When position coaches do film breakdowns and pages upon pages of scouting reports, they're being virulently unproductive. Throughout a football game, there are several series involving many plays where snap judgments and decisions need to be made. What coaches attempt to do, which is rooted in good intentions, is sort of stockpile a database in the minds of the players so that in a flash moment, the unconscious mind that works behind a “locked door” will go through rapid recognition and act as freely as it is supposed to and basically do its hidden job.
Coaches introduce many complex sets, fronts, schemes, alignments, tendencies, and formations, at the players while they're dealing with other studies outside of football. It's plausible that this system of preparation, which is seemingly supposed to better prepare the players for the many variants that can be thrown at them, may hinder and hamstring the natural knee jerk reaction that players intuitively have. Hearing things in a meeting room isn't enough. You must live it. There is always this dissonance between what you hear and what you see. Without more experience, players can begin to take what they hear and contradict what they see, limiting that initial natural response.
Right now, they're in the middle of a system that can't measure what it promises to measure. They disaggregate and tear it apart but are never able to synthesize the whole. Just because a player understands some of the plays doesn't mean he understands the holistic premise of the defense, and he must because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The coaches today hand out far too many cues, reads, and looks. If you're given too many choices, if you're forced to consider much more than what you're comfortable with, you get “paralyzed.”
They gather and consider far more information than is truly necessary because it makes them feel more confident. The irony, though, is that very desire for confidence is precisely what ends up undermining the accuracy of their planning. They feed the extra information into the already overcrowded equation that they're building in the player’s heads, and they get even more muddled. Extra information is more than useless. It is harmful. It confuses the primary concerns. In truth, you need to know very little about the underlying signature of a complex situation.
When you make players become too reflective of the process, it will undermine their ability, and they will lose the needed flow of a game. They must be in command and out of control. Making great snap decisions requires a balance of some deliberate thinking and instinctive action. Introducing too much deliberate thought, as stated, will hamstring the player on the field.
I'm not saying players should be thoughtless. I'm stating that maybe an extremely detailed scouting report, film breakdown, or whatever covering every minor minutia of the other team’s tactics and tendencies isn't necessary. Only introduce what is needed and keep things as simple as they may run this play or pass on this play. Perhaps, extremely detailed is a proxy for complicated. Do not worry about the opponent so much. Worry about advancing the players' skills every week, getting better at playing with the system you use, and improving the ability of your players to make snap decisions on the field. This will improve performance. You need to simplify the environment in which they work. Attempt to create a simple structure for spontaneity on the field.
The problem will be convincing a coach to let you act out your vision. He needs to trust and support you 100 percent. The problem is that buried among the things we disagree with is a class of things that are in that category only because they're different. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it can take some time to understand that it actually make more sense and is more productive for the system the NCAA hands us. It is a system with constrained resources and time, so you must coach accordingly. When you are in the coaching world, you become so immersed in your own stuff that it's hard to keep in mind that the players you work with spend very little time on their own developing their skills. We spend profoundly too much time on the opponent, forgetting to overkill the necessary fundamental skill building the players need. Noticing what doesn't happen is often a sign of expertise. I promise the players go home and don't think about football tactics and fostering the promotion of advancing technical efficiency.
In theory, I'll just throw out a possible solution a position coach would face in-season between competitions. I would structure a “mini” combined method where early in the week, keeping the biodynamic/bioenergetic demands always in your thoughts, you break the cycle. In this case, I'm referring to the week prior to every competition. I would break the weeks into stages of specialized preparatory work, possibly after I felt out the athletes. I may have a high central nervous system work day on Tuesday and blend toward more dominant specialized developmental and competitive exercises on Wednesday and beyond, always favoring a direction of positive training transfer and matching criteria of dynamic correspondence so that skill is acquired and improved upon. After the player’s efforts on competition day, assuming everyone is healthy, and as we continue to go through the mini-cycle that has been set, a higher level of sport form would slowly be reached in every competition. Then, after competition, I would go through the restorative measures, cardiac restorative work, and tissue massages and repeat this mini combined method through the season.
I would use principles derived from Issurin's model with respect to special strength exercises placed in the context of a transmutation of general strength exercises and biomotor developments into more specific exercises and biomotor developments as the season moved forward. It would need to be done with great care so as not to disturb the sequence of bioenergetic field training and/or sport technical practice and competition exercises.
This is just one of the many complex variations that could be visited, but that is just an idea of where I'm going with my current thoughts. The idea of constructing a specific preparatory week of training whose taxonomy is geared to each specific opponent, who has his own tactical approach and the developmental as well as regenerative efforts as they should be temporally placed within the weekly structure, is nirvana. It is as accurate as it can be. Yet, this situation escapes us.