To Script or Not to Script: Offensive Game Planning – Part I

By Ryan Munz, Assistant Head Coach,

University of Wisconsin-Platteville

An interesting debate within offensive game planning is how important is a script to ensure you are seeing the right plays against the right looks. Each coach has a plan in place to make sure that what you see from your opponent is what your players see during the preparation each week. We know in a perfect world that this is the best way to ensure your players and coaches are successful each week. The 6 P’s right: Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. We also know as coaches that it is our job to prepare our athletes to the best of our abilities so that we do not see any unwanted surprises come game time. This has always been an area that is highly debated within our program, especially when it comes time for competition periods. The purpose of this article is to provide an opportunity for you to reflect on your current way of thinking/doing and either support what you do or to get you to rethink how you do things. Either way, let’s start thinking.

Scenario #1

I remember my first day as a graduate assistant. I got into the office early in the morning and the first thing was to sit down with the offensive staff and go through what practice is going to look like. What are you implementing, your individual periods and what periods are team periods that need scout? From there, the offensive coordinator picked the plays he wanted to see, wrote them in order for each team period and then behind each play, wrote these three things: front, coverage, blitz. That information was then handed to me and I was in charge of making the scout cards for the day.

Before the invention of Hudl, Playmaker Pro existed and a good old pen and paper! For forty-five minutes of team prep, it took me about two hours to get scout cards ready for the afternoon practice. This is a typical morning for most graduate assistants in the country, right. Then practice began. I had one goal! Get 11 guys to look at a card and run a defense that they have been given little information on. Everything went according to plan, until…I missed a play and got the wrong blitzes on the wrong prep plays or Jimmy forgot to read the card correctly and went to the wrong gap. The scout team got amped up because their production was amazing and then the offensive coordinator would start shouting across the field to get on script because, well, the scout team was amazing!

It was a nightmare that would happen about once a week, usually Tuesdays because every week was a new defense. The offensive coordinator would get frustrated, I would get frustrated, the scout team would get frustrated and our offensive unit would suffer because we where losing plays and production. The cycle continued week after week. To fix the problems, we would extend a period by five minutes just to “redo” all the missed plays. Something had to change.

Scenario #2

Scripting also occurs in practice when you have a one versus one team period. This is where it gets interesting. We all want to win. As much as you can say we want the team to be successful during competition drills, that is a line of bull! If you are the offensive coordinator, you want to score and a defensive coordinator wants turnovers and sacks. It doesn’t make a difference if you are competing on game day or you are competing in a controlled team period. Here is what tends to happen – whichever side fills the script out last, usually tends to have the upper hand. It starts off pretty innocently and the script is followed down the line. Then, after a couple of rotations, every time the offense sprints out pressure is coming from the field or every time the defense blitzes a screen is magically called. That will last for so long and then one side goes off script because they realized the drill has been compromised and then hard counts and double passes come out to play!

Scenario #3

You can script the first ten, twelve, however many plays of the game! You are going to run these plays in order to see how the defense will line up and what you can set up the rest of the game. This is all fine and dandy until you get a holding penalty the second play of the game and you are now on your own ten and the next play is a home run that you anticipated running on short yardage. Sure this makes it easy on the play caller in the first quarter and the players are prepared for the plays, but your plan should be to score on every play not show them every play and hope one works. Your homework should be done already.

By now, you may have figured out what side of the coin we fall on with this debate. It’s not something that we decided to do to be different. Its something we decided to do because we feel it makes us a better program. Here is why.

To be continued…part II will be posted tomorrow.