Little Things - Fundamentals
By Adam Knoll | November 24, 2009 at 02:45 PM EST | No Comments
Perhaps the most overlooked thing in football is how huge fundamentals are at any position. The guys on this team hear me say it a lot, but proper mechanics and understanding in everything we do is paramount to achieving our first goal which is to become a respectable team in this growing league. It is no mistake to say that every championship team, and runner-up, has been the most fundamentally sound teams of that season.
The Cougars, dating back to 2007, have always had a stunning defense and up until last year a really nice offense to compliment it. The Lynx, who have been in every Championship game, has been easily the model that every GFL team should try to become. The Lynx are so good at running the ball (i.e. – everyone knows their assignments and the proper way to block and seal off a hole) that there have been entire games where they haven’t needed to pass at all to whip up on teams. Sometimes I wonder if they pass only to give their QB something to do.
The Heat, runners-up in 2008, have a savvy and veteran team which uses its smarts to win games. Last season some picked them to fall off a bit, and to a degree, they did. However, they used their understanding of the game to go 5-1 in the early season, which held them up into the playoffs. Last year’s Cowboys were the closest team to the Lynx. Not an overly great team, they had holes no doubt about it. Yet they practiced, and played, like a true team would and just beat teams with their sound style.
Another must for a playoff hopeful is a stout defense. For comparison on this, we can look at last years Gladiators as a team that used its defense to create an opportunity for itself. In their first 5 games, the Gladiators were winless, yet everybody talked about their defense and how they were better than their record. Their defense held good teams close, yet until their week 6 game the offense couldn’t do their part. After they figured out how to score some points, they finished their season 4-1 and really came out of nowhere to claim the last spot.
I know I say it a ton, but it’s the truth. The more and more you look at it, it’s the teams that practice the basics (while having talent doesn’t hurt as well) that you will find in the top half of the league.
Little Things - Kicking
By Adam Knoll | November 11, 2009 at 09:41 PM EST | No Comments
It seems like such a normal thing, score a TD, get close to the endzone, kick the ball. Get some points, leangthen a lead, get closer, you know, the normal. How the simple can become difficult.
Last season in the GFL was the first to sport a kicking game, of any kind. There was to be extra points, field goals and punts (punts were later voted against due to the way they were to be run). One may not think this a huge deal, it's still normal football right? Well, no.
Last years system gave a team kicking a PAT 2 points instead of 1 (it was as wierd as it seems, this season look for it to be 1 point again), so you can imagine now how HUGE kicking became in just a flick of a rule change. Yet...nobody really took advantage of it. On the Storm last year, we didnt kick untill the third game or so, and then only begrudgingly. We didnt kick a field goal (3 points, like normal) till almost half the season was gone, and it was a battle to even do that with the idealogy differences on the team.
Yet before I start to sound as if we were the only team not embracing the change, the same was going on all over the league. Only the Lynx and Rage REALLY took to the change, kicking from day one, the surprise of the year (up to that point) was that the Gladiators kicked a field goal in thier first game...an honest to god field goal...my goodness. It was no secret that the teams that embraced the change scored higher than those that didnt. The Lynx and Rage had the two highest scoring offenses in the league, which had something to do, in part, by thier extra point kicking (remember, 2 points). 4 TD's and PAT's later and you have 32 points, not 28. It doesnt seem like much till you understand that going for an NFL 2pt conversion was worth 1 point. Thats right, you got more points for kicking it over the bar from 15 yards away than by picking up 3 yards on the ground. It was backwards, and a team that didnt adjust was, well, outgunned.
That's not to say that the system was unfair, no quite the opposite. Every game, every team played underneath the same rules and chances. No, instead it truly became a system of, who has a kicker, and who doesnt. If you had a kicker, per 3 TD's that team was good for 3 more points at least. This season, expect the NFL style conversion to still be worth 1 point, and going from 5 is 2 and 10 is 3, and expect the kicking PAT to be worth 1. Yet still, having a good kicker is still paramount to having an edge.
This season, it isour goal to have a kicker that is almost automatic from 30 yards away, which gives us an intermediate game as well as an easier time with PAT's and the like. If the GFL adopts a punting system again, then expect the kicker to have even more influence. It seems like such a small thing, football: Kicker...go hand in hand, yet untill last year in the GFL, they did not. I expect most teams to have fair to great kickers, and the game to feature more small scores than last year (I wouldnt be too far off if I guessed that the GFL had about 10 FG's made TOTAL last season). It's now a small thing that is becoming a very large element, and an absolute nessesity
Little Things - Emphasis on YAC
By Adam Knoll | November 05, 2009 at 05:08 PM EST | No Comments
I’m fairly convinced that one of our biggest problems last season (on top of the obvious stuff), was the lack of YAC yards (yards after catch). We ran a pretty devoted version of the west coast offense last year with the Storm, and perhaps suffered a bit with the lack of ability to run after the catch. In the west coast, passes are short and timed, which gives it a higher chance of completion percentage (55% last season with a revolving door on the O-Line). Even though we had a legitimate deep threat, production on deep routes was shaky at best and we made due with mostly outs and curls, a possession type passing attack indeed. Well, this put us in a huge hole as plays per drive skyrocketed and an inability to convert on 3rd and long developed. It even started impacting our entire offensive scheme as if a 1st down play went backward, our chances of converting a 2nd or 3rd down plummeted.
The difference this year will be in getting the receivers into an open area and letting their wheels do some of the work. Some may take this as a commitment to going to a deep passing attack, this is not necessarily true. Using the backs and combination routes can do the work just as easily. Let’s be honest, on a field with 8 guys per side, getting into a soft zone shouldn’t be too difficult.
Yet, one very important aspect is overlooked: The receiver’s ability to make a man miss. Last season, we had a lot of touchdown taken off the board by the last defender making a play. Not only that, but when running a shorter route, sometimes making a man miss is the difference between a six yard gain and a seventeen yard one. This season, a lot of work will be put toward getting that extra yard, because when one is going for one more yard, he sometimes ends up with a few more. It can turn a 15 play drive into a 12 play one, which matters greatly. It shifts defensive priorities over to tackling instead of blitzing or zoning. It’s the little things that nobody notices that makes a team better.
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