4 games down
By Coach P | September 16, 2008
We are 4 games into the season now. The 2 tough non-region ones we start with got away from us. We played pretty well offensively in both, but poorly on defense in both. The third game was our first region game (some places would call it a conference game). We played well for 3 quarters (it was 21-20) then didn’t finish the game. We ended up losing 33-20. All 3 of these are ranked in the top ten in the mid-state and two are ranked in the top ten in the state. We played our last non-region game last Friday and finally finished a game on both sides of the ball and came away with our first win. We now sit at 1-3 overall and 0-1 in the region with 6 region games left. We’re going to need to win 4 of the 6 to keep our playoff streak alive. We have made the playoffs all 5 years I’ve been here and 2 years before I got here. If we can get the defense on track we should be OK.
Digg
del.icio.us
Netscape
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Technorati
YahooMyWebTopics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Back to the Grind
By Coach P | August 12, 2008
Well, school’s back in session and football season is, basically, in full swing. We had our last scrimmage yesterday and have to go waste a night at a jamboree Thursday night and then we begin preparations for our 1st game. Football, for us, has become a year round job. We take a couple of weeks off after the season is over. We take the Christmas holidays off and we take off a state mandated “dead period” for two weeks in the summer. Other than that, we never stop. I really realized 2 things this summer. I miss the extra time at home with my kids in the summer….and I wish I could just coach for a living. It was really nice to come in, get all of my football stuff done, and go home. I definitely inherited the coaching gene from my father, but I appear to have missed the teaching gene. For 39 years he has taught a full load of English classes and coached football and wrestling. More power to him. I coach only football and teach PE and wellness (health) and it drives me crazy to sit through all these classes. But, to take a line from the old TV show “Coach”…..”God, I love football.”
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
NBA season is over
By Coach P | June 18, 2008
Another NBA season has come and gone. Seems like just like just nine short months ago it all began. I feel like I should probably start this post with a disclaimer. I have not watched a single NBA game in about a decade. Why, you may ask? Because I, literally, could not possibly care less. I don’t want to sound like some old guy saying “Back in my day…” here. I am only 36 years old, so I am not “some old guy.” I just find absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever in this league. Everything in life changes. We have a couple of teachers at my school who are constantly complaining about “the kids today”. One said, “They have terrible handwriting now because they type everything on the computer.” Another said, “They can only tell time on a digital clock.” My response is this…If we are going to type most things in the future, why does it matter that they don’t have beautiful handwriting? Somewhere in the past someone, no doubt, uttered the phrase “The kids today can’t even write with a quill anymore because of these new fangled pens that come with ink in them.” Someone else no doubt said, “The kids today can’t even use a sun dial because of these new ‘clock’ things.” Imagine the horror of the grandfather and grandmother who realized there grandkids could not drive a horse and buggy because of the cars everyone has now! What does all of this have to do with sports you ask? Nothing. Except that it is my preface to the stump I am going to get on shortly. I am not a person who resists change. I think it is inevitable and, generally, for the good. It is natural for us to have the skills that are pertinent to our lives. Most of us, I am sure, have no need for the skills of sun dial reading, writing with a quill or driving a horse and buggy any more than the skills of using a computer were necessary 200 years ago. Sports also change. Football has certainly changed since the days of Pop Warner and Knute Rockne. The thing about football, though, is that it remains more of a true team game. Basketball seems to have changed from being two, five man teams to being five guys playing five guys. In an age where AAU and the And1 tour are what excite kids, they do not seem to understand that having skills and being a good basketball player are not the same thing. We had a player at my school this year who has extraordinary skills, but seemed to be much more interested in displaying these skills than winning games. A team loaded with talent ended up being a .500 team. I am not saying that this happened to the Lakers or any other team in the NBA. It just seems that this is the direction that basketball is headed and when a team sport becomes a bunch of guys playing, it becomes irrelevant in my book.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Check out the new site
By Coach P | March 27, 2008
Check out our new site!!!!!!!!!!!….ezplaybooks.com (same as this one but with an “s” on the end)…Check it out…forums on several sports (with more sports to be added)…and much, much more to come in the future.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
8 Team D-1 Football Playoff Scenario
By Coach P | December 6, 2007
Ok…here’s my scenario for an 8 team playoff. The first question is…how do you pick the 8 teams. I say you use one of two methods. Either go with the BCS standings like they are now or, as I heard someone else propose, hire a panel of retired coaches whose job it is to watch film for a living and have them pick them just like it’s picked in basketball. If you actually pay them throughout the season, have them start their poll about half way through the season and use their final poll to pick them, you’ll come out with a better poll than you will with a bunch of writers and current coaches who just look at scores and never see some of the teams they are voting for play. Personally, I like the second option but for our purposes here I’ll use the BCS final standings.
Using a normal 8 team tournament format you’d have no. 1 playing no. 8 to get to the winner of no. 4 vs. no. 5. No. 3 plays no. 6 to get to the winner of no. 2 and no. 7. This year the playoff would look like this:
Ohio St. (1) vs. Kansas (8)
Georgia (5) vs. Oklahoma (4)
Va. Tech (3) vs. Missouri (6)
USC (7) vs. LSU (2)
Now..how do we tie the bowls in? The top tier bowls (Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, Orange) work on a rotating basis just like they do now. They would get the championship game, the semi finals and one of the 1st round games. So a team would go, over the course of 4 years, 1st round, semi, semi, championship. The team that had the first round game would get first choice of which 1st round game they wanted after the brackets were set. The other 3 1st round games would rotate between the second tier bowls (Capital One, Gator, Outback, Cotton). These four would rotate picks (1st pick, 2nd pick, 3rd pick, out of the playoffs) and the team who was in its “out of the playoffs” year would get first choice among the teams not in the playoffs.
This is the scenario I’ve come up with. You have a playoff and you make the top bowls a part of it. In the process, you make the bowls more important than they are now. If anybody has other suggestions I’d love to hear them. I’ll take most any scenario to get a playoff system implemented. The system now is just ridiculous. In its time, the bowl system worked. That doesn’t mean it will work forever. In its time the pony express was a great system, but with email and cell phones does anyone think the pony express would work well now. Times change. Unfortunately, the university presidents seem stuck in a pony express system.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
My Division 1-A Playoff Soapbox
By Coach P | December 4, 2007
With the announcing of the bowl schedule for 2007-08, it’s time again for me to get on my playoff soapbox. The powers that be irritate the fire out of me by blocking a division 1-A playoff. To my knowledge, there is no other sport at any level of any sport that decides its champion in this asinine way. Here are some of the excuses against a playoff that I’ve heard. The ironic thing is that for a couple of excuses I’ve heard that supposedly makes a playoff not work, the powers that be have implemented something that contradicts its position.
It forces the players to play too many games. THEN WHY DID THEY ADD A 12th GAME?! This year every team that played in a conference championship will play 14 games. If you went back to 11 game seasons and had an eight team playoff, even with conference championships figured in, the MOST a team would have to play is 15 and that’s only if a team came from a conference with a championship game AND made it to the national title game. Otherwise, they would play, at most, the same number they are playing now.
It forces the players to miss too much class. Stop it! First off, this means one of two things, either the 1-A guys are much more studious than the college football players at every other level or they just aren’t as smart and need more time in class because every other level HAS A PLAYOFF.
It diminishes the importance of the other bowls. Let’s start with this…there has ALWAYS been a bowl hierarchy. Even when the bowls had conference tie-ins there were always consolation bowls. Again after making that argument, they created the BS…I mean, BCS…and further diminished the consolation bowls. Then they created a championship game and diminished the other BCS bowls. With the scenario I will put in my next blog the BCS bowls and the 2nd tier Jan. 1st games would be made MORE important than they are now. I won’t get into my opionion of why we have 197 bowl games, but as far as the lower tier bowls are concerned, here’s a trivia question for you…who played in last year’s San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl?
Fans won’t travel to see their team play two or three weeks in a row. Yeah right! Let’s say some of them won’t. If 35-40,000 Ohio State fans were to go and watch
Well, that’s my soapbox for this year. Look for my next entry to see how I would integrate the bowls into a playoff.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Oops
By Coach P | November 11, 2007
Coach Kip is right about November. It’s an awesome time to be practicing and playing…looks like he jinxed the maize and blue though.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Your attitude goes a long way
By Coach P | November 11, 2007
Last season I had five starting offensive linemen who had combined to start about 130 games. My center had started about 30 games himself. Coming into this year I had two guys who had started a combined seven games and neither of them started those games at the same positions at which they would be starting this year. I had a feeling all throughout the offseason that we were not going to be very good. Not only were we looking at a lot of inexperience, but we were going to be looking at some inexperienced guys who I didn’t see as being top-notch talent. When we started spring practice things turned out to be worse than I had expected. The guys I thought wouldn’t be real good weren’t and a few new guys we thought looked good weren’t very good either. My attitude throughout the spring and summer was terrible. Our line throughout the spring and summer was terrible too. We started the season 0-4. At about that point I decided that my attitude was going to change. While I never conciously brought my negative attitude to the practice field and I never told the line how bad they were, there is no doubt that my attitude affected my performance and thereby had a negative impact on my players. After my attitude changed toward my guys we steadily began to make improvement. When I went to the practice field thinking “we’re going to get better today” instead of “we’re awful” things started to turn around. We have now won seven games in a row, finished second in our region and we are preparing for the second round of the state playoffs. Did my attitude cause us to lose our first four and then win our next 7? No. There are several factors that have played a part in the turnaround. One of those factors was the line getting better, though, and THAT is what my attitude directly affected. This group of guys is still not going to go down as one of the best lines I have coached or will coach in my career, but it definitly is a line that I am extrememly proud of becaused they have worked hard and gotten better and that started with my attitude.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Remember why we coach
By Coach P | October 14, 2007
“In the end, the extent of our own success will be measured by the accomplishments that we have help create in others.”
One of the easiest things in the world to do is to get wrapped up in ourselves. Everyone’s favorite topic is “ME”. Keeping the focus on others is, generally, a much harder task. This is also true in coaching. Sometimes it is easy to get so wrapped up in ourselves and our careers that we shift the focus off of our players and onto ourselves. How is my team shaping up? What do the anonymous people on the chat sites think of me? The truly successful coaches,the ones that people look on as the “greats” never seem to have lost sight of this. Our job is not to make ourselves great. It is to strive to make our players great…and not just great as players, but great men. Listen to Bill Walton talk about John Wooden sometime. The message you will hear from Bill Walton is “Coach Wooden made me what I am today.” He tends to speak much less about what Coach Wooden did for him as a player than he does about what Coach Wooden did for him as a man. Bill Walton never turned out to be a clone of John Wooden in the way he lives his life, but Coach Wooden made a tremendous impact on his life. In what, right now, stands as a 38 year career, my father has probably coached a couple thousand young men. It seems like everywhere he goes he runs into someone he coached and they always seem to come up and speak. For just a few, brief years during a very impressionable period in their lives, he had an impact. We won’t all go down in history as having won a ton of games and championships. All of us won’t have great TEAMS that everyone remembers. Every coach can’t end a career as a perpetual winner, but we all can leave a legacy with the INDIVIDUALS we coached. How will your individual players remember you? What will your legacy be?
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Know your players
By Coach P | September 30, 2007
One of the hardest things to do, I think, is to get to know your players well enough to know what motivates them. The old saying “If you have 11 players on the field, you’ll have to have 11 ways of handling them” is true. Players have different personalities and different motivations and looks can be deceiving. A couple of years ago I had a tackle who was 6′2 and weighed in at about 340. Between the lines he could be a beast when properly motivated, but off the field he was a big ole sensitive teddy bear. Occasionally getting in his face would make him mad and he would go all out, but that usually only lasted about 2 or 3 plays. The best way to motivate him was to constantly pat him on the back and let him know I believed in him. He wanted to please everybody and as long as he knew you were proud of him, he played his heart out. Often times, if I yelled at him, he just shut down. The guard who played next to him was just the opposite. He got too comfortable when he felt that I was satisfied with his play. I had to constantly challenge him, make him think he wasn’t playing well, and question his ability in order to keep him motivated to play hard. A pat on the back was the worst thing I could do for him. All of those ploys were wasted breath on the center. I had to talk to him very logically like I would a fellow coach. He had an inner ability to motivate himself. He didn’t need me to do any of those things. All we ever discussed were x’s and o’s. He understood the game very well and all I had to do was make him understand the concept of the play and he made sure everyone was in the right place. Some guys, no matter how tough they may be on the field, need constant reassurance. Some guys need a constant challenge. Some guys are very logical and all you have to do is reason with them, make sure they understand and they will follow you. Some guys are very outgoing and fun loving and you have to make things fun or you will lose them. There is definitely a place for yelling and I tend to be one of the louder coaches on any field I’m on, but the key is to remember that the guys in pads are individual players and not programmed robots. Each one is going to have something that motivates him and the challenge, as a coach, is to find that thing.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »