Apply Today for the “2012 Football Challenge”!

We all know the costs of running a successful football program. Fundraising is an unfortunate, frustrating, time consuming and absolutely vital part of having a great football program. So it’s nice when it can be as painless as possible.

That’s why Football-Defense is proud to support the “$1,000,000 High School Football Challenge” and the $1,000,000 Youth Football Challenge”

The mission is to help 200 high school and 300 youth football programs across the country generate thousands of extra dollars right now for equipment, apparel and gear.

Football-Defense.com is rewarding the top-10 coaches who raise the most money for their teams with a free 1-Year subscription ($89 value!).  Plus all participating coaches will receive a free 1-Month Subscription to Football-Defense.com.  There will be lots of other prizes from other great football companies too.

For all the details and to apply for a spot:

High School Football Teams go to www.reachingourgoal.org/mdc

Youth Football Teams go to www.reachingourgoal.org/football

Top Football Coaching Websites for November, 2010

Here are November’s Top Football Coaching Websites based on Alexa.com rankings. Once again, I have not included Football-Defense.com or GridironChat.com, both of which I run.

Thats probably for the best, I think we would’ve dropped. 3 new sites were added this month (and one dropped off, since there was no data available on it). If you’ve got any new sites to add to the list, let me know!1. SmartFootball.com Blog2. FootballScoop.com Articles & Insights, and of course Job Search
3. Coach Huey Forums Football Coaching Forum
4. FootballDrills.com Drills
5. MyCoachBook.com Coaches Networking Site
6. CoachTeed.com Drills, Playbooks, Videos
7. Fast and Furious Football Playbooks, articles, other resources
8. American Football Monthly Football Coaching magazine
9. Cripes! Get Back to the Fundamentals… Blog
10. Jerry Campbell Football Free Forum, other resources for sale
11. GlazierClinics.com Pay for Clinics, Videos, and more
12. SpreadOffense.com Spread Offense articles, video clips, blog13. Bucksweep.com Wing-T Football Articles, Forum [Read more...]

Create Your Own Blog

There’s a few new blogs popping up out there that I’ve gotten to look at. I’m sure there are plenty more that I haven’t seen yet, since I don’t really actively look for them. But there are so many brilliant coaches out there, and so many ideas to share, that I think we should encourage anyone who’s got something to say to put it out there.The great thing about coaching football today is that you can get on the internet any time, and find tons of sources of information for whatever problem you’re having, idea you’re researching, or anything else. So I thought I’d throw something out there about how to start your own blog (whether you want to talk football, or start a blog about anything else in the world).The Road to Football-Defense.com

I started out setting up an account on GoDaddy to create GridironChat.com. That site is still active, and I’ll add more to it during the off-season. But what I found out later was that traditional websites not only require you to create the page, but they do miserably in search engines like Google.com when compared to blogs. I did have a great time learning HTML and some other things, and I can write a web page now, so there was an upside to the process. Some of that stuff comes in handy, even when running this blog.The next step was creating The Football-Defense Report on a Blogger site. Blogger (or BlogSpot, they’re the same thing) is from Google, so the idea is that it will do better in the search engines. Most of my traffic comes from Google searches. I was shocked at how well it did, from the start. In a relatively short period of time, The Football-Defense Report on Blogger was getting as many visitors as GridironChat.com was. That was in spite of the fact that I was actually actively advertising GridironChat.com on message boards, and at clinics – while the only advertising other than search engines for The Football-Defense Report was coming from GridironChat.com. [Read more...]

My Guys

Here’s a picture of my Linebacker group with me, following the Graphic Edge Bowl this past weekend. I’m really proud of what these guys did this year, and you can see there’s a little hardware down there too. We won the game 64-7 over Central Lakes-Brainerd. Ellsworth Linebackers

Making Adjustments During the Game

Its been a while since my last post. I knew it would be tough to get posts up during the season, and this is my first season since starting The Football-Defense Report and GridironChat.com. Now that we’re into our first truly “regular” game week (we’ve been in class for two weeks, but this past week was a bye), I’ll work to get on some sort of legitimate schedule. Later this week, I even hope to get a second post out talking about some blitzes for the 4-2-5 Defense! We’ll see what happens. For now, I just wanted to talk a little bit about making adjustments during the game. This is an outpouring of things I have been thinking about, so it may not be very well organized or even useful, but I hope it has some value to someone.The first key to making adjustments is understanding where your weaknesses are, and anticipating how the offense might attack them. I get really concerned when a coach talks about this “amazing” system that “covers everything.” Before you install anything – a front, coverage, blitz or otherwise – we need to completely pick it apart and recognize that it has weaknesses. After 100 years of football, there’s nothing perfect and nothing really new. Someone would have found the perfect system if there was. You might have incredibly good athletes that make your system look perfect, and if you do, please send me an e-mail! But recognize your weaknesses, and anticipate how they will be attacked.Now that you have your weaknesses, have an alternative… and don’t wait until they start attacking your weakness! As an offense, if I recognize a defense is vulnerable to the run, I’ll keep doing it til they stop it. BUT, as a defensive coach (and this is the Football-DEFENSE Report!), I can’t sit back and wait for them to start attacking that deficient area, or we’ll be down 6 points. Use a variety of fronts, coverages, line movements and blitzes to keep the offense from keying in on your “base” or your favorite call in the game plan. Stay one step ahead, because if you’re once step behind on your adjustments then you are giving up points.The time will come, though, that we have to pull out the whiteboard on the sideline and draw up something new that the players have never done before. You may not have even thought of it ahead of time (shame on you!), but that’s okay. Be sure your thoughts are clear in your head, draw it up and explain it clearly to your players. Make sure it fits with your base principles that you teach your players every day. If someone has been a box player all season, don’t suddenly ask them to spill and expect it to go well! And finally, give it a cool name and write it down somewhere after the game. You may want to use it again later in the year, and the players will remember it if you do. The easiest thing to do is give it the nickname of your opponent. Then down the road you can just say, “Remember the Chiefs adjustments? Next series we’re going to do that” and briefly review it. Now you’re ready to roll. [Read more...]