CHAPTER ONE - YOUR TEAM

Your team.
Good players help your coaching. The more weaknesses you have, the more you may have to
"coach" or what I would call "guessing" or making various strategy options to make up for the
weakness. With a really good defense, you should be able to sit more in a BASIC defense and
make the other team work REALLY hard to move the ball on you. If you are the weaker team,
you may/should have to guess more on defense, which opens you up to getting burned.

How good your team is will depend on two things - the other teams in the league and your player
stats/ratings. 

If you want to be successful, you should set out to have one of the best teams in the league. The
weaker your team, the more you will have to work on play calling.

CHAPTER TWO - PRE-GAME STUFF

You need to know 4 things in order to be successful. Your opponent, your opponent's
team, your team and yourself, You can't take any of these lightly. Ok, easy enough, but how do
you go about finding out this information.

1 - Your opponent. You need to scout your opponent. If you have played against him before, that
will help. If not, the next best thing is to look at the season stats and play-by-play information.

2 - Your opponent's team. Look at the REAL stats for his team. Look at the LEAGUE season
stats for his team.

3 - Yourself. See #1. Review yourself, just like you would your opponent. Assume he will be
doing the same to you.

4 - Your team. See #2, then see #3 :-) Basically, assume your opponent will be checking you out.


Ok, that's great - where's the meat and potatoes? All I see are simple one liners or so.....

Well, let me answer in more detail. Let's look at the season stat/play-by-play report. Look first at
the offensive RUN/PASS % and defensive ZONE/MAN %. This will tell you if the guy likes to
throw a lot, run a lot or is balanced.

Basically, get a feel for how this guy plays his defense. Does he gamble a lot (blitz, calls
RUN/PASS instead of BASIC, plays AGGRESSIVE)? Does he play it safe (BASIC defense,
conservative, no blitzing)? 

Myself, I would prefer to play a guy that wants to be aggressive on defense and one that calls
primarily RUN or PASS only. If he is going to guess, I think I can go against what he is going to
call and burn him more often than he will stuff me.

Against a blitzing team, on pass plays, go shotgun and throw short to medium. Draws and
screens should also burn this guy a few times. Just know that this style of defense will smash
your offense from time to time, even against draws, screens, pitches, etc. But, the percentages are
not in this guys favor. Keep running the same types of plays - eventually you will break off a big
gainer.

Now, some guys may disagree with me and they feel they are successful with a "guessing" and
aggressive defense, but I would like to see the stats....

You should look at the play-by-play of every game that your opponent has played so far. You
should take note of his first offensive play and his first defensive play of each game. Odds are he
will do the same to start the game against you.

I do this, but many people may not be able to, or want to, and that is to take all the play-by-play
reports and save them to disk. Import these into MS-EXCEL and create two sets of worksheets -
one for offense, one for defense. These are the play-by-play for you opponent's games only. From
this point, you can sort by down and distance, you can sort by play type and get a feel for this
guy's tendencies.

Ok, let's move on to the team stats/ratings. I typically print off the REAL NFL stats for my
opponent and I look for a few key items. One thing that I like to look at, is to see how many total
sacks this team has and INTs. This should tell you if you can gamble with your passing attack, or
if you need to watch out for a great pass rush or pesky DBs that will pick off your passes. This
should cause you to alter your game plan accordingly. Don't play into the other team's
strengths....

Look at his fumbles as well. If the QB fumbles a lot, then you might want to watch for pass more
and force him to scramble. Look at the QB's running stats. If he is a scrambler like Jeff Garcia,
Michael Vick or Donovan McNabb, he might be more prone to doing bootlegs, draws or runs
with the QB in key situations.

Ok, that's it for your opponent. Lot's of work, right? Yep, but worth it. But, you are not done
yet...LOL! Do the same exercise for your team, acting like you are your opponent. Do you have
tendencies that could be exploited? Try to achieve better balance on your RUN/PASS and on
your ZONE/MAN. .


CHAPTER THREE - GAME DAY!

Ok, now you have spent hours and hours getting ready for the big game :-) Hopefully, you have
bothered to grab a piece of paper and write down game plan - noting if you want to go very slow,
or noting your opponent's tendencies on offense/defense as well as your own.  

Ok, you have done all of this homework and you should, by now, have a feel for if you have the
weaker, stronger or even team. If you are the stronger team, I would suggest that you play more
basic in your defensive calling. Let the weaker team go 80 yards in 20 plays to beat you. On
offense, try to score early and often. If you are the weaker team, you may have decided to go
VERY SLOW and you should initially not take too many risks. If the better team is gambling,
you might be able to surprise them by not letting them sack you but by running right past their
blitzing guys. 

If the other guy is pretty much conservative, then go to your strengths. If he is aggressive, think
about chasing his defensive call, or going with a call that he would not really think of, and one
that you don't normally do, but don't make it a risky play like a trick play or something. Don't be
discouraged if he has the better team and you make a great call on offense/defense and you are
not successful, the odds are against you anyway. What I would do, when I am overmatched is to
not be too risky and go really slow with the pace. Hope like hell you get a turnover or a penalty to
put them in a hole. Now, if you are getting pounded by halftime, then you will most likely have
to adjust and try to guess more.

There is no single best, magical strategy. Many factors determine the outcome of the play and the
game.

You may have to make weekly game plan changes, like being conservative one week to really
aggressive the next. Some guys will do their homework on you, most will not. That does make it
difficult, if you are trying to set up someone for a big play and they weren't paying attention
anyway :-) Let's say you run on 2nd and 1 almost exclusively (for the season and during the
game). You would think that maybe the guy will try to stop the run on 2nd and 1 the next time it
happens, so you go for a big bomb, but lo and behold the guy wasn't paying that much attention,
called a PASS defense and you get picked off.... That's why you really need to know your
opponent as well.  

The best thing I can advocate, either way, is patience. Play the percentages. If possible, run more
on 1st and 2nd downs so that you can give yourself more options on 3rd down and short. If you
find yourself down by 2 or more scores, sometimes the best thing to do is simply run the ball or
throw short passes. Don't play into three long pass incompletes and then going for it on 4th down.
If you love to run on 3rd and 1, you might be able to have it work in the 1st quarter, but what are
you going to run in the 4th? Well, if you want to set your opponent up, by all means, run it early
and often, but when it comes to the 4th quarter play, you better run something else...LOL! Like I
mentioned, watch your opponent. Try short passes. Maybe the guy loves to blitz every 3rd down.
Be prepared to run plays to beat the blitz.

On defense, the best thing you can do is know your opponent, the way he thinks and how he uses
his players. Figure out if he has basically one weapon or many. Figure out if he loves to gamble
or if he just plays it safe. If you only develop one game plan or one style of play on defense, you
will most likely find two different results based on two different opponents. If your opponent
knows how to beat a blitz, or mixes it up well, then you have your work cut out for you. If you
feel you can guess correctly most of the time, by all means, do that, but realize that out of 10
defensive plays, let's say you can guess the exact type of play 50% of the time (that may even be
too high). That means you might stop a run for no gain, you might force an incompletion on half
the plays, but the other half may end up burning you bad. A pitch for 12 yards, a short slant that
turns into 15 yards, etc.

I prefer to force my opponent to drive on me, but more by letting the BASIC defensive call force
him to be perfect in order to score. The big plays on offense will kill you and if these happen
because you are guessing too much and guessing wrong, you should consider dropping back into
a BASIC frame of mind. For my money, it's tough for any offense to put a 20 play, 80 yard drive.
But, they can go 80 yards in 5 or 10 plays if you guess wrong and guess badly.

It takes gigantic boo-gumbas to call a BASIC on 3rd down, but if you are looking at 3rd and 1 to
3rd and 8 or so, you might want to do that. I do that. You will be surprised how many stops you
can make. Because guys on offense will try to guess what you are going to call and will go
opposite. So, they call a pitch on 3rd and 7, hoping you are deep, looking for a pass and maybe
even blitzing.

Sometimes, your basic package is better against the pass than pass defense. Not always, but
sometimes, depending on personnel.
The first thing you have to realize on defense is this. You will not throw a shutout every game (or
that often). You will not be able to stop every drive and make the offense go three and out every
time. You will make the best call and still get burned.

If a guy is going to score a TD on me, I would much rather prefer that he goes 80 yards and runs
20 plays. If one or more of his players have a low durability rating, a drive like that could result
in an injury to one of his key players. The more offensive plays he has to run the more chance of
a penalty or turnover.

You should never be afraid to go to something unpredictable.

Football is like a chess match and/or boxing match. The guy that jumps out early doesn't always
win. Sometimes you have to take a lot of punches to tire the other guy out, waiting for your
knockout punch.

Don't tighten up near the goalline. Matter of fact, just before you get too close to the goal line,
you might want to consider throwing a few LONG passes. If they play RUN the LONG opens up
even more.

It is not rare for me to run on 3rd and long (6+), I figure I might catch the other team napping and
my RB can be just as dangerous.
Throughout this whole novel, you will notice that there is no one special way to play. Thankfully,
there is no one special way. You can't simply call GOALL LINE every time, or you
can't call RUN every time. You will get burned eventually. You can't simply sit back in BASIC
either, but you won't get burned as often. Play BASIC as much as possible.

If you get burned calling BASIC, accept it. Each team will probably call at least 50-60 offensive
plays during the game and there are going to be some great plays made against you. Minimize
these by not guessing often and guessing poorly. I think the old adage of "When in doubt, punt"
should be changed to "when in doubt, call BASIC", or "when in doubt, don't make a guess". 

I think this pretty much covers it. As you can see, there is not just on single thing, nor a few
things, that will help guarantee you success. There are a lot of little things that you can do to help
you succeed, but it still comes down to players and luck as well. But, at least there are many
options (like going VERY SLOW, or if you feel the need to sell out on every play you can) that
you can use to see if you can gain the smallest advantage over your opponent. In most games and
leagues, the teams are pretty evenly matched, so you need to find that small edge - having
patience.

It's like Poker. If you are easy to read or too predictable you will lose more times than not. Pure
luck dictates you will win in Poker once in a while, as well as football. You should have a base
plan, but you should be able to change up and take some gambles that just might pay off, like
running on 3rd and long. If you constantly throw long on 3rd and long, you might end up with a
sack that pushes you back or you end up throwing an INT. Maybe, you run the ball and send a
booming punt and pin the guy back instead. You can't pick up every 3rd down - it's next to
impossible. Sometimes the small victories will add up to one large one....:-)

Hope this helps!