John T. Reed’s football coaching blog

On their last touchdown drive, Alabama got the ball @ 4:38 left in the game and ran six plays. Plays that are not incomplete or go out of bounds take right around 46 seconds if the team follows my max slowdown rules. Alabama, which had lost the lead for the first time in the game 28-24, could have run 5 x 46 seconds off the clock plus about six seconds on the final play rather than 46 because the clock stops after a TD. That would be 5 x 46 = 230 plus 6 = 236. But their first play...

The 1/9/17 Wall Street Journal says the run-pass option play is unstoppable. Well, I really like the play, but I don’t know about unstoppable. My single-wing offense book only has 12 plays total, but if I recall correctly, three are run-pass options. Option plays give the quarterback the ability to change the point of attack AFTER the snap. But all the traditional options were all runs. I discuss that kind of thinking my book The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense. For example in the triple option, you had dive, keep, and pitch. Fake field goal speed option I had a...

I just watched the Packers-Giants game. congrats to the Packers. Well-played game..I saw one stupid mistake that coaches need to drill out of the players. In Hail Mary passes, defenders and receivers seem to focus on each other rather than the ball. At times, all the players are in a scrum five yards from where the ball comes down. In this game, just before half, one Packers player was trying to stay in the scrum but got pushed out by a Giant. .As it turned out, the Giant doing the pushing should have had his eyes on the ball. The...

My alma mater Army went 8-5 this year, including winning a bowl game. Yay, Army!That’s their best record since 1996. Congrats to Coach Monken and his staff as well as to the current Army players. Coaching mistakes However, I am a former coach and a football coaching book author, not a fan. So I see and comment on what I believe are coaching mistakes.  There may be three categories in the case of Army 2016: • lack of three strings of competent field-goal trios (long snapper, holder, placekicker) • poor clock management • more than average turnovers Loss to Buffalo...

There has been much approving talk this season about moving the PAT kick point back to the 25-yard line. Yeah, I advocated exactly that years ago in an article about boring plays that should be eliminated..Good, so how about enacting the rest of the changes I recommended?. Boring football plays that should be eliminated