Efficient Use of Practice Time

University of Oregon
by Chip Kelly
excerpt from 2011 Nike Coach of the Year Clinics Football Manual by Earl Browning available at www.coacheschoice.com

Two short years ago, I was an assistant coach. When I was an assistant coach, I was the smartest coach in the country. I was always the smartest coach in our meeting room. I was not the head coach, and I said things like, "I would not do it like that way" or "I would do it this way." When I became a head coach, I realized I was not very smart. When I became a head coach and got the chance to do what I wanted to do, it became scary. I was the coach sitting at the end of the table, making those final decisions, and it became a bit tougher.

Statistically, 33 percent of the assistant coaches become head coaches during their career. When I took over at the University of Oregon, the first thing we had to find out was "What do we stand for?" You have to answer that in your offensive, defensive, and special team philosophies. If you are going to stand for something, it is not what you say it is. It is what people see in your actions. People should be able to come, observe you, and in five minutes know what you stand for.

That is the great thing about this game. There are so many choices of philosophies in this game. You have to decide what it is you want to do, and then do it. Do not be the coach who runs a play offense. That coach constantly adds plays that he likes and sees on TV or at a pro football game. Before he knows it, his offense is a mile wide of nothing but plays. He has nothing in that mass of plays to hang his hat on. Your players cannot say, "This is what we are." I suggest you take a long look at your program and identify what you want to be. If a coach tells me respect is an important part of his program, I should see it in practice. If I go to practice and I see a player who takes a cheap shot at another player and no one corrects him, that program has no respect in it.

WHAT WE STAND FOR
• Fast
• Play hard
• Finish

You need to sit down with your team collectively and ask them, "What are we all about?" If you watch the University of Oregon on the field, off the field, at practice, and in the classroom, you should know if we stand for something. When you watch us, the first thing that sticks out is the speed at which we play. When we talk to our team about fast, we have a simple concept. All they have to do as individuals is be as fast as they are.

We all have players who can run. If you have a 4.5 player in high school football, he had better score four touchdowns a game, and they should never catch him from behind. There are not that many 4.5 football players out there today. I do not care what state you come from. I have seen players run 4.5, but they do not run 4.5 in the games. I want the 5.0 player who runs 5.0 on every single play.

If a player is a 5.0 player and plays at 5.0, that is what we want. Do not be the 4.6 player who plays at 5.2 in the games. That is our concept about speed.

The second thing you should see from our team is we play hard. The ultimate compliment you can get from the opposing coach is "Your team really plays hard." It does not matter what the score was, if we play hard, that is all we can ask. There will be a time that you play a team who has more talent than you do. That is life. The reason you play the games is the team who plays the hardest wins the game.

That brings up another concept you should see from our team. The team who plays the hardest for the longest time is the one who usually wins. If you play against a good team, they will play hard.

The next concept is finish. If you come to our practice, you will hear that term all the time: "finish stretching, finish the drill, finish the run, finish the block." That is what you hear at our practice. Everything they do, they must finish. We engrain that concept in our players' heads.

What you decide is up to you, but find something to be. Our coaches got together as a group and talked about what we wanted to be. We wanted to know what the team was going to look like.

What was our vision of what our team was supposed to be? When you go to the practice field, you prepare against the vision of what you want to be. Every single game on your schedule is a rivalry game. If the cross-town rival is game six on your schedule, and you circle it in red, you have told your team the first five games do not count. It will be okay to lose a couple of games during that stretch.

Every game we play is the most important game of the season. We approach every game as if it was the Super Bowl. When we walk off the field after the game, we have to ask ourselves three questions: "Did we play fast?" "Did we play hard?" and "Did we finish?" If we can answer yes to all those questions, we have won the game.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
• I see, and I forget.
• I see, and I remember.
• I do, and I understand.

Within our staff, we talk about our teaching philosophy. It is a simple philosophy, and I will tell you about it very quickly. The first one is "I see, and I forget." How many times have you watched a tape and ask the question, "What is he doing?" The coach's answer is "I told him ...." If you catch yourself saying that many times, you have not put the player in a position to be successful.

Every coach in this room has a ton of knowledge. That does not matter. What matters is what the players know. Education is the transference of knowledge. You may know more than anyone in this room, but if you cannot communicate it to a player so he can go out and execute, it does not matter.

The alternative to that is "I see, and I remember." How do you learn to coach "I see, and I remember?" How do you coach a player to step at a 45-degree angle? I can give you an entire clinic on a 45-degree step, but is that coaching? If you have a player who can do the technique, that is the best method. The player that can take what you say and perform the skill, becoming the example for the others. The coach told them how to do it, and then he showed them how to do it. The players heard what the coach said and saw what he wanted. They heard it, saw it, and remember it.

The next concept is "I do, and I understand." When we teach, we implement it in the classroom. We talk about what we are putting in that day. We show them what it is. After that, we go to the practice field and do it. The practice field is not where we talk. It is where we do the skills. We want to keep words on the field to a minimum. The words you use must have a meaning. When the players hear the word, you get immediate feedback.

When we go to practice, we want to use punch, hat, hands, footwork, and terms that have meanings to the players. They do not want to hear you give a 10-minute clinic in the middle of the field. Do not stop what you are doing so you can tell one player something. If you do that, there are 10 other players standing around doing nothing. If you want to talk to a player about something he did, take him out of the drill. Our coaches do a heck of a job of coaching players who are not in the drill or scrimmage.

A perfect example is the offensive line coach, Steve Greatwood. He watches the players in the scrimmage and coaches the group of players who are standing and watching. He gets constant feedback from the players watching, and that is his goal. When they are in the drill, they play. When they are not in the drills, he coaches them up by watching the mistakes of the players in the drill.

If the coach needs to talk to the player, he substitutes for him. Do not stop the drill and let everyone else stand around. That is not fair because there is only a certain amount of time we can practice. If you can make your practices more efficient, you will be more successful.

PRE-SEASON CAMP

You have to organize your pre-practice. I do not care what it is, but when they get to the practice field, they should be doing something. That bothers me. When the players get to the practice field, it is practice time. That period is not a walk-through period that we can teach in a classroom. I do not care what the group does, but the coach needs a routine that the players know. That way the players get into a rhythm and habit of doing something.

When we go out to practice early, they know what they are going to do, and they do it. The timetable for all positions is specific. The wide receivers work on the JUGS machine. The quarterbacks and centers work on snaps and footwork. The inside linebackers are doing a read drill. We are in teaching mode, but we are doing things. We are active and moving.

The first period in our practice is a drill period. That is a three-minute period when we concentrate on fundamentals. The defense works in a turnover circuit or on a pursuit drill. The offensive line works pass sets and steps. The quarterback, receivers, and backs have a "county fair." We work on the deep ball at one station. We have a curl station and a one-step 45-degree cut station. Everybody knows where to go.

The next drill is a five-minute core drill to work on formations and shifts in those formations. One day in practice while this was going on, I looked down at the other end of the field. That was where the defense did the same thing, working on their checks and adjustments to formations and motion. The defensive coaches were mad at number 97 because he could not go in motion the way he was supposed to go in motion.

He should not know how to go in motion because he was a defensive lineman. They yelled at him because he did not know what 0-cross motion was. They coached the heck out of the player who was supposed to be going in motion. However, they were supposed to be coaching the defense. They were coaching a player who does not know what motion is, and if he did, he would not be playing in the defensive line.

To have both units working on the same thing at different areas of the field is not very efficient. We needed to bring the groups together and work on formations and defensive adjustment to those formations. The defense and offense both get work, and the defense does not have to coach up the scouts. It maximizes our practice time. Instead of trying to coach a defensive tackle to go in motion, they coach him to play a defensive technique.

We have a great pre-season camp drill. We work the offense and defense in the same drill. It is a teaching mentality, but the offense goes through its formations and motion, and the defense goes through their checks and adjustments. We snap the ball, but we do not run a play. It is the best thing to do for your younger players because they do not know what to do. We get all those things done, and we do not run a play.

At first, we took a five-minute period for the drill. Later we got it down to a three-minute period. However, we create an opportunity for both sides of the line to learn. When you look at the drills you do, you need to find out how to make the drills more efficient.

That is your job as a coach. Coaching is one thing and one thing only: it is creating an environment so the player has an opportunity to be successful. When you teach him to do that, get out of his way. The coach is not playing the game. All we can do at the end of the game is to evaluate what happened in the game. Was there a situation that we did not cover in practice? The coach needs to know if he gave the player all the tools he needed to be successful in that situation. We have to continually analysis the situation and try to make it better.

When we have a team walk-through, we set a limit to the time we allot for it. When we do a walk- through, we do not spend time getting the defense aligned. They are ready so we do not spend time aligning the defense or getting personnel to stand in place. Our offensive line has the four down linemen and the Mike linebacker in our pass protection scheme. The tight end has the Sam linebacker, the running back has the Will linebacker, and the slot receiver has the strong safety. Everyone has an assignment in a walk-through drill.

We want them coached during this time. The offensive guard had better know what a 3 technique is. If the offensive guard does not know what defense they are in, you are in trouble. When you do the walk-through, you can find out what they know.

When we do stretching in practice, we do a dynamic stretch. We emphasize what it is, and we coach it. That bothers me when I go to a high school practice. The entire team is stretching, and the coaches are standing around talking to one another or throwing the ball around. A coach should not worry about spending time in stretching if they do not care about stretching. They show how they care about coaching by their actions during the period, not their words. If you do not think stretching is important, do not do it. If you think it is important, you have to show your team it is important.

The coach teaches everything the player does. If he does not do the stretch drill correctly or he does the wrong technique, he learned it from his coach. He did it because the coach did not think it was important enough to coach it. Every drill we do, our coaches coach for success. If the coach thinks what we do is important and shows it, the players buy into it, and they do it.

The conditioning coach thinks stretching is important. If he thinks it is important, we do it, and the players will buy into it. When practice starts until practice ends, we practice as hard as we can. Whenever we practice, we practice fast, and we finish everything. We emphasize the finishing part in stretching.

If you accept it, expect it. If you accept a player going eight yards when he is suppose to go 10, it will happen Friday night. If it is third-and-10 and you get eight, whose fault is that? Did you accept the fact that they went eight yards in practice instead of 10? Did you emphasize it in practice? If you are getting a huge amount of holding penalties in the game, you are allowing the players to hold in practice. If you allow the player to hold in practice and do not correct him, you should expect that on Friday night.

If that is your mentality, never yell at an official over a call. You have already told your players it is all right to cheat. When the player is caught holding, you get mad at him. You cannot have it both ways. You teach him to cheat, or you teach him how to do the skill. You accepted the player not finishing the drill, now you must accept the fact he gets caught holding. If the coach does not hold the player to a high standard, he is not going to do it. That is your job as a coach. You have to push them to places they do not believe they can go because you see things they do not see.

How you run a drill is important because that is how your team is going to look on game night. Teaching has two speeds. You have a speed at which you teach, and there is game speed. There is no such thing as half speed. When we are in practice, we go hard. When you teach, there is teaching speed, but do not let them go half speed in practice. If the quarterback has a problem setting up, we walk him through it. We talk about the first drive step or the second crossover step and the balance step. However, we walk them through it at a teaching speed. After he works out his steps, he goes full speed. There is no speed between teaching speed and full speed.

Make sure when you teach something to your players that you identify it so they know what you want from them. The more you communicate with your players, the better they are. When you can explain it like Coach Paul Brown, the father of football coaching, explained the "whys" of football to your players, the better off you are. The players today do not do it "because I told you so." We do not live in that society anymore. Some of us grew up in it, but it does not work anymore. Players today want to know why. Tell them why. If you do not have a good reason why we do things, we probably should not be doing them.

I want to show you some statistic on some things that actually occurred in a game. Your practices should reflect what happens in a game. The first situation is the goal line offense. If you use the goal line offense when you get inside the five-yard line, how many times did you get inside the five-yard line? Do not spend time on something that does not happen in a game.

People worry about and practice third down all the time. The reality is we are not in third down that much. For the season, our statistic told us we had 49 snaps in third or fourth down with long yardage. In the third- or fourth-and-short situations, we had 31 snaps in the season. On our first- or second- down plays, we had 398 snaps for the season. You had better practice the first- and second-down situations.

The point I am making is to go through every scenario that happens in a game and practice it. You should not just put the ball down and run a play. That never happens in a game. Football is a game of situations. You have to practice those situations. When the game is on the line, your players better be able to call the play before you call the play. The only play that will work is the one they have confidence in running. Everybody at the end of a game knows the play we are going to call.

You have to practice it. We know what to do on the last play of the half. We know what to do on the last play of the game. We know what to do if we have no time-outs. We practice all those situations. I know at the end of the game with no time-outs and we have to snap the ball, we know what to do.

I want to take you through one of our practices. This a Tuesday morning practice for us. We start at 9:05 in the morning, and we finish at 10:52. We dress out in full pads.

Agilities are from 9:05 to 9:08 and walk-through from 9:08 to 9:13. Then I began to think. When you go to Coaching 101, they tell you if you have five-minute blocks that is 12 periods per hour or 24 periods for two hours. If you go with six-minute periods, you can get 10 practice periods an hour. As I watch our 3-on-2 period, I figured out that five minutes was too short but 10 minutes were too long. We made that period a seven-minute period. We want to run team offense by using two offenses against the third defense. We can get 14 plays in a six-minute period.

If you work too long in a drill, the players get bored. We like to keep the players fresh. We run a 10-minute special teams period. We have a 12-minute block period for team run. We work on first- and second-down plays. We work a 7-on-7 passing drill against the scout team. Ten minutes is too long and seven minutes is too short, so we work eight minutes in this period.

The point I am making with this practice schedule is you can make the time blocks as long as you want. Do not box yourself in to a period that you cannot use. Do not spend more time in the drill than is necessary. You have to figure out what you want to do. When a drill runs too long, adjust the time and get off the field. Be efficient on the field and get off the field.

WHY RUN THE SPREAD?
• Makes the defense cover the entire field
• Faster scoring
• Gets speed in space
• The defense cannot disguise
• Simple reads for quarterback

I want to talk about the fundamentals of being a shotgun quarterback. The fundamentals are different from being a quarterback under the center. The reason we are in this offense is we think we can score faster, and it makes the defense cover the entire field. If you stretch players from sideline to sideline, the defense has to cover them.

The offense gets speed in space and creates opportunities for your player to get bigger gains. The defense has to tip their hand and let you know what they are doing. If they do not, they will not cover some people. We are a spread team, but we run the ball. We averaged 300 yards rushing last year. We run the ball better than we throw the ball. We are effective running the ball because we have bigger lanes through which to run the ball. The reason for that is the number of people we have to run through.

If there are seven defenders in the box, there are only four defenders to play the pass. It is difficult to play man-to-man without help all day long. It lets you define the defense. For a quarterback, it is simple. There is one high safety, two high safeties, or no high safety.

If there are two high safeties, mathematically there can only be five defenders in the box. With one high safety, there can be six in the box. If there is no high safety, there can be seven in the box.

With two high safeties, we should run the ball most of the time. We have five blockers, and they have five defenders. We feel if we can get a hat on all five defenders, our running back should make yards. If the defense has one high safety and six defenders in the box, the quarterback has to be involved in the play. He has to read one of the defenders, in effect blocking him. We can block five defenders and read the sixth one.

If they have no high safety and seven defenders in the box, they have something going on. They are going to blitz or run some movement scheme. You must have a concept to handle that situation. It could be a screen, option, quick game, or a deep pass. It is what your plan is against that scheme.

It is hard for the blitz to get to the quarterback because of the gap. If the defense is good at disguising what they do, they will not get to the quarterback. That means the linebacker has to blitz from his linebacker depth if he wants to disguise what he is going to do. The quarterback is five yards off the line of scrimmage, and the linebacker is five yards off the line of scrimmage. That is 10 yards. The fastest time run at the NFL Scouting Combine for a 10-yard dash is between 1.5 to 1.7 seconds. That is without pads. My quarterback can get rid of the ball in that amount of time and complete a pass.

In a quarterback, I look for a quarterback who can run and not a running back who can throw. I want the quarterback who can beat you with his arm. If the defense forces him to run, he can do it effectively. We are not a Tim Tebow type of quarterback team. I am not going to run the quarterback 20 times on power runs. If I had a Tim Tebow, I might change my mind. You do not find the 6'4", 240-pound, 4.6 quarterbacks too many times.

If the quarterback is not tall, look at his hands. That is the biggest coaching point to finding a quarterback. How big are his hands, and how well can he control the football? The height of the quarterback is not the important thing. No one playing quarterback throws over the line. They throw through lanes in the linemen. The important thing is the size of their hands.

The quarterback's stance in the shotgun is a base stance. I tell them to think about a shortstop in baseball. He is in an athletic stance with his eyes in what we call "split attention." He sees the snap from the center and the defense. He cannot concentrate 100 percent on the ball coming back, and he cannot be 100 percent looking at the defense. We want the quarterback stance balanced so he can move and catch the bad snap. I do not want him to lean forward.

We have a good quarterback drill we use called "rapid fire." We snap five balls at the quarterback as fast as we can. On each ball, the quarterback has to catch the ball and reset to accept the next ball. He works on catching the ball.

We run a read drill every day. We run a ton of zone reads (Diagram #1). We do not run the zone read option much, but we practice it all the time. When we run the zone play, the quarterback reads the backside defensive end. He extends the ball into the mesh area, but his eyes are on the key. The read key may be a manager or another player. After the back comes into the mesh area, the read key flashes the quarterback a number. The quarterback verbally calls the number. That way, we know he is looking at the key.

If you are a shotgun team, you still need to practice under-the-center snaps many times. At the end of a game when protecting a lead, you need to pass the ball from hand to hand with no air in the mist. Mistakes can happen under the center, but it is not as risky as the shotgun snap. In practice, you can get anyone to snap the ball. What is important is the quarterback must get accustomed to the snap.

The first fundamental is the grip of the ball. The grip should be with the fingertips. He has to have fingertip control. The top knuckle of his hand should be white from the grip on the ball. He should be able to pass his finger through the space between the ball and the palm of the hand. The smaller the hand of the quarterback, the further back on the ball he grips. The bigger the hand, the more of the ball the quarterback can grasp.

The quarterback wants to form an "L" with the index finger and thumb on the back of the ball. The index finger is the last finger to leave the ball. The elbow has to be perpendicular with the shoulder. If the elbow is below the shoulder, three things happen. The first thing is the ball comes out flat. The second thing is the ball sails. The third thing is the free safety becomes an all-state player because he intercepts the ball.

The coach is the quarterback's eyes. If he sees the ball sail, he knows the quarterback's elbow is too low. He draws the quarterback a picture he can envision. He tells him to hammer his all-state plaque into the wall. That means he put the plaque up high on the wall, and the motion he hammers the nail into the wall is the same one he uses to throw the ball.

The difference between a thrower and a passer is the fingertip control. That leads to the flick of the finger and wrist on the throw. That puts velocity on the ball. A good passer does not get sore in his shoulder. He gets sore in the middle of his forearm from flicking his finger and wrist as he throws the ball.

The fundamentals of throwing the ball do not change. He forms the "L" in his grip, hammers the nail, and flicks in the throw. We engrain the fundamentals so they become habit. When it is third-and-10 with the pressure on, he is not thinking about hammering nails and flicking footballs. The motion has to be a habit, which he learned. Make sure the player gets the answer. When you ask a player a question, and he says, "I don't know," if you go on to the next player, you have lost the first player. Do not give up on players.

When the player carries the ball, we want his elbows down and not out. His front shoulder is his lead shoulder. When he throws the ball, his eyes are on the target and stay on the target. If he follows the flight of the ball with his eyes, the ball will sail, and he is inconsistent to the target.

When he throws the ball, he wants the motion to be short and compact. The follow-through comes across the body to the opposite hip. He wants to throw with the entire body. It is all connected, and he has to use it all. When we target the receiver running to the sidelines, we want to throw to his left or right outside shoulder. If he hits the target,he will hit the receiver in the face. We want the quarterback throwing to small targets so he can focus on them. The smaller the target, the more accurate he is.

When he throws with his shoulder, he has to keep the throw within the framework of his body. The next thing he throws with is his feet. We align the feet at the target. That means the lead step aligns to the left of the target so his hips and shoulder can come through at the target. He throws with his eyes. If he wants to throw the ball to the left, when he looks in that direction, he does not have to think about turning his hips. His eyes bring the body in that direction. All he needs to do is open his hips, hammer, and flick.

It does not matter what position you play, the eyes are the most important thing you can play with. The defensive lineman has to use his eyes. His hands go wherever his eyes go. The same thing is true of the offensive linemen.

If the quarterback walks down the street and passes a good-looking girl, his eyes turn his body to look at her. His body turns to look at her because the eyes look in that direction. That is what happens when he throws the football.

When the quarterback throws from the shotgun, he has already taken two steps. On the three-step drop, he takes one step back and throws the ball. If he throws a five-step pattern, he takes a drive step, a crossover step, and a balance step. His second step is his break step. He breaks, comes to balance, and moves forward with the delivery.

From the shotgun drop, the patterns have to be shorter or the quarterback has to hold the ball longer. He reaches the three-step depth in one step, and if he throws the ball with that timing, the receiver cannot get as deep. We adjust the delivery of the quarterback with a hitch before he delivers the ball. If he throws the ball at 10 yards, he takes three steps and a hitch to time out the pattern. He uses a three-plus-one step to the curl pattern and a three-plus-two step to the checkdown to the backs. The rule is hard and fast for the quarterback. He goes three-plus-one to the curl route. He goes three-plus-two to the checkdown. He goes three-plus-three steps and leaves the pocket. If he has to hitch three times, he needs to get out of the pocket, get rid of the ball, or buy some time.

In our attitude, every sack is the quarterback's fault. It is not a sack if the quarterback throws the ball away. Nobody ever lost a game on an incomplete pass. Throw the ball away, and give us another opportunity to make a first down. If you throw it away, it is second-and-10 for the first down. If you take the sack, it is second-and-16 for the down. If you can stay away from negative yardage plays, you will be successful.

We base the success formula for offense on the total number of plays. Take those plays minus the dropped balls, offensive penalties, and negative yardage plays, and divide by the total number of plays. If the answer is 80 percent or better, you win the game. The total number of good plays is what you want to consider.

The job of a quarterback is simple. He has to "let it happen, and not make it happen." We want to move forward. That is a concept you have to make your team understand. The cardinal sin at our place is the quarterback sack. We want the ball out of the quarterback's hands in 1.5 seconds. That does not mean holding the ball until 2.5, waiting for someone to get open.

We teach the quarterback a base footwork in a bag drill (Diagram #2). The quarterback carries the ball in the carriage position. He shuffles through the bags. This teaches movement in the pocket. He goes forward, sideways, and backward with the shuffle movement. He has to have good ball carriage skills because he does not know when he will have to throw the ball. He must be ready to set his feet and throw. He is not on his toes, and he is not flat-footed. He is on the balls of his feet with a little bounce in his steps. He is "keeping his feet alive."

Our players have a passion for playing football. We have a team that is all in, no matter what it is. If it helps our football team, they are for it. They do not care about personal interests. It is all about our team. We use 25 players on defense, and they all play. They all get excited about playing football.

People ask me how many different helmets we have. The answer is four. I do not have anything to do with the design of the uniforms, but the players do love them. Anyone have a question? Thank you very much for your attention.