What Plays Get Installed In Spring?

Spring ball is quickly approaching! This week, we're going to look at some strategies for the first time in the year some coaches are able to put on pads.

Spring is an exciting time of year. For me, it’s when the football calendar really picks up. Most of my experience with spring ball has been the very end of the school year, so once spring ball comes around, the rest of the off-season transpires extremely quickly, and the next thing I know, the Friday night lights are back on.

How can we maximize this time to help us 3 months from now? From a roster perspective, I like to use spring to get our first glimpse at if players have developed the way we have hoped/expected they would on the field, and if not, we have time to adjust over the summer. From a scheme standpoint, it’s about installing our identity to me. Sure, we’ll try some wrinkles we’ve studied throughout the off-season, but when spring is over, I want my players to know the concepts that are going to carry over every single week of the season. These are also going to be the concepts we rep in 7-on-7 throughout the summer. We may throw in a new concept or two every week in the season to try and exploit the tangible defense we see on film, but they are going to augment the core plays that transcend opponents, not transform our offense on a weekly basis.

There are many schools of thought when it comes to where to start the offensive install process, and throughout this article, I am going to share mine.

Everything for me starts with the system. A true offensive system has many layers and functions regardless of the talent available. I believe true offensive systems have a core play that sets up everything else. For the Wing-T, it’s Buck Sweep. For the Flexbone, it’s Veer. For me, it’s Wide Zone. Everything ties back to that. We will sell out to developing players that can execute it because it is the foundation of the offense. The next layer of a system is the answers for what a defense can do to stop the base play. To me, that’s where talent and personnel start to factor into the equation. Defenses can stop base plays based on the skillsets of those who are executing the play. If I have a 4.4 40 yard dash halfback and a defense is flowing fast to cut him off on Wide Zone, my answer would probably be Crack Toss so I can still find ways to get him on the perimeter to force angle tackles instead of having a bruiser where I might go with Counter instead.

Deeper than that, I want the plays that get installed throughout the spring to be what I call “utility plays/concepts.” Utility defined is “the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial.” A utility play to me has built-in answers against at least 80% of what a defense can do. The goal is to spend the spring installing them and the summer perfecting getting to the right answers vs each defensive problem we can face. A small handful of plays with a lot of utility where players know the answers to activate can spell many problems for any defense.

Paid subscribers will have access to the rest of the article where I detail my favorite utility concepts! Next week, we’ll look at the next steps I like to take for spring install.