By Coach Martin | Football Basics
In football, as in any sport, there are some easy-to-understand rules and some not-so-easy-to-understand rules. The “illegal shift” falls into the latter category. Not many people truly understand what an illegal shift in football is, why the rule is in place, and how referees can spot the infraction. However, one thing is for certain… It’s easy to understand how […]
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By Coach Martin | Football Defense
The 4-4 defense is one of the more popular defensive alignments among youth football teams.
That is because this defensive formation allows players at each and every level of the field to learn valuable experience at their position.
And possibly also learn techniques for their future experience, if they end up changing positions based on their developing size and skills.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The Wishbone offense was one of the most popular offensive formations in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in college football.
The offense gets its name because of how the players are lined up in the backfield.
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By Coach Martin | Football Strategies
There are a lot of different strategies that football coaches employ to give their team an advantage in games.
One such strategy is strictly mental, though, and the merits of whether or not it works are constantly being debated.
The strategy to which we are referring here is known as icing the kicker.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The Wildcat Offense burst onto the professional scene about 10 years ago.
The Miami Dolphins were playing the vaunted New England Patriots in 2008, and running back Ronnie Brown lined up as the quarterback, running all sorts of misdirection and confusion plays to keep the Patriots’ solid defense guessing.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The spread offense is one of the most popular offensive formations used nowadays at the collegiate and professional levels of football.
With coaches at all levels seeing the various benefits of the spread offense, it’s starting to trickle its way down to high school, and to even less experienced levels of football as well.
The spread offense today isn’t just one basic formation for a team with a specific set of skills that runs plays in a specific set of ways.
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By Coach Martin | Football Defense
The Tampa 2 defense is a formation that is named appropriately for a specific team’s approach to defense.
Much like the “46 Defense” was named after the stout defense of the 1985 Chicago Bears, the Tampa 2 defense was named after the defense that the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers ran in the late 1990s.
Tampa head coach Tony Dungy and defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin created what is now known as the Tampa 2 defense as a way to modify the traditional Cover 2 defense for the West Coast Offense.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The West Coast offense derives its name from the location where its creator made his name. Bill Walsh actually created the offense as the quarterbacks coach and play caller for the Cincinnati Bengals in the late 1960s. Walsh became known as one of the greatest NFL coaches of all time after leading the San Francisco 49ers (and […]
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
Pro Style offenses are named after the level of play where they are most often run… At the NFL level or with collegiate teams who have a similar personnel and skillsets with that of a typical professional team. The reason for this is that Pro Style offenses are generally more complex and take more skill to run […]
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
In the mid-1980s, the college football offensive landscape was built around running the football. Sure, some teams with strong-armed quarterbacks would run some type of Pro Style offense, with their passer standing tall in the pocket… But the majority of plays were still in the running game. In fact, there were still plenty of college teams at this […]
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