Second Registration Saturday

We had 21 register at the first FCCJC registration for 6th grade football. That was by far the most of any grade in our area. Three of those players are brand new to tackle football! We are monitoring the numbers, but at this point it appears that we will have four teams again (including Coach Swinford's in the Blue Valley league) though the teams may be a little larger than they were last year. At the bottom of this post find a list of those that have signed up so far in FCCJC.

The second FCCJC sign up is this Saturday, June 11th, from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., out at the Heritage Football complex at 162nd & Pflumm.  To get signed up for football, you need

• Your son, for weigh-in and equipment fitting if renting
• Proof of age and grade. This can be
• His player card from a previous season, OR
• A copy of his birth certificate and a copy of a grade card from this year
• A credit card or check to pay the equipment rental fee ($60) at the sign up, if you will be renting equipment

You may optionally bring

• Your own shoulder pads and helmet if you are not renting. They must be checked by FCCJC before you can practice wearing them.
  
• An FCCJC Equipment Reimbursement Request form. If you are renting your equipment, and your family is suffering from financial hardship, you may be eligible for an equipment fee reimbursement. Turn in that filled out form with your rental check or credit card payment to apply for reimbursement.
  
• Funds ($165) to pay the league fee (credit card or check) if you wish to pre-pay. You will still receive raffle tickets that you can sell to offset the league fee, but many parents prefer to pay at sign-up time. If you choose not to pay at this time, the league fee check must be turned in to your coach or team administrator by August 3rd.
  
• Funds ($20) to pay for a physical examination at the sign up. You may also use your own doctor by getting them to fill out this physical form. The physical form is to be handed to the coach at or before the first practice.

Based on the first sign up, the lines really die down about 11:00 a.m. - you can pretty much get right through, very little waiting.

The next available registration date is Saturday, June 25th.

Coach Todd Dain of Olathe Northwest will be the head coach of an FCCJC football camp out at Heritage Park next week. Seems like it will be a fun camp. You can see the brochure by clicking this link.

Signed Up 5/21

Returning
Trevor A
Thomas B
Jackson B
Peyton B
Colin B
Mitchell C
Tommy F
Will H
Hunter H
Grant H
Nile M
Jarid M
Parker M
Kawai P
Tyler R
Jared S
Ben W
Kyle W

New
Jon B
Cody H
Logan I

First Last Registration Ever

The first registration for the 2011 season is this Saturday, May 21st, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. out at the FCCJC football complex.

With 7th grade football in the Olathe middle schools now, this is the last time we will all be standing in line to get our kids signed up for football. We probably won't miss that part of it.

Remember to bring

• Your kid for weigh in
• Proof of age and grade (player card, or birth certificate and grade card)
• Check or credit card for equipment rental ($60)

See many of you on Saturday!

Rules In Play

A few football rules have come into play this fall that are interesting to write about.

In week one the opponent for our black team was granted a 5th down (see Coach Lee's post below.)

We talked to the crew about the whole series of plays before the 5th down play was run, but they chose to grant the offense the play anyway.

We didn't make a big deal about it, other than to try to get the situation corrected before the 5th down snap. But the crew chose to leave the down marker as it was, having given Olathe South two 2nd down plays - one at the end of the first quarter, and the other at the beginning of the second quarter.

Turned out that it didn't hurt anything, but we spoke with the officials about it before the snap because we thought it was a correctable error. They told us in the conference pictured above that they knew they'd made a mistake with the down marker. But in our view, they then chose to fix that error by making another mistake. As an official, you hate it when you make a mistake. But you can seldom make things right by pretending that you didn't make a mistake. It probably should have been first down ONW, with referee apologies to Olathe South for having the down marker set incorrectly. Instead, we got the apology, and they got a 5th down.

In our White team's game last Saturday, our referee was giving our opponent's offense a little too much time in the huddle. We complained a bit, and he enforced a delay-of-game penalty for us on the next play when they took too long.

But then he started the clock.

To me, this was an obvious error. If the clock restarted after a delay of game penalty, any coach could virtually kill a game with repeated delays. And in fact of course, the clock procedure after delay IS in the rulebook under Rule 3 Section 4 Article 3-i.  I couldn't have told you that precise location before the game, but you can bet that I can tell anyone where it is today.

What was more interesting to me was the reaction of the various coaches on our sideline to this mistake as it happened. We were all fairly convinced that the ref had it wrong, just because it had to be wrong, based on an intuitive understanding of the game. And yet the ref and line judge both maintained that yes, it probably would be possible to run out much of the clock with repeated delay penalties.

I made a note of this on my evaluation form, as possibly being an exception to the generally pretty good job the officials did in that game. Then just as a follow-up (and to be sure I wasn't crazy) I checked the book, found the specific rule, and sent a quick e-mail to the league supervisor of officials about that and the 5th down situation I mentioned above. To my surprise the league supervisor admitted that he too would have started the clock after a delay penalty, but that in fact we were right about the rule.

I guess this rule must not be as intuitive as I thought, but I'm pretty sure our league knows how it works now.

Finally, I did a bit of research this summer about BBW - that's referee shorthand for 'block below the waist'. In high school football, Rule 9 Article 2 generally prohibits blocking below the waist, except down in the trenches under certain conditions.  However, blocking below the waist is defined within the definition of blocking (Rule 2 Section 3 Article 7) as "Blocking below the waist is making initial contact below the waist..." (my emphasis of the word initial.)

I wondered if this exception by description might allow a down-field punch block in the numbers, followed immediately by a cut technique below the waist. In fact, given the wording, I wondered why wouldn't ANY down-field low contact be OK if the blocker had initially contacted the defender above the waist.  Several other referees had written that contact had to be sustained to meet that exception - but I could not find the word sustained, continuous, or anything like it anywhere in the rulebook.

I had verbal and written conversations with multiple officials pointing out the absence of the language necessary for sustained contact, and was pretty convinced that I'd found a legal way to throw low blocks down the field. But as it turns out, I've since decided that such a technique would be illegal.

By definition blocking is 'obstructing by contact'. Once contact is broken, a blocker is no longer blocking, even if he is standing right beside the defender he just blocked. So the punch and cut technique down the field that I was envisioning would actually be TWO blocks. And the second block would be illegal.

To look at it another way, substitute the definition for the term blocking itself in the blocking below the waist description: "Obstructing by contact below the waist is making initial contact below the waist..." In other words, obstructing by contact can't be blocking below the waist unless it starts as blocking below the waist.

That's why experienced refs had written that the block had to be 'sustained.' If you start high and fall down in the process, sliding down the body of the defender - in fact if any number of different things happen that might seem to make the block illegal, including the guy turning his back on you during the sustained block - you're actually legal if you started legal.

There's a great discussion of NCAA low blocking right here.

Someday when my knees are completely shot (instead of only half shot as they are now) and I can't cope with being a soccer referee any more, I think it would be a great challenge to be a football official.  Until then I'll just work amateur hour on Saturdays from the sidelines.

Logical Progressions of the Option

When we went to the "true" triple option in 2009, logical necessity quickly established the Midline option as another version of the option we would run.

Our regular option dives at the B gap (the hole between our guard and tackle) and reads what we call the #4 man.  I've written many paragraphs in our playbook and even made videos about the numbering system on our password protected site about this option. In the interest of brevity for this article, lets just say that the #4 man is very often the defensive tackle.

Here's a drawing of our standard (inside) option play:

Notice that the fullback runs to the gap between the guard and center. Against this five-man front, we get to 'option block' the defensive tackle that is circled T4 above. If our offensive tackle gets past him to the inside, then we can hand the ball to the fullback.

But what happens if the defense lines up in a 4-4? Here's a picture of our offense lined up against that sort of defense:

We could run the same play - E becomes the #4 man. But with a defensive tackle over our guard AND the  defensive end over our tackle, it becomes more difficult to read the B gap effectively. If, for example, the defense slants to the outside, chances are that the defensive tackle will jam up the hole between our guard and tackle. Our quarterback could make a perfect read of the defensive end, hand the ball to the fullback, and we'd still not run a successful play, because the defense overloaded the gap to which we were trying to run.

Necessity being the mother of invention, the Midline option is a better call against this defense. For the midline, the dive path and dive read key change. Instead of running between the guard and tackle, the fullback runs just outside of the center. Instead of reading the #4 man for the dive, we read the first down lineman to the option side of the center. Here's a drawing:

By shifting the dive key read to the first man to the option side of the center, the option block shifts to the play-side guard. If he can get inside and out to the linebacker, he does, and that becomes a 'give' read.

If you look at both option plays, you'll notice that we prefer to call the option that allows our fullback a two-hole window. In the first drawing, there is no player lined up over the guard, potentially opening both the A gap and the B gap. In the second drawing there is no player lined up over the center, leaving both A gaps potentially open.  We call these two consecutive open gaps 'the bubble.' We prefer to run our dive to the bubble, wherever it may be.

Let's really complicate things: Imagine that our our opponent decides to put a defender directly in BOTH of the gaps to which we'd like to run. Here's an eight-man front that seems to take away both the inside and midline dive options:

By playing linemen in both the A and B gaps, this defense attempts to take away both dive options. So while the center is technically uncovered, it is unlikely that our guard will ever get inside his opponent, and the fullback would appear to be taken away for the Midline. Likewise the B gap is occupied as well, complicating our regular option. But there is a bubble in this defense. Between our tackle and our A back there is an open  gap. That is the C gap, and the Veer option attempts to exploit that gap.

The Veer option play we created was the direct result of playing against an eight-man-line during a pre-season scrimmage last summer. By shifting the option dive path to the C gap, we could once again run to the bubble and force player B4 to make a decision - fullback or quarterback.

By the end of last season we had three different versions of the option play available, and managed to use all of them to one degree or another in our games.

But in our Black squad's seventh game we ran into a different sort of problem. The defense wisely changed its scheme from down to down. They played a 5-3 defense as shown in the first diagram above, but also would periodically shift to an 'eagle under' look, where their defensive tackles would line up on our guards, rather than our tackles. The veer option would have been a great alternative against that eagle-under defense. But we didn't know which defense we would be seeing when we broke the huddle. THAT was a very frustrating day, and our boys at nine-years-old, in our first year running the true triple option, just couldn't understand quickly enough who to block.

I knew that we could run some option successfully, but I couldn't know until we lined up which one. So it seemed to me that an "Option On Me" scheme would be most effective. In "Option On Me" systems, the quarterback calls whichever option he wants to run at the line of scrimmage.

If he sees an eagle under look, or an even front shaded to the inside, or a gap 8 defense, he can call for the veer option. If he sees a wide tackle six or a four-four, he can call for the midline. Against nearly all odd fronts he can call for our standard inside option.

We will work on this system both with and without a huddle this summer. I'm excited to see if we can do it.

Great Expectations

Coach Self's comments about expectations were right on the money. At Kansas, where basketball tradition is long and great players are everywhere, a loss to Northern Iowa really stings.

It is a terrible habit of mine, but I coach every football game with a certain expectation. I should know better, but I do it anyway. Consequently when we meet or exceed what I thought we'd do, I'm a pretty happy guy. When we fall short, it is a personal failure.

I will give you two games from last year as examples.

ONW Black played Garder-Oropoza and lost 26-14. We were tied at half, but we'd out-gained them substantially. In the second half they scored on two long touchdown runs, and returned a punt to the one yard line to set up their final score. We finally scored a meaningless late touchdown, but were three touchdowns behind in the fourth quarter.

That game makes me angry to this very day. We were better in the first half, by a wide margin. They took a full minute between plays to try to keep the ball away from us. I used a timeout when we were ahead in the first half to get the ball back, and that actually backfired, leaving time on the clock for them to tie the game. I was mad at myself for that error, and I could not wait for the second half to begin. I knew that they could not stop us. But critical penalties and turnovers damaged our offense in the second half, and they had that big punt return. The expectation I had throughout the game - that I hold to this day - was that we were better. And that particular loss will stick with me for a long time.

As the other example, ONW Blue played SM East Luetje and lost 22-14. We ran out of time, 25 yards from the game-tying touchdown. At that point in the season the Blue team was still winless, and by the end of the game we were showing what I thought was marked superiority to our opponent. They could not stop us. With two more minutes, we'd have won the game.

Was I frustrated? Actually, not so much. We'd met my expectations for that game. We'd competed, improved, and played better, and made great progress. By the end of the game I knew we were better than they were - but that improvement happened during that game, and the strides we made to become better exceeded my expectations for that point in our development.

In both cases I thought the better team lost. The Black squad lost by a wider margin, and the Blue squad just missed it's first win. You might think that the Blue squad's near miss would have been more frustrating than the Black squad's debacle.

But such is the weight of expectations, that I was far happier after the heartbreaking close loss. And now my emotions have run the entire gamut that Self described. I'm just past angry, right in the heart of competitive, and desperately anxious to arrive at teaching football again.

The Triple Option, Week One

This is an example of one of our option plays. In this case, the play called was Wishbone Option Right. That's just about as basic as we get. The video has some narration, so turn your speakers on if would like to hear my description.

This was our first touchdown in league play this year, and it was on a true triple option. It was pretty well done for the 4th grade, if I do say so. Credit the boys for paying attention and understanding their jobs, and the coaches for their patient persistence teaching.

Our QB, BK (#5) reads pull from the defensive tackle going inside, and then gets a pitch read from their defensive end. Our halfback is in great pitch relationship position, makes the catch, beats the corner and the OLB to the boundary, and they're not going to catch him.

A couple of things to note about this version of the play. The dive read was the head-up tackle on Ox (#00). He was the 4th man, counting from outside in. Here's what their defense looked like. I colored the dive read key red, and the pitch read key blue:

X  X    X     X  X

 X  X X   X X  X

  O O O O O O O

        O

        O

     O     O

The way this version of the option play is designed, the fullback's running path should have been to the guard-tackle gap. In our offense, we call that the 4 hole. Our fullback ran to the 2 hole, which is more or less where he runs on the Midline version of the option.

(For Midline, the dive read would have been the man head up on our right guard. If our guard can rip inside of him, we give the ball to the fullback. If he gets hung up, or the dive read jumps to the A gap, we pull. We also have what we call a 'veer' version that is really just an outside option off-tackle.)

But back to this one - it was supposed to feature the FB to the 4 hole, but often times young kids want to run to the path of least resistance. The quarterback nevertheless made the correct read, and our offensive tackle did too. He knows that if the defender crosses his face, he blocks him down, and that's what he did.

The quarterback moves down the line, and the defensive end - the #2 man from outside in - comes right at him. With ideal timing, our QB makes a good pitch.

Because it was off the frame, you couldn't see that our lead halfback pretty much missed the #1 outside man, the cornerback. This was early in the year, and like I said in the video, we weren't perfect on this play. But the corner took a step inside toward the quarterback too, and by the time he realized that a pitch was going to happen all he could do was dive at our halfback's feet. Normally defensive coaches will make that #1 man responsible for the pitch back, and if we don't get at least a piece of him, we're in some trouble if we pitch.

Our tight end was supposed to block the outside linebacker, who would be the #3 man. I don't think he got very much of him. But he may have forced him to the inside briefly, because by the time he re-appears in the frame, he has very poor angle to try to tackle a kid as fast as our halfback.

One of the neat things about the option is that even if you don't do things perfectly, you often have just a little bit of space to let a good athlete make some things happen. In this case, the space was out on the perimeter, and our halfback (Peyton, #21) was plenty fast enough.

We won this game 12-0, and yes, we did throw it a couple of times on them. Had to really, as they had no safeties at all.