FBCP Episode 04 – Are Special Teams Really One-Third of the Game?

Joe Daniel: Hi and welcome to the Football Coaching Podcast. I’m Joe Daniel with, Football-Defense.com

Nate Albaugh: And I’m Nate Albaugh, ChiefPigskin.com

 

Joe Daniel: Today we’re going to be talking about special teams. And one of the things that we’ve been talking about, Coach, is whether or not, you know we always use special team at one-third of the game, but do we really treat it that way? And I think that we both kind of brought the point that, I don’t think either one of us really truly spends a third of our practice time on coaching special teams.

 

Nate Albaugh: No, I know that we do not. It has caused me to question a little bit whether or not it truly is a third of the game. One thing I wanted to do before we shot this, and I forgot to do, is kind of look up some statistics as to the number of plays in the game that are technically special teams. But when it comes down to it, we spend far less time on our special team’s game. And I think one of the main reasons for that is that it’s predictable. It’s more predictable. When it comes to kickoff, you know you’re starting in the same way every time; you get to use the same one every time; you get to use the same kick return if you want to.

I think there are some ways to simplify some things for yourself so that you get to save some of that ever precious practice time for other things.

 

Joe Daniel: Yeah and I think when you look at it, it’s really, kickoff team is one play. You’re going to line up, you’re going to kick the ball off, you’re not going to face different alignments out there. I mean you’ll obviously see different styles of kick return. But what it balls down to is that you’ve got to cover the entire field, you’ve got to kick where you’re going to kick it, you find ways to make it easier on you; we kick to a hash. So really went to defending half of the field. Just as like you said, it’s simplified a little bit. That’s something we do for kickoff; just cut the field down in half. Sometimes we even just squib it if we don’t have a good kicker. So we know there’s very little area to defend.

 

Nate Albaugh: For as far as kick-off goes for us, we really try to simplify as well. The toughest thing for me to master, I think over the years, especially as a head coach, was thinking out the best way to get the spacing amongst my attackers; from your bullets to your alley men (the different things that you may call the guys). But once we felt like we had a good way of figuring that out, figuring out how to get the proper spacing as we went down the field, we were able to save a lot of time. In all my years I’ve had kickers (over 11 years), I’ve had zero that could kick it into the end zone.

So now we have really leaned very heavily towards onside kicking quite a bit. In fact, many times we were onside kicking until you put your hands to your mouth and then we’ll kick it deep and try to pin you.

 

Joe Daniel: Yeah and I think that we had talked about, I know I had said it to you that on the Mathlete blog, where they had done a breakdown of division 1 onside kicks and the success rate of surprise onside kicks was something like over 60 percent. To whereas the success rate, like you said when the hands team’s out there, the other team is expecting an onside kick (predictable part of the game), the success rate goes down to, like, 20 percent. And something that we don’t do is we don’t do a lot of surprise onside kicks. But I definitely like that idea, like you’re saying.

 

Nate Albaugh: Yeah, ours came down to this; somehow, some way, we’ve been lucky enough and my 4 years as a head coach, to never have a kick returned on a score touchdown. But I’ve seen so many games, every week I’ll get a game filmed; you know of course you have to do your film trade, your film exchange with the other coach. I can’t tell you how many times I see somebody get one returned on him and of course I’m always scared to death of it. So I came down to this for us; I decided if I kick it deep with a kicker who cannot reach the end zone, maybe he can reach to 15, he’s going to kick on a nice pretty one, there’s a 50-50 chance that we stop on around the 40 and then the other 50 percent chance is they return it for a touchdown. So I thought if we kick and if we onside kick, there’s probably an 80 percent chance they get it on a 40 and a 20 percent chance we get it back. So i decided that I would rather get it back on the rare times and give it to them on a 40 which I was going to do anyway.

 

Joe Daniel: True, definitely. I guess one of my questions with that is (not that it’s something that we always want to think about) how do your players respond to that mentality and how do your parents and your fans, how do they respond to that? Because it is different.

 

Nate Albaugh: It is. It is a little bit different. I think that, of course, everything comes down to winning. We didn’t win; we were 4 and 5 this year, so we were a little bit below average. But I think that it went over better for us because it was so obvious; the lack of deep kickers that we had. So I’m fortunate in a place right now where most of our fans and parents have a pretty good amount of confidence in what I’m doing. So I still hear the whispers and the mumbles. But I feel so strongly that the decision I’m making is best for our kids; gives us the best chance to win that the slight of my mumbles really roll right off my back. And our kids, as far as our kids go, our kids absolutely love it. It is very easy to just tell them that, “Listen, we’re coming to win every time. We want to smash some people. So we’re going to be greedy and we’re going to go after this thing every single time.”

Last year was the first year we employed a full time. A year before, I was at a high school near St. Louis. I’d just taken over the job and the team that I was coaching had scored 36 points the previous year. So they had gone all 9 thatscored 36 points on the year. So it was a huge rebuilding job and by the end of the year, seeing my lack of kickers, games 8 and 9 we finally employed the strategy and it worked wonders; which is what carried it over to this year formally.

I think you have to play it year by year and I always know this. If I were to find a kid that could kick it into the end zone, we will absolutely kick the end zone to get 2 more out of the 20; but it’s been 11 years I haven’t had one yet. So I’m starting to think they might be a little bit rarer than I was hoping.

We’re prepared now to onside kicking. We’re working on getting more back next year. How can we get more back? Maybe if we get up our percentage from 25 percent back to 35 percent back, that’s a big deal. Might be an extra kick or two a year we’re going to get back. So we’re working hard at getting better now at our onside kicks rather than the past year is really just the concept of. We’re trying onside really so that you can’t return one back real deep on us or kick for a touchdown and we’d love to get one back. So we’re getting a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more focused now so that we can get more back.

 

Joe Daniel: We have been fortunate to have some really good kickers. We have been able to kick the ball into the end zone with the number of kickers so that never really been… The onside has always been something we use when it was necessary. But it’s obviously a good idea to have in mind if that time comes.

What does it do for you, and obviously we’re getting off of what our original plan was, but, it’s okay; I don’t think we’re fooling anybody that we’ve got our huge scripted show here.

What does it do for the momentum of your team when you get one of those kicks back?

 

Nate Albaugh: Obviously, it’s a huge momentum swing; you could see it when it happens on the 4th quarter, when you need it for a comeback win, it’s a monstrous momentum swing; you can see it on TV, you could see everybody going crazy. But I tell you why; it’s got to be close to that big momentum swing or momentum drive, if you just score. So it really is an incredible momentum builder for your kids to come off with a score and get it back. The times when we get it back, we’ve been fairly consistent in putting another score together. And it’s helped us come back in the game, helped us what I think win games.

Most recently, I remember our last game of the year, we won 65-42 and we really couldn’t stop the other team. It didn’t matter where we gave them the ball on the field and they have 2 fantastic returns. And so it was a very easy decision, that game. We were onsiding and sure enough we were trading scores back and forth with them all game and we finally got the onside back, punched it in, and from there, they never closed the gap between side that was 2 touchdowns. So, obviously, getting one back is very fun, your kids get excited, and we all know how well our kids play when they’re feeling good about themselves.

 

Joe Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. Now one of the things that this kind of feeds into and that we’ve run into is, we have some beautiful schemes for kickoff return. I mean they really look good. But you don’t see that many kids in high school football who are going to kick a nice high deep kick that’s going to let you set up some of these returns. So we’ll see some surprise onsides, we’ll see squib kicks; and as soon as you return one, you might not see a deep kick for a couple weeks. Like you said, when you see a kid that you’re going to be kicking off to return one, you don’t want to kick to him. And I think that’s probably changed our view of the kickoff returns. Is it valuable to have all these schemes that you’re practicing? Maybe you’re practicing during camp. Like I said we do have a good kicker. So during camp, we were able to kick the ball off high and deep and run these returns. But I don’t know how much value there is in constantly practicing this? One-half the time we’re fair catching a pooch kick or trying to scramble over to a squib kick somewhere.

 

Nate Albaugh: How true is that? You get so frustrated during a game and that’s what has caused me to shy away from. I used to be big when I got my first head coaching job. That first year, I was big on trying to hide some of my kids that weren’t getting into the game but for on that kick return. Sure enough after another squib pops enough squibs and pop-ups and who-knows-whats, I’ve been burnt plenty of times so I had to get those kids back off.

You’re absolutely right, you could only do so much because you can’t predict what they’re going to do. And if you do start to pop one or two big returns, you’re pretty much sure to not get any nice kicks for the rest of the season or at least for a few games. So as far as we go, we have one return, it’s the same one we’ve practiced, and then we try to put athletes at all of our upback positions that could potentially go to new practice. We try to anyway, practice all the crappy kicks in the world that we could go to; as well as the nicely set up ones. We just focus all of our time on the one return, one scheme, and then trying to handle the array of things that could come at you.

 

Joe Daniel: And another thing with the kickoff return is your front line. You mentioned that you had tried to hide some guys out there. I think the frontline is always kind of a debate with our staff of who needs to be up front because the traditional thinking was to put some linemen up there. It’s hard to run linemen out there when the other team, even if they are kicking it down the field, they’re doing it with cats and running 45s and 46s down the field, and just whizzing pass your linemen.

So as your philosophy, I don’t know, ours is to try to get some better athletes out there. They may not necessarily be the, especially that front line, may not be your star players but they are guys who are a little faster than maybe when I was playing and we put me up on the front line.

 

Sure. Now what kind of return do you guys run, Coach?

 

Joe Daniel: We run a couple different things. We run a middle wedge, just a traditional middle wedge, double wedge. And then we run a sideline return, and usually we focus on running it one direction. And if we decide one game we need to switch the direction that we’re returning it, we’ll end up flipping everybody. So they’re still doing the same thing just from the other side of the field. And then we’ll have the reverse off of that, somewhere in there. So I guess 3 returns, 4 if you line it up right. But like I said, sometimes we have to question how much it’s worth that because we do see a lot of squibs, a lot of onsides, a lot of pooch kicks and that sorts of things.

 

Nate Albaugh: For us, we’ve gone, on our front line, we have traditionally used linemen. But this year, we’ll be changing. I always wish I could have these great ideas. I could have them all when I first started but it kind of takes time and it always requires you to learn the hard way. You always get burnt before you realize you need to change something.

For us in our kick return, because we’re not a wedge team, then there’s no reason our front line needs to be linemen. In fact, there’s no reason they need to be on the field at all. So we’re anxious to see our return, which has been good to us, we’re anxious to see it next year with dealing with 11 athletes. Keeping all of our line and off. Maybe even if it’s an opportunity to bring some of those sophomore athletes on there that are really there on your team or dress up on Friday night to give you depth. But the way to get them on the field because they’re athletic enough to move and set up that little block you need because we all don’t run a wedge; we’re a little cross return. We don’t need much on the blocks; we just need to get them away. So we’re anxious to see our return next year with some more athletic guys up front. But if you’re a wedge team, then I think there’s a lot of value in having some big boys along that front line. So you just kind of have to determine based on what kind of return you run.

 

Joe Daniel: Yeah that’s good point. That’s absolutely a good point.

Now, how much time do you think you’ve spend, we’ve talked taking kick return so far, how much time would you say you spend on those special teams?

 

I guess that’s good question. Should we talk per day or per week? What do you think?

 

Joe Daniel: I think we look at it in a per week. We’ll tend to try to get between Monday and Tuesday. We’ll try to get two 10-minute blocks. Or, excuse me, four 10-minutes blocks for special teams. So 20 minutes a day we’re spending on special teams total. But out of the four that we really practice, we don’t spend much time practicing PAT. You know, once you got it down, you kind of got it down. Just don’t get run over and if you do get run over slowly, then we’re good to go. So we don’t spend much time on that but between kick and kick return, punt and punt return, we’ll try to get a 10-minute block with each one of these. So we may spend, I would guess we probably in total spend less than 20 minutes on anything.

 

Nate Albaugh: I say we’re probably fairly similar. Once we’re in season, we try to work them more during doubles. But once we’re in season, Monday we won’t work on our special teams. Tuesday, we’ll go 15 minutes of punt. Wednesday, we’ll go 15 minutes of punt return. And Thursday is run-through days, it’s when we run through our kick returns and our kickoffs once again. We do not rep our kickoff and kickoff return in pads at all once our season gets going.

Really, it’s just a matter of we have only so much time and we have to make the tough decision to choose. And of course, we absolutely want to see our punt team. In fact, we actually get a couple more reps of that on our second bit on a Wednesday as well. And then we’ll just look briefly at what we want to do with our punt return. Really more so thinking how we’re going to defend this, looking for fakes type of thing. You don’t get burnt that Friday night. It’s really at Wednesday, special teams is about, don’t get burnt on that punt return.

We don’t spend much time at all on our kick off and kickoff return to keep things simple. And then we just run through them up on Thursday.

 

Joe Daniel: You know, the time gets pulled back. We do try to run at least a 5-minute drill period, not just lining up and running it but getting a 5 or 10-minute drill period. We find the layer in the seas and we might need to line up and kick off twice. During a day, just line up and kickoff, maybe run our back-ups out there for a kick. Even if sometimes we use a full 10-man or 11-man back-up. Sometimes we may just have somebody who backs up, L345 and R345. One guy’s the back-up contain guy and one guy’s the back-up gunner, whatever you want to call him. You may just run them out there, here and there. We don’t find we need to kick off a lot or even kick return a lot. But we do try to run some drills out there just to get some basic technique work with them for 5 or 10 minutes at least.

 

Nate Albaugh: You know, what I forgot to add in was that we do also our PAT everyday for 5 minutes; something we want to get consistent practice with. So that’s kind of in addition to, we do it later in the practice though. A lot of times we let them finish up our practice with it. But we’re a swinging gate team as well so we kind of have that we want to get some repetitions in every day.

 

Joe Daniel: Yeah, you do have to work that little more, you’ve got to make it look pretty. We see enough of that. I know we have to work against it. That’s always a fun discussion when that week comes up. But that’s something that we’ll do. We’ll probably do that more and I don’t know that we don’t have many kicks blocked. But we have had the benefit of having a fairly experienced kicker for the last few years. Really, gosh I would say, the last 6 years that I’ve been there we’ve had a pretty solid, if not more, we’ve had solid kickers. That’s been fortunate. We’ve had kickers who had the ability to, and they were just kickers, that’s all they did, that’s all that they wanted to do and they did it well and they practice all day. In fact, this year, we were fortunate enough to have a kid who just wanted to be a long snapper, and a kid who just wanted to be a kicker, used kicker punter, a long snapper, short snapping, and long snapping, and they did that all practice; because that is probably the most crucial part of both punt and PAT. We didn’t have to spend as much time on this. Obviously, the time was being spent but it wasn’t a whole team situation. Now that’s just been a fortunate thing. It doesn’t happen every year. Certainly there’ve been year when we’ve struggled with the long snapping. But with the PAT, we don’t spend a ton of time with it at all. We’ve been fortunate not to have too many problems with it. That is one more we’ve found, that it is, it’s worth, to me the PAT it’s, we’re not a swinging gate, we just line up and we get down, and get run over, and it works for us. But it is worth it to keep your starters out there especially offensive linemen because it’s not a physically exhausting play. There’s very limited chance for injury. But those are definitely your best guys at not getting run over. They’re the guys who can go out there and take the blow and take on that charge.

As far as field goal block, and we’ll get into punt in a minute because that’s more fun, we usually have a standard block that we run and everybody knows it, we might adjust to definitely find a weak spot because to me a lot of game planning which is a whole different situation when you’re talking special teams, a lot of game planning is, where’s the weak link? In high school football, there’s a weak link, usually. Somewhere out there on that field goal block team, on that punt protection, there’s a weak link out there. We may adjust our block to attack that weak link. But for the most part, we don’t spend much time on it.

 

Nate Albaugh: PAT block was something that I had long been searching for. We finally found a little scheme that we like. Something we need to do next year is be able to attack from the left or the right but this year we really just attack from one side. But the biggest change for us, we actually block, I think we blocked 5 kicks this year. The biggest change for us, forward block by the same kid and it was that edge rusher, it was that one edge rusher, was getting a kid that would dive. I couldn’t tell you how many years before I’ve seen a kid, and I would think, you would’ve had a chance but you will not dive. And how hard was it to get a kid to dive? So I tried something new this year. I was desperate to find someone who would dive and I had a couple freshmen on the team that were just blazers. We happened to have a team where 4 or 5 fastest kids on our entire team were all freshmen. So that’s good for the future. So I found one of these kids and I asked the kid, his name’s Corwen, and I said, “Corwen, I will give you a varsity jersey and you will dress every Friday night if you swear on your life you will dive for every single PAT.” And of course this is a freshman that absolutely loved football and he looked me square in the eye and said, “Coach, I’ll dive after every PAT, I swear on my life.” So we dressed him and we told the kid, this is your sole job, I mean, you have to die. And I think he’ll go after every single one but two, and he got a yearful when he didn’t die. He clearly didn’t have the chance for him but I was trying to stay on this case and threatened his varsity jersey. But sure enough, he kept diving and we got 4 from him, and 1 from another kid, and that was more than we had ever had. So I was excited about that. So like I said, we have to be able to attack from both sides so it’s not so predictable. But that was a big difference for us; just finding a kid that would commit to diving after it.

 

Joe Daniel: Yeah and I think, I’m not sure how many we have blocked this year, 3 or 4. And I’m pretty sure that they were all, most of them were the same kid but they were all from the edge. We were fortunate to have a kid who was not blazing fast but he has just really good burst of the ball. Unfortunately, ours was a senior. I think we’ll be able to find someone else to fill that role. But that’s where our blocks have come; for the most part is off the edge.

I think one year we had maybe 3 blocks up to middle from just a big animal of a kid who was 6’4″ and would burst off the middle and is 300 pounds or 280 pounds or something like that and he would throw somebody aside and get a hand up. But that’s probably a rarity and there’s not a lot of coaching in that. But getting those guys, like you said, getting them to lay out and dive. If you’ve got a guy who’s willing to do that, man, that makes all the difference in the world. Because like you said, if they’ll dive after all of them, they’re bound to get a few of them.

 

Nate Albaugh: Even the ones they feel like they don’t have a chance. Sure enough they were committed to diving and get a finger on it and that was enough to throw off that kid. I’m curious, I wonder if one of the big differences for us was this year having a kid that wasn’t depressed after they scored. So here’s a freshman who didn’t play any other time. So when they scored, he was actually a little bit excited because he got on the field. Whereas in the past, I feel like some of my kids have let down because they just scored and depressed, I don’t really care about this point. Do you see any of that in your kids? Or how about this kid that’s been blocking it from the edge? Was he a normal starter?

 

Joe Daniel: Yes, he was a normal starter and he had been a starter for a while. So I think there’s a little bit of maturity that goes with that. I won’t say that he gave it his all every single time but that was something that he was good at. There’s a confidence in knowing that you got a shot at, if you’re that kid you know you got a shot at blocking it because he’s been doing it for a while. But definitely I would say and the kid is going to be coming off the edge for you as most likely your corner or your safety. So if it was a long pass he was giving up, guess who (there’s a good chance) got toasted on that. And you’re right, he’s going to be maybe not as excited to go out there. He’s a little depressed and upset and I think that’s a great point is that you got to get out there whose sole job is go out there and block a kick; especially a young kid who may not, this is his chance, this is his spot. I think it’d be interesting to see if that kid develops and continues being that way. Like I said with the kid that we had doing has been doing it for a while and he did it well. And so there was a confidence level in that that I don’t know. I don’t know if you would have always done it have you not known, you know I’ve got a chance to make up for it right here; in an understanding with that.

Well, I think the only thing we haven’t talked about so far is punting. And of course my reason for that is I hate punting. We punt and it’s not a decision that I make but I hate it. And you have a different philosophy on it. I know that when I was at Ellsworth College up in Iowa, I had coached rarely punting the ball. We had a couple of down offensive days, I remember, where we did have to punt two or three times; and he was just fuming! And as a defensive coach, I know that our defensive coordinator that time didn’t care for it. He obviously wants the field position. But the more that I look at it, the more I think as long as you’ve got a talented, average or above average offense and there’s obviously limits to where you want to do this. But I see punting as kind of like the way that you see onside kicking. If I’ve got the chance to get it to line up and play it again, if we’re at the 50, unless my defense is just absolutely locked down stellar, and I know that I write Football-Defense.com, I would like to pretend that our defense is always perfect; it’s not at all. Let’s take a shot and keep the ball in the hands of the people who score points.

 

Nate Albaugh: Sure. You’re right that you could kind of equate it to the onside kick; the biggest difference for me and why we do not go fourth very often on fourth down. I must work on your side of the 50. If we’re not on your side on the 50, we will not go fourth very often even if it’s 4th and 1. And that is for us; it’s that I feel like on an onside kick, if you don’t get that onside kick, it’s okay because you’re kids really didn’t expect to get that onside kick back. Whereas if you don’t get that 4th and 1, it is completely demoralizing for your kids and it’s very hard to get them back, and it can string from the sideline clap and say it’s okay, but you’re kind of crapped in your pants and I think they are too. And that really worries me and now that I’ve found the punt game that we’re pretty pleased with, we are okay with punting and fighting another day.

 

Joe Daniel: I think our punt game is very solid; we’re a spread punt. We skip 5-foot splits and spread out and we do a very good job of covering down the punt, we have a very good punter, a good solid long snapper. The one thing that I see, because I do see a lot of teams go 4th and 4th down against us, and this doesn’t say that we don’t ever go 4th; we certainly pick our spot and we take our shot too. But one of the things that I see with defensive players is they watch the NFL, they watch college football where most team, when they get stopped on 3rd down, they punt on 4th down; a nd so the big thing is 3 and out, 3 and out, 3 and out, 3 and out. They stop you on 3 downs. And it’s 4th down now. The defense almost expects for you to line up and punt it. And when you don’t, it’s almost like, we’ve already had this led down like our down. It’s over. We’re about to get the ball back. And then you line up to go 4th. And I think you can actually give your offense an advantage to whereas, you know, maybe we’re not guaranteed to get 3 yards on 1st, 2nd, 3rd down but we got a heck of a better chance on 4th and 3; in case your defense thinks it’s already over.

 

Nate Albaugh: So tell me this so Coach, 4th and 3 you’re talking, how deep in your own territory are your comfortable still going 4th on 4th and 3?

 

Joe Daniel: Depending on how good our offense is. Obviously, you’re going to have to use a little common sense here. I think I know that there are some guys who are just never punt, never punt. But I would say, definitely, if we’re on the right side of the 40, I wouldn’t hesitate at all; on 35, I’m still thinking about it, at least.

 

Nate Albaugh: That’s definitely guts right there. I may be *inaudible*[31:05] but I don’t have the guts for that.

 

Joe Daniel: And I think it’s just, and again, you have to know what’s going on and like I said, this is my philosophy and I’m not the head coach and that doesn’t happen. But I really see a letdown in defensive players when they get to 4th down. I really believe that that happens. And I don’t know, like you said, I don’t look at percentages, 4th down conversions, that’s something you did look at, maybe this is something you’re going to do regularly. But I think if you’ve got an offense that can get 3 yards you’ve got an even better chance on 4th down.

If they’re just crushing you, it’s 4th and 10 and you didn’t move the ball an inch, punt it away. The next time you get the ball, try to run it 3 times in a row so at least some clock goes off. But if you’re moving the ball consistently, I especially don’t want to get a couple 1st downs to get the ball out to the 40 then get to a 4th and 3 and just punt it away because we’ve already shown we could move the ball. And like I said, I feel like there’s an advantage at that point. I don’t have any scientific evidence to back that up, I don’t really care. Some of these stuff is just feel. And i just feel like there’s a letdown.

 

Nate Albaugh: I’m sure you’re right. The greatest thing about football, it’s been fun to get to know, especially since I’ve become, the offensive play caller is to get used to how fast it all moves. It becomes 4th and 3. You use 5 seconds which really isn’t that much time to decide whether or not to go for it. Now you have about 10 seconds left to make the hardest decision of your night which is what play to choose on 4th and 3. So it all goes so fast and you’ve got, so I say, probably about 15 total seconds to make the decision to go. And then choose a fantastic play that’s going to work on 4th and 3. So when you add it all up, man that is a very, very tough thing to do but I tell you what, if you can pull it off, no doubt of what a monster your men would sling a huge, huge, I guess I would say shock to the heart to that defense that was on the field because I think that would definitely be demoralizing to them.

 

Joe Daniel: Sure and then they’ve got to line up to do it again. It’s easy to say, it’s easy for me to sit here and think you’ve got a plan for 4th and 3. But obviously you get into the flow of the game, maybe that play that you said was your, this is our hour, it’s 4th and 3, we need to 4th play. Maybe that play is just not hitting. You got to come up with something else pretty quick. So there’s a lot that goes into it obviously. There’s a lot that goes into that decision. It’s easier to sit back and say and obviously I think we’ve all made decisions in games that we’ve might like to have back just because of that whole situation.

Now the last thing, Coach, is we touched on it briefly, is there anywhere on your special teams that you think, and I know we’ve all made the mistake in the past, is there anywhere that you think you need to or you can’t afford to get some other guys out there (of course you mentioned the guy going to block the kicks) that gets some other guys out there on your special teams or gets your best players off the field for a break.

 

Nate Albaugh: There are but I’ve found over the years less and less opportunity to get kids off. So what I usually try to do is find my 3 or 4 kids that I have to give a break in the least for us being small school, most of our real good ones go both ways. So I’m going to find the 3 or 4 and I’m going to find a way to get them off the field during those special teams. It may be the only time of night they come off.

But outside them, now I need everybody else to stay. Maybe if someone else gets too tired to play, I’ve got room to bring someone else and he’s not going to kill us. So those types of kids, if we can live, I mean we won’t absolutely be dead if you’re go down, then you’re probably going to stay on the field for special teams. Over the years, we’ve tried to get more and more athletic kids in our special teams. I’ve improved the course because we have better athetes out there.

I still look like crazy to find those spots. One spot we found is I’ve been able to get away with one of my real good gunners on my punt team and one of my senior athletes that isn’t a star, I’ve been able to get him on the field there. The style of punt we’ve been using has been good for us there.

So outside of that, we try to give one or two of our big heavy boys on the PAT gate team; I try to do that as well. Those are really the only spots I could find. If I have a young talented sophomore that’s maybe the next defender end, we’ll try and get him on that kick off team. But the chances are few and far between. How about you, guys?

 

 

Joe Daniel: We find the spot to get that 12th/14th guy (12th, 13th, 14th – I skipped over number 13 there). We’ve tried to get those next guys up on defense out there. More than likely though if they are on some of the special teams they probably play some. So I think that that’s, and obviously we’re on a different situation, we’re on the highest classification in the State of Virginia, we are 2000+ kids enrollment, we’re talking a big difference, 150 kids out in the program total. We’ll dress about 50 for a varsity game. Most of those guys are capable of going out on the field of playing. We generally confine the place to get some of those guys out there on our special teams but I think, one thing that we definitely have found is we cannot just get, one of the things we have tried in the past was to make the kickoff team and the kickoff team will always be the place. We tried to make the kickoff team a special group of guys who really focus on that or make a special teams group who may be were on all the special teams. And obviously you’ve got your guys who are on every special team. But you just had to have some of your better athletes on kickoff. I don’t think there’s any way around it. There’s too much risk involved in it. I would be more inclined to rest some guys on kickoff return as long as the guys who are going to be catching the football can catch it; if they can catch it and get down. Catch the ball, get down with it, and make sure that we get to line up and play offense with it. But kickoff is just such a gamble.

Punt, like I’ve said, we’ve had a good punter. So if we can get a good punt that skies up there, we feel pretty good with just putting some guys with some speed down the field. And that’s a situation we don’t need. We need guys who are secure tackles. They may not be, you may not need your starting little linebacker out there. You’re second corner can get out there and do just as good a job for running down the field.

We find places to get more guys involved with special teams. It’s certainly not the same 20 or so that always play. But more and more we see that, like you said, there’s less and less places to just run guys out there on special teams.

 

Nate Albaugh: When it comes down to it, for every team, no matter who you are, how many kids go to your school, you only have so many kids that are really ready to play on Friday nights. So you just have to prepare as a coach, your speeches to those kids that aren’t quite ready, be able to work with them and let them know that “Listen, I appreciate you. I want to help you get better every chance I can get. But right now you’re just not ready to play on Friday nights.” And it’s a tough conversation and it’s one of the stinkiest parts of coaching. But you know what, too much is at stake and you need to win, darn it, and it’s just tough. But you got to have those conversations and when it comes down to it, you can only put those kids on the field that are ready to play.

 

Joe Daniel: I think that all goes back to creating that kind of family atmosphere in your team that everybody knows; that they have their role and they’re appreciated and even if they’re not the star on Friday night, they like being a part of what you’re building there and what you’re doing there; and I think that we could roll on that for another 3 hours here.

So we’ll have to get into that some other time, Coach. You got anything going on with ChiefPigskin right now?

 

Nate Albaugh: Yeah, there’s a lot of things going on which we’re getting up some of the old footage that we had still stored up from the summertime and during the season didn’t have time to get up. So we got a lot of new footage coming up. And we just recently started that it’s all password protected; and you happened get on ChiefPigskin, and you can’t log-in, you click on a free video and it requires the email and password, you can get frustrated. Hang in there, it really is super simple. All you have to do is be on the mailing list. So it’s worth signing up. Sign up for the mailing list; you get access to the over 303 videos. I’ll just encourage everybody to stick with it and go ahead and sign up and don’t let it slow you down; it’s all still free as it ever was.

 

Joe Daniel: Great. And the other thing, as far as Football-Defense.com that I wanted to mention and Football-Offense.com, I’ve got 2 sites, they’re both hyphenated; Football-Offense.com, Football-Defense.com. I have committed myself to coming out with two posts a week on each of them. That’s my new year’s commitment. I have no idea how’s that going to happen or to the next 12 months (laughter). That’s what I’m trying to do there. So if you ever see something show up on one of those sites that just seems like complete garbage, it’s because I was desperate to get something out there (laughter). But I’m going to try to keep putting up some quality stuff there.

The other thing is that we finally do have a name, as we’ve mentioned at the beginning, so this is the Football Coaching Podcast and I think this is the 4th episode we’ve recorded now. I think we’ve talked for a lot more than that but sometimes the recordings didn’t go through.

You’d be able to find them on iTunes. We’d appreciate you checking it out there, Football Coaching Podcast. And also, check out FootballCoachingPodcast.com. And I think that’s all the time we’ve got for today. I’m Joe Daniel, been talking football with Nate Albaugh of ChiefPigskin.com and you’ve been listening to the Football Coaching Podcast.

 

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