By Coach Martin | Football Basics
The pocket is a term that’s thrown around a lot when you watch football games.
It’s a way to describe an area of the field that forms around the quarterback on passing plays.
The pocket isn’t a set space on the field, as it is something that changes and molds based on the specific play.
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By Coach Martin | Football Basics
It is a pass play that is designed to get the ball out of quarterback’s hands and into the receiver’s hands as quick as possible.
The work, then, is on the receivers to do the initial blocking, and for the player catching the ball to make a move or two to get downfield.
Let’s have a closer look at the bubble screen so we can know exactly what it is, how it’s run, and when it’s best used.
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By Coach Martin | Football Drills
The infamous Oklahoma Drill was created more than 70 years ago now by Bud Wilkinson, the former coach of the University of Oklahoma football team who won three national championships and 14 conference titles.
While some aspects of the game of football that were created that long ago are still relevant today, this archaic and dangerous drill is not one of them.
Many “old-school” football players, coaches, and fans think the game is becoming “soft” today, but there is plenty of evidence that not only does the Oklahoma Drill put players at risk of serious injury, but it doesn’t have many benefits at all.
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By Coach Martin | Football Plays
When creating offensive 7 on 7 flag football plays, the idea is to try to get the ball to a receiver or running back in space.
Since in flag football, all a defender has to do is rip off a flag from a belt (rather than make a tackle), the idea is to keep the ball handler as far away from defenders as possible.
This makes creating offensive plays in 7 on 7 flag football slightly different than that for normal tackle football.
Let’s take a look at the top 10 7 on 7 flag football plays for offenses — five passes followed by five runs.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The Wing T offense is a formation that not a lot of defensive coaches and teams are used to seeing.
It is not a traditional base offense in the sense that it has one tight end, one running and multiple wide receivers on the field.
At the same time, it does not have the “big” personnel that some other run-heavy formations such as the Single-Wing and Double-Wing offenses have.
Instead, the Wing T offense is a hybrid of them both.
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By Coach Martin | Football Basics
All footballs are not made equally.
That is to say — just because you’re playing the game of football doesn’t mean that you will be using the same ball.
Unlike a sport like baseball, where the size of the ball is always the same regardless of what level of the sport you’re playing, there is a different size football that you should use depending on how old you are and what level of the game you’re playing.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The Run and Shoot offense was first made popular in the 1970s with Darrel “Mouse” Davis and his Portland State football teams.
His version of the offense was very simplified, in that it contained only three running plays and five passing plays.
Instead of having multiple plays that could be run, the offense instead created variations off those plays to take advantage of the specific situation and the specific defense that the opposing team was running on a play.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
There was a time in college football when the majority of teams would run some form of the Triple Option offense.
As recently as the 1980s, a good number of teams were still running a form of the Triple Option offense, which at times is called the Wishbone formation.
As the game developed, and younger kids began to get bigger and stronger by the time they arrived on college campuses, though, more teams started getting away from an offense predicated around the Triple Option being the main mode of attack.
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By Coach Martin | Football Offense
The Veer Offense is more so an offensive philosophy than it is a specific formation out of which multiple plays are run.
In essence, the Veer is an option running play that offenses mostly at the high school — but sometimes at the collegiate — level use to keep defenses off balance.
Like other option plays, the Veer is used to create deception by giving the offense multiple choices for who the ball carrier may be on any given play.
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By Coach Martin | Football Basics
Unlike a lot of other sports, it’s rather difficult to understand all the various football positions on a team.
While there are only 11 players on each team on the field at any one time, there are three distinct “units” for each football team:
(1) The Offense, (2) The Defense, (3) Special Teams
This means that there are 33 different football positions — or slight variations of positions — throughout a game.
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