Delegating Staff Assignments for Weekly Offensive Game Planning

By Justin Iske
Offensive Line Coach
Southwestern Oklahoma State
Twitter: @justiniske 

Introduction

In January 2015, I was blessed with the opportunity to join the coaching staff at SWOSU. Our head coach, Dan Cocannouer, our passing game coordinator, Jon Garfield, and myself all had coordinator experience and our own ideas on how to fix the struggles that we had on offense in 2014. Meshing our three separate, but similar, philosophies and incorporating nine new starters on the offensive side of the ball was our challenge. The purpose of this report is to go through the game planning process that was the results of our meetings. This is the process that we use for a typical game week and communication on game day. Note that this report will assume that game day is Saturday.

Sunday: Here at SWOSU, Sunday is our players’ day off. Our coaches will grade their position and special teams segment, and complete our self-scout during the day. We will meet as a staff at 5:00 PM to go through the highlights and/or lowlights from Saturday. We also use Sunday as a day to watch film of our upcoming opponent on our own. We split up our self-scout and opponent breakdown as follows.

• QB/WRs Coach: Breakdown (Coverages) / Self Scout (Personnel / Passing Game)
• RBs Coach: Breakdown (Fronts / Depth Chart) / Self Scout (YAC / 3^rd & 4^th Downs)
• TEs Coach: Breakdown (Fronts) / Self Scout (Run-Pass Tendencies / Red Zone / Backed Up)
• OL Coach: Breakdown (Blitz / Stunt) / Self Scout (Overall / Run Game / Protections / Goal Line)

Monday: In the morning, we will get together as a staff and determine what personnel groups / formations we are going to stress for the week. The two biggest things we use to make this decision are our self-scout from the past three to four weeks and our opponent film from the past three to weeks. It is important that we continue to do things that our players do well, but at the same time, we have to make sure that we are not too predictable based on formation, down and distance, etc. In the afternoon, we will watch Saturday’s game with our players and begin to introduce our upcoming opponent’s base fronts and coverages. By the end of the day, we will create a ready list of our base runs and passes for the week. The key to this process is having enough offense to keep the defense on their toes, but not so much that we can’t practice everything that we have for the week.

Tuesday: The offensive staff will watch film of our opponent in the red zone, goal line and backed up. We will then put together our game plan for these situations. In practice on Tuesday, we work 60% of our team time on first and second down (open field) and 40% of the time on red zone, goal line, and backed up. We also work good on good against our defense on red zone and inside run.