Using a hit chart when making cut-up films for defensive tackles.
You can improve your defensive line play by providing a short video to your players detailing the blocking schemes of your opponents. This article details how we first FILTER the plays of our opponent by selecting just the plays that are run to the interior of the line and then eliminate plays that do not gain more than two yards. (Plays that gain less than two yards are usually not very good examples.) We then SORT the remaining plays by the play type and formation. The subsequent video tape or DVD film study will provide our DT's with several plays of each type (Veer, Iso, Zone, Dive, Trap, Pass Protection, etc.) and from various formations. Because our DT's play a different technique based on the call of the formation we want to make sure we group or sort those techniques together.
We play a 4-3 scheme with our defensive tackles playing either a 1 or 3 technique. We teach our DT's to react to cut-off blocks, reach blocks, base blocks, double team blocks, down or gap blocks, trap blocks, and a variety of pass protection blocks and schemes. In order to prepare our DT's for this week's opponent we create a video cut-up that represents a proportionate number of running plays and blocking schemes. We will determine the type and number of blocks through analysis of this year's opponent's games, but we won't hesitate to add clips from our last year's game with this opponent as well, especially if they were able to exploit a particular weakness of ours along the line of scrimmage. We will also use plays from our previous games with this opponent if this year's scout films do not show our opponent on offense versus a scheme similar to our 4-3. (We also believe that our players need to see themselves on tape doing both the right and wrong thing versus a specific blocking scheme. This is a separate cut-up that we continually update throughout the year. The particulars of this type of ongoing cut-up film will be addressed in next month's newsletter.)
Offensive plays can be described in many different ways. Plays can be described by their name; Isolation, Belly, Power, Veer etc., and by the area or hole along the line of scrimmage that they attack. The name of the play will quite often describe the blocking scheme, while some teams might use a numbering scheme to describe a play type. A 32 may indicate the #3 back taking the ball through the 2 hole. Or, it could mean that we are using a "30" blocking scheme, perhaps a gap scheme and taking the ball through the 2 hole. But in all the above examples there are a lot of different ways to get the ball through a particular hole, and therefore, a lot of different ways for your defensive linemen to get blocked.
As we're cutting up game film, we like to be very specific when describing any run play. We'll always try to include this information for each running play:
Formation (Pro) and Formation Variation (Right)
Run Type (Zone) and Run Type Variation (32)
Hit Chart (Where did the offense plan to attack along the line of scrimmage?) H2
After watching several games and adding all the necessary and pertinent play information we'll create a film study or cutup.
Coach's Video Assistant allows you to make a film study and edit it each week, picking new game films and a new opponent.
In our example we'll edit the film study called "Run vs DTs". We'll choose Okemos as the focus team on offense and select any game from this year or last.
All of those clips with Okemos on offense will be put into a big "clip bucket".
This clip bucket may have hundreds of clips, but we are going to FILTER or choose just a representative few.
As we enter the play selection area we'll choose "O Setup" on the filter panel at the bottom of this screen. We want to make sure that we FILTER our plays by Hit Chart. Hit Chart filters are considered Boolean OR's. In other words, choose any play out of the clip bucket that equals one of the hit chart areas. For the sake of our example we'll use H1, H2, H3 and H4. This will include the A gaps (H1 and H2) and B gaps (H3 and H4).
You may want to expand this and include additional plays in the C or D gaps. We like to keep this film study specific to our DTs and only use H1-H4.
We also need to FILTER the result. We really want our DTs to see good plays that probably included good blocking. We will set the result field to Greater than 2.
After clicking on the Film Study button we'll be prompted to choose a method for SORTING. We want to group all the plays together that have similar blocking schemes so we will choose Run Type or Run Type Variation. Run Type will sort the plays by basic type; Iso, Veer, Blast etc. Run Type Variation will sort the plays by gap or hole on the line. We'll choose Run Type Variation as our Primary Sort.
We'll choose Formation Variation as the second, or Secondary Sort. This will order each of the specific run type variations by the strength of the formation - as determined by the formation variation.
After including our method of sorting we'll be asked to create automatic titles. An automatic title will be created every time specific play information changes. It is usually one of the same fields that you included in your sorting, and in this case we'll choose Run Type Variation.
Every time the Run Type Variation changes a black screen with white lettering will appear announcing the name of the new Run Type Variation.
Finally, after the selection of sort type you will be asked to choose View Options. We really like every play to be shown twice.
Entering the last screen you will see a long list of plays and automatic titles. Click on a play or an automatic title. You can edit a title, changing the wording, adding a prompt to the next set of plays, anything that will make this film study more worthwhile.
Most importantly however, you can DELETE clips. This film study is probably too long. Scroll down through the study and look for Run Type Variations that include a large number from a particular Formation Variation. Try to get your film study to less than 30 plays, which really means 60 plays when every play is seen twice. That will probably make about a ten minute film study, which is just about the attention span of a teenage male.
