One Fooball Step Forward, One Football Step Back
Jun 1st, 2009 by Coach DeLorm
Here is another great post from football coach Dan Levin. He is a Head Coach of a football team in Australia. If you would like to contribute to the site please drop me a line using our contact form.
After a somewhat promising start to the season, we took a big step back this past week - though it’s hard to say exactly what needs to be done. We lost 70-7 to the second best team in the league, and the score is pretty indicative of how poorly we played. Still, the game could have been much closer.
We had 3 snaps out of shotgun go horridly wrong, 2 in our own endzone for touchdowns the other way, and another recovered close to the goal line for another score. Eliminate those mistakes and it’s suddenly 49-7. Still bad, but not atrocious.
In week 1, our passing game was on but our running game was wretched. This week our running game was adequate but the passing was bad. A combination of errors led to the debacle, but mostly lack of protection and bad QB mechanics. Obviously there’s more work to do in that respect. The interesting thing is that our QB’s mechanics are pretty good in practice, but they don’t translate well to games. I’m not sure how to get this to change, other than making him over-exaggerate the footwork and shoulder rotation in practice.
Another factor that hurt us was that we were down 6 starters before the game even kicked off, and then lost our starting G/ILB before the end of the first quarter. Most of our entire team played both ways for the entire game - which against a more experienced and rested squad we had little chance of being competitive. This week we should be getting the majority of those starters back, but the real question is how much will it help us?
On the plus side of things, we didn’t have nearly as many substitution problems this week compared to last.
We get a much easier opponent next week, and then a bye to get healthy before we face the two most physical teams in the competition. We’re hoping to get some momentum going into the bye so we can come out strong afterwards.
