John T. Reed’s football coaching blog

I am often asked what drills I recommend for youth coaches. The more drills you do, the fewer games you win. Most football drills waste precious practice time and thereby make the team less successful. The few that  I like are in my football-coaching books like Coaching Youth Football: First, let me define some terms. Definitions Drill. A drill is a repetitive, narrowly-defined, and closely-supervised activity. The purpose of drills is to inculcate into players habits which they resist. Example: Football players must participate in nightly tackling drills because the way they would tackle otherwise, grabbing opponents’ shirts, is totally...

Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2008 John T. Reed Every year, I hear coaches making the same mistakes. Drills that look very busy and footballish but which are a waste of time, too much standing around doing nothing in practice, not enough time spent on learning assignments for the next game, failing to scout your opponents, and many more. Study this list and make sure you spend your valuable practice time on useful stuff. Having any assistant coaches who are not your brother, sister, son, father, spouse, or other close relative or longtime personal friend. About 95% of youth football head...

 From the outhouse to the penthouse in one season In the late 1980s, the Cincinnati Bengals went from the bottom of their division to the SuperBowl in one season by running a whole-game, no-huddle offense. It was causing defense so much trouble that they would fake injuries to slow it down. In the early 1990s, the Buffalo Bills also went to the SuperBowl—four times in a row—in part because of their whole-game no-huddle offense. I interviewed Coach Dana Bible of the Bengals and Marv Levy of the Bills about their no-huddle tempos. Both were quite enthused about them. These are...

I have never had any use for football huddles. When I was first an offensive coordinator/head coach in 1992, I used no huddles—even when we were in a maximum slowdown. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about the rarity of huddles now in NCAA and NFL football. High-paid, slow learners. I describe how to do my warp-speed no-huddle (which is faster than the OR “warp-speed”) in the following of my football books:  Coaching Youth Football Coaching Youth Flag Football  Single-Wing Offense for Youth Football Football Clock Management And I have an article about it here at this blog: Turbocharge any...