovations, the evolution of equipment. In order to make players faster and safer manufacturers use space age materials and newest technologies. There is also considerable amount of marketing involved – i.e “the safest helmet in the market”, to justify spending the equivalent of annual GDP of a small African state on a single piece of equipment.
If we are discussing financial matters, how many of us have found ourselves in a desperate need of training equipment like sleds, linemen chutes without sufficient funding? In order to solve this problem we use our sense of “MacGuyverism” to create affordable solutions. It’s funny how often homemade training equipment proves to be reliable and simply does its job. However, there is one constant in the world of equipment innovations- the ball. To contrast it with soccer where every major tournament has a dedicated model, The Duke has remained unchanged since the 40’s.
The Software

I have to mention the concept of “flipped coaching” described by Coach Keith Grabowski on his blog. In general instead of long classroom sessions – coaches create a video lectures which can be uploaded to players tablets, so they can study at their own pace. In European reality of players missing meetings and practices due to work and other important issues – this can be a useful solution.
The digital revolution makes coaching time efficient and allow us to save the most precious and unrenewable asset– time. On the other hand, those of us who aren’t blessed with a huge staff have to develop computer skills, I treat investment that will later pay dividends.
Survival Of The Fittest

How about throwing in spinning or mixed martial arts to your conditioning program? As for the strength training kettle-bells, crossfit and calisthenics are the new buzzwords among football community .
I believe that this is the section where I should write about the growing awareness in the field of nutrition and recovery. I’m not an expert in this area but I like the comparison of our bodies to engines, if we put low quality fuel we shouldn’ expect high performance. Recovery is often neglected, if You've seen CT Fletcher Over-training video, you know what my point is. Getting better doesn’t always mean you have to train harder, sometimes you just have to train smarter and if like you’re not an expert do not be afraid to ask questions!
Tackling is one of the fundamental football skills and since our players safety should be our top priority I strongly recommend the HeadsUp initiative. Also some coaches apply rugby tackling concept -shoulder first.
The Process
In a great piece Peter King of MMQB described Stanford offense – which in the game vs Army used myriad of formations and was described by King as “the probing offense”. Maybe, this is the way of the future, especially in Europe, where players rotation, new opponents, and other external factors demand rapid adaptation.
I encourage you to share your thoughts and comments on the story. For latest football news from around the world follow me @CoachVoyt
Wojciech Andrzejczak
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