Coaching Football Is Like Going To War

 From 1968-88 your friendly blogger coached high school football. In '68 as a rookie assistant I was to put it mildly clueless. As time progressed I found myself in a high level program in Illinois. Football was a big deal at our school. Even though we were much smaller than the other schools in our conference we did what all football teams aspire to do------we kicked ass.

Let's go to game night because that was the fun part of the week. After the game the coaches all went to a gathering and either celebrated or commiserated. The next morning, Saturday, we met in the coaches office and watched film from the night before. We did this for a good four hours to see who did or did not perform. That afternoon we then watched game film of our upcoming opponent. There would be coaches writing down each play. In addition, we had a scout who attended the game of our opponent from the night before. It was after this was all concluded that we came up with a game plan. There was always a great deal of discussion about this. Guys would get angry because they thought their ideas for success were correct but in the final analysis there was total agreement on what we were going to do when we next went to war.

On Monday of game week the kids ran, exercised and wore off the aches and pains from the previous Friday. We then walked through what we could expect for the upcoming game. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday the kids ran our offense and after that the defense worked against a practice team the ran our opponents plays. Thursday was relaxed and then on Friday we went into battle. Football is a lot like actual warfare in that you could lose on one Friday but win the next and you considered yourself victorious.

General Milley, our guy in Afghanistan, stated our security forces and intelligence agencies did not see the rout by a bunch of 8th century cavemen coming. Don't these people do what we, as coaches did? Don't they prepare? Isn't there a contingency plan in place in the event the opponent(the enemy) tries a surprise play(attack)? I don't think there was one time while coaching that a play occurred and one coach said to the other, "I didn't see that coming."

Vince Lombardi and Dwight Eisenhower are rolling over in their graves.