From depth charting players in the pre-season to trying to stop your cross-town rival’s power play, understanding your defense is of utmost importance. The better you know your system, what each lever is best at stopping, the more efficient you’ll be at adjusting on the fly.

This episode of The Football Coaching Podcast delves further into the idea of having the best 11 on the field, by concentrating on your overall understanding of your defensive system.

When you’re filling out your football depth chart for your defense this season, you should be pencilling in the ‘Best 11’. In Youth and High School Football where we do not recruit, we coach the kids we have. They might not always fit into a perfect mold for each position.

This episode of The Football Coaching Podcast kicks off Season 10 with a look at what the Best 11 really means for your defense. Find out how to pick the right guys and put them in the right places on your football depth chart.

For every playbook out there, you will find another way to name offensive football formations. There are no strict guidelines or rulebook to what you call your formations. 

Creating your own system of rules for how you name offensive football formations is important, though. It will determine how easy it is for your players to grasp new formations. The system also determines how easy it is for you call new formations. 

I love keeping it simple. Football plays take a lot of work. They take time to install and perfect. You do not need a lot of plays.

Formations are cheap. You can install new formations quickly in practice. Being able to run just a few plays out of many different formations creates a complex look for the defense, while you keep it simple. 

Check out this episode of The Football Coaching Podcast to learn all about naming and grouping your offensive football formations. 

Unlike the rest of the topics in Season 9 of The Football Coaching Podcast, this is not one of the 20 most asked questions. In fact, this question gets asked very infrequently.

But it is important.

When do I know it is time to walk away from coaching?

You feel like you need a break. The stress of the job is wearing you out. Changes in your life have made the huge time commitment a bigger burden than it was. You don’t get the same joy from the game as you did before.

There are a lot of reason coaches ask the question. In this episode, I will talk about how I knew it was time to walk away. And how I knew it was time to come back.