After watching part of yet another disastrous Army-Navy Game, I decided to post some suggestions for my alma mater’s (Army) football team.

My qualifications

I never played or coached college football. My son Dan played tailback for Ivy League Columbia University. I have asked him to proof read this. I did coach fifteen football teams including six at the high school level. I also wrote seven books on football coaching. Five are about youth football; one is about high school football; and two; Football Clock Management and The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense, cover all levels.

Readers may think youth is ridiculously far from college football. Yes and no. In many respects, they are very similar. Also, as the testimonials at my Web site show, my youth readers have achieved many, many spectacular turnarounds using what I advocate. A spectacular turnaround is what Army needs.

Football Clock Management

My book Football Clock Management has been purchased and used by all sorts of coaches from youth to NFL. It has also been commented upon favorably by Bill Walsh, Marv Levy, Sports Illustrated’s “Dr. Z” (Paul Zimmerman), and other nationally known coaches. Because of the book, I was a columnist in American Football Quarterly (now American Football Monthly) and a speaker at their 1998 and 1999 American Football Quarterly University conventions.

It got a good review by Scholastic Coach magazine, the premier periodical for high school coaches. Heck, it was even reviewed favorably by Assembly magazine, the magazine of the U.S. Military Academy Association of Graduates. U.S. Military Academy is the official name for West Point, whose football team is nicknamed Army.

I now regularly see TV games where it appears that they read and are using my clock book. For example, in the 12/16/07 Eagles-Dallas game, Brian Westbrook broke loose on an apparent TD run. But he suddenly stopped and took a knee at the one yard line, then his team took a knee several times until the clock ran out. I advocated that in my book. The book includes tables that show the combination of opponent timeouts left, down, and time remaining when you can take a knee or execute a play I invented called the QB sweep slide which is a take a knee that takes much longer to execute. According to those tables, the Eagles needed one more first down before they could stop trying to advance the ball. One of my Clock Management Rules discusses taking a knee on the fly, that is, after you reach the line to gain for the last first down you need. At that point, you take a knee either just before an enemy player touches you—thereby running off as much clock as possible without risking a fumble—or at the one yard line, whichever comes first. If you score points that you don’t need, the opponent gets the ball from the ensuing kickoff. There have been many examples of the team that scored unnecessarily losing the game as a result.

The Cowboys bought a copy of Football Clock Management from me. An Occidental College coach, Tom Melvin, who tried to recruit my son Dan and who took me to supper in Pasadena, had already purchased and read my clock book back then before he ever heard of Dan. He later moved to the Philadelphia Eagles coaching staff. I am not sure Westbrook got that tactic from someone who got it from my book, but it seems likely. I sure as hell never read about anyone else advocating that before it was in my book.

Tackle Jon Runyan, Westbrook’s teammate on the Eagles, suggested before the play that Westbrook take a knee at the one yard line if he broke free. During the play, Runyan was running down the field behind Westbrook reminding him to take a knee at the one. Runyan previously played for the Titans. Titans head coach Jeff Fisher called me years ago to order my Football Clock Management book. I talked to him for about 40 minutes. It is possible Runyan learned that tactic from Fisher before teaching it to Westbrook. Or he could have learned it from the Eagles coach, Tom Melvin, who came from Occidental.

Committee to improve football at Army

Several years ago, I wrote a letter about football to the editor of Assembly, the West Point alumni magazine. They published my letter. Other letters to the editor had made various suggestions to improve Army’s football fortunes, like joining the Ivy League. I explained why that would not work (they won’t have us, plus if we recruit as an Ivy League team and compete with eight other Ivy League teams during the season, we are going to get our heads handed to us when we play Division I-A Air Force and Navy).

Actually, in its original usage in the 1930s, the phrase “Ivy League” referred to seven of the current formal Ivy League members (not Cornell) plus Army and Navy. Back then, there was no formal Ivy League. It was just an informal sportswriters’ phrase that referred to the major older football colleges in the Northeast. Except for a brief term in Conference USA, Army has never been a member of any football league.

In my letter, I suggested they form a “competent” committee to fix Army football. That adjective seemed necessary because it was not going to be the first such committee and the disastrous results were already in on the prior committees.

I suggested that the members of the committee include Mike Krzyzewski, head basketball coach at Duke and West Point class of ’69; Bill Yeoman, Father of the Veer Triple Option Offense, Hall of Fame former Houston University head coach, and West Point Class of ’50; and Jim Young, the Hall of Fame former Army coach who started the use of the option at the service academies and whose tenure was marked by considerable success which was continued with less success by his assistant Bob Sutton after Young left. [In a letter dated 6/23/08, one of my classmates told our class that Army is bringing back the option starting in the 2008 season. Smart move, but I think that alone will not be enough. They have to be more contrarian than that.]

Shortly after my letter was published, I was horrified to learn that there already was such a committee and that it was headed by my former cadet roommate, Dan Kaufman, who was then Dean of the Academic Board at West Point. I immediately sent Dan an email apologizing for not knowing that there already was such a committee and that he was head of it and told him I withdrew my suggestion and that I was sure his committee would do just fine. I used an email address he had given me years before. Don’t know if he ever got it. Dan’s committee hired Bobby Ross to be head coach. I don’t know who their alternatives were, but that sounded like a reasonable choice to me at the time. After coaching Army for several years, Ross resigned, apparently in a huff, last year.

Now there is a new committee, and it includes two of the guys I recommended: Krzyzewski and Young, as well as Pete Dawkins, Class of 1959, West Point’s most notable, cadet scholar-athlete (Heisman Trophy and Rhodes Scholarship). Kaufman moved on to to be the first president of the brand new Georgia Gwinett College.

Army clock management

All teams should adhere to my Football Clock Management Rules which are fully listed on pages 259 to 262 of the third edition of my book Football Clock Management. Those rules are thoroughly explained throughout the book as well.

Page 1 of the book says adhering to my clock management rules will cause a competitive college team to win two to three more games per season. That figure was suggested to me by Dana X. Bible, then Stanford offensive coordinator, after he proofread the first edition of the book. Bible had previously coached in the NFL. Several months later, Bible’s then boss, Tyrone Willingham (now head coach at Washington), came to my house to listen to my rehearsal of my first American Football Quarterly University clinic on the subject. Willingham was also a speaker at that clinic.

Those two or three more wins a year would not require any better players or play results. Everything exactly the same except for decisions related to the clock would be all that was necessary to produce the wins.

Could Army use two or three more wins a year?

Does Army have a copy of my book? Not unless Assembly magazine gave them the review copy I sent them. I am the only source of that book and I have never seen an order from Army come through. I got orders from Harvard, the 49ers, the Chicago Bears, etc., etc., but never Army.

Like I said, all teams should adhere to my clock management rules. Army especially should. Why? Because they need all the wins they can get and because they are fortunate enough to have an alum who “wrote the book” on that subject. Or as Bill Walsh said to me on 6/1/04, “You’re the man on football clock management.” I would charge any other team to work with them on clock management, but I would do it for my alma mater gratis. Never heard a peep out of them, not even after the Assembly review, which lamented that Army coaches had not read my book, came out.

Does Army manage the clock correctly? Not that I know of. But then neither does anyone else. Seems like it would be prudent for them to be the first team to do so and thereby pick up those extra wins.

Contrarian offense

All football teams should have a contrarian offense. I just wrote a book about that called The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense. It came out 5/7/08. That is one that is different from anything their opponents see all season. If possible, different from anything their opponent players and coaches have ever seen. That would enable Army to get better at their unique offense week by week, but their opponents would only get one week to prepare for it.

The option offense comes to mind. You remember the option. That’s the one Jim Young introduced at Army and was continued by his assistant Bob Sutton when he took over for Young. During the Young-Sutton years, Army had a resurgence, often leading the nation in rushing and winning bowl games.Then various pseudo-coach geniuses at West Point decided they did not like the option and that any coach running it was an idiot. A similar thing happend to Lou Holtz at Notre Dame. He won the national championship at Notre Dame in 1988, in part with the option. Broadcaster and Heisman Trophy Winner Notre Dame alum Paul Hornung repeatedly, publicly pronounced his disgust that Notre Dame was running the option. That was the last national championship Notre Dame won.

Running the option, Nebraska won the national championship in 1994, 1995, and 1997 (13-0 and #1 with USA Today/ESPN but #2 with AP behind 12-0 Michigan). Then some geniuses at Nebraska decided the option was stupid. Coach Tom Osborne left to go to Congress. Nebraska subsequently fired coach Frank Solich in 2003. Nebraska has not been in the top ten since. Army tried to hire Solich. Smart move, He turned them down. Unfortunately, that was probably also a smart move for Solich, too. He went to Ohio University where he was 19-18 after three seasons, won one division title, and had one bowl appearance.

Army has since gotten its ass handed to it decade in and decade out by almost everybody and most notably by Air Force and Navy who run—you guessed it—the option.

Clearly, Army cannot recruit the same quality players as other Division I-A college teams. Cadet life, the eight-year military service obligation after graduation, the difficulty of going from Army to the NFL, and the near certainty of going to Iraq and Afghanistan take care of that. So how in the name of God do the coaches at Army figure they can compete against those other teams by running the same offense and defense as they run? And how many decades of disastrous seasons does it take for that fact to sink in?

Army’s 2008 7th round NFL draft pick

Army’s Caleb Campbell was picked 218th by the Lions in the 2008 draft. That gets Campbell out of having to do anything military other than recruiting after graduating. His classmates will generally being going to Iraq and Afghanistan after completing stateside training like ranger airborne, and military specialty training (infantry, artillery, etc.).

This is pursuant to a new Army policy intended to enable West Point to offer possible NFL careers to potential recruits. There can be no question that inability to play NFL football in the past has hurt Army when recuriting against other Division I teams, including Air Force and Navy who reportedly adopted similar policies before Army did.

But it seems to be getting mixed reviews. Campbell says most of the feedback he has gotten is favorable, but some of it is hate mail, like one that asked him how he could look his classmates in the face.

Caleb Campbell is the mirror opposite of Pat Tillman. Tillman quit the NFL to go to Afghanistan. Campbell is avoiding Iraq or Afghanistan for the time being by going to the NFL.

Campbell’s story does not fit into the script of the classic 1955 movie The Long Gray Line. In that movie, which was from the perspective of long-time West Point physical education instructor Martin Maher as he watched class after class graduate, including those who graduated just before or during World War II. It was a tear jerker that celebrated the dedication of these full-of-life young cadets whose names on the KIA lists later were read from the newspaper and marked by Maher placing a black bookmark by their photos in the class yearbooks.

Inability to offer NFL careers to the Army recruits makes it hard for Army to compete against Division I football teams—BCS or non-BCS.

But there is also the issue of what West Point’s purpose is. Many fictional and non-fictional books, movies and TV shows have told various stories about West Point cadets and graduates. West Point has enthusiastically embraced those stories including permitting filmmakers to use West Point cadets, other personnel, and buildings in the filming. (I appeared in a couple of films including a parade filmed by cameras pointing in all directions from the top of a jeep. To my shock, I was standing in a 360-degree-theater at Disneyland with my family when that scene suddenly came on the screen. “Hey! I was in that parade. I remember the jeep with all the cameras on the roof.”) None ever had any story remotely resembling a cadet going to the NFL while his classmates went off to war.

West Point has allowed its place in the minds of the American people deteriorate in many ways since my class entered the Academy in 1964. It has happened in little ways. For example, when I was a cadet, and TV camera pointed at us in the Army-Navy Game, we tried to behave the way the American people would expect of West Point cadets. For the last twenty years or more, cadets who see the red light act like idiots just like high school or civilian college kids. We would have been severely punished for such behavior. The admission of women in 1976, which may or may have been the right decision, eliminated the all-male nature of the place. Losing wars has done no good. Nor has losing football games.

I think the place is in an identity crisis with no end in sight.

As far as the policy Caleb Campbell is availing himself of is concerned, while offering an opportnity to go play in the NFL is clearly a plus for West Point football recuriters, getting hate mail if you make it to the NFL, or having to go to Iraq or Afghanistan if you don’t, still leaves the Army football package short of, say, USC’s, or even Navy’s, offer.

Army reneges on Campbell

On 7/23/08, the Department of Defense reneged on the deal. They “revised their interpretation of Department policy.” They now say Campbell has to serve two years on active duty first, then he can apply for “release.”

No apology. No compensation to the Detroit Lions for wasting a seventh round draft pick on a guy they were told could play. Under NFL rules, if the Lions do not sign Campbell before the 2009 NFL draft, they lose their rights to him. That’ll teach NFL teams to draft Army players.

It is hard to imagine how the idiots who run the U.S. Army could have screwed this situation up more. Army’s service academy rivals Air Force and Navy have sent a surprising number of players to professional sports. Apparently, they will continue to do so. But Army has to compete against them for the Commander in Chief’s trophy not only handicapped by the body count in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also by the inability of Army players, alone among service academy cadets, to play professional football. Is this some kind of colossal joke?

No, the Army is some kind of colossal joke. They’ve been fighting wars with similar skill for 50 years.

What about the new football players who just entered West Point on July 1st—the ones who are now enduring the ordeal of the period of most intense hazing called Beast Barracks? They were told about Caleb Campbell when they were recruited. Do they get a refund of the money they spent on uniforms and free transportation back to wherever they came from? Do they get into the colleges that also tried to recruit them, or do they have to sit out a year? How does that affect their eligibility?

What about the Army football coaching staff? What recruits or recruits’ parents will ever believe them again? West Point keeps saying they are going to hire excellent coaches. Only if they receive applications from excellent coaches. I guarantee you that is now less likely because of the Deparment of Defense pulling the rug out from under Caleb Campbell and their Army coaching staff. Indeed, I expect that if Army currently has any excellent coaches, they are more likely to be recruited to another coaching staff at another college than to recruit for Army in the future.

There is only one way to get supporters of both sides of a decision mad at you: make a decision that one side likes, then reverse it.

There is only one way to do a good job and have people unhappy with you: promise more than you deliver.

The Army made a decision, reversed it, and promised more to Caleb and recruits inspired by his example than the coaches and West Point can now deliver. An incompetence trifecta.

Dirty little secret

Discussing Air Force and Navy reminds me of the dirty little secret of the Army-Navy Game and the Commander-In-Chief’s trophy (which goes to the service academy that has the most football success against the other two service academies). (My Web site includes two articles I wrote about the Army-Navy game: one about inaccurate announcer hype and one about USA Weekend’s 2007 article on memories of the games.)

Only West Point dooms its football players to being ground pounders in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, or wherever our next Draft Dodger in Chief decides to send the troops. (Clinton and George W. Bush were draft dodgers. If you think Bush was not because he was in the National Guard, ask a person who was in college in the 1960s what that meant back then.)

When Army, Air Force, and Navy are recruiting football players, the elephant in the room is the body count from our various recent wars and the branch of service attached to the names of the dead. Rarely is it the Air Force or Navy.Marines and SEALs do die there and many Naval grads go into the Marines or SEALs, but I am not aware that it is mandatory for any Navy football players to go into the Marines or SEALs. I can assure you that all Army football players do have to go into the Army after graduation.

Here are the actual officer fatality figures from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 6/2/07: Army, 297; Navy, 15; Marines, 75; Air Force, 13. (Source: Congressional Research Service Report for Congress American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, Updated 6/29/07)

“Most dead and wounded graduates in combat” is the only “Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy” Army has won lately.

Undefeated-until-their-bowl-game Hawaii’s June Jones, a contrarian coach (run-and-shoot spread) just accepted an offer to coach at Southern Methodist University which has had awful win-loss records since the NCAA imposed their so-called “Death Penalty” on SMU for recruiting violations. Jones said he is good at turning around disastrous programs. He should have gone to Army. Talking to the mom of a prospective blue-chip recruit about her son’s prospects of going to Iraq gives new meaning to the phrase “Death Penalty” in the context of college football recruting.

You try recruiting football players as the only college in America who will probably put the kid in the line of fire in a war after graduation.

This is not something for the coaches to be discussing with the players, but it certainly has to be a part of any discussion behind closed doors about making Army competitive again.

Ironically, Army’s greatest success in football came during World War II for the opposite reason. Army and Navy were the only colleges you could go to and not have to worry about being drafted into the military back then. Army won the national championship in 1944 and 1945 and had two different Heisman Trophy winners in 1945 and 1946: Blanchard and Davis. Some would probably argue that Army is now getting rough justice for “cheating” in the 1940s. Maybe so, but the duration of the recent punishment of Army exceeds by far the duration of Army’s World War II dominance.

Is West Point admissions hurting Army football?
Many college football teams have trouble on the football field because their admissions office hates football and makes it uncompetitively hard to recruit good football players by setting high academic standards for them. The Swarthmore admissions office, for example, appears to have run one of the oldest football teams in America off the campus. Is that going on at Army? Apparently not.

Since I am a professional football writer, I receive media guides from various colleges (not Army though). The 2008 Notre Dame media guide brags about Notre Dame’s graduation rates by showing where ND is in the top five in various categories. That reveals the other four teams. Navy appears in all five; Air Force in one. Army never appears.

• All student athletes Graduation Success Rate: U.S.N.A 98% (tied for first place with Notre Dame and Northwestern)
• Male student athlete Graduation Success Rate: U.S.N.A. 98% (sole first place team)
• Female student athlete Graduation Succeess Rate: U.S.N.A. 100% (tied for first place with Notre Dame and Vanderbilt)
• Black student athlete Graduation Success Rate: U.S.N.A. 96% (sole first place team); U.S.A.F.A. 88% (fifth place team)
• Football student athlete Graduation Success Rate: U.S.N.A. 95% (sole first place team)

Let me explain what this means. The bigger pool of potential players a team can choose from, the better the players chosen will be and, typically, the better the team in question will do. If you can only recruit smart players, like Harvard, you only have a relative few to choose from. If you can recruit dumber players, you have far more to choose from.

Nationally-ranked teams rarely appear in the top five GSR schools. The others in the top five for the football student athlete GSR are Northwestern, Notre Dame, Boston College, Stanford, and Duke (four-way tie for third place).

To state it starkly, Army has been losing to Navy in spite of having a lower graduation success rate among its football players. I do not know how much lower; only that they did not make the top five.

One possible explanation of that is that academics are harder at West Point than at Navy. But I am not aware of any evidence to support that. The other explanation would be that Army has lower admission standards than Navy for football players—and still cannot win. Again, there are two possible explanations: Army has better athletes than Navy but still loses (not evident if you watched the 2007 Army-Navy game) or, although West Point admissions is not keeping out the dumber, better players, the dumber, better players are still declining to accept the admits extended by Army.

In other words, admissions appears not to be the problem at Army, which suggests whatever is the problem is is a deeper problem than perhaps thought by those of us who did not previously know what role, if any, admissions was playing in the losses.

Single wing

The first time I coached offense, I adopted the single-wing offense. I figured it was simple enough for that youth team, but proven from many decades of use. The single wing was the most popular offense in football for several decades. Princeton won the national championship with it as recently as 1950. Virtually every national championship won in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was won by other teams using the single wing. But by 1993 when I used it, it had become quite contrarian. Few of the opposing players or coaches or away-game announcers even knew what to call it. They thought it was a shotgun, which is quite different.

My first attempt at offense outscored every team in our 32 team league against common opponents. In other words, we scored more points against each of our opponents than any other team they played with one exception: Fairfield Suisun scored 21 points against Berkeley. We scored 19 points against them. Suisun ended up the league champion. With regard to Suisun’s other opponents who also played us, we always outscored Suisun.

Many of my readers have had equal or greater success with the single wing that I tell them how to run in my book Single-Wing Offense for Youth Football and in my Coaching Youth Football book. You can see their many success stories at the reader comments section of my Web pages on those books.

How did my subsequent attempts at contrarian offense go? I do not yet know. I was later an offensive coordinator for three high school freshman teams, but in each case the varsity head coach dictated that I run his non-contrarian, conventional offense.

Single wing at Army?

Would the single wing work for Army? I don’t know. It would certainly be contrarian, but the offense is a power running offense and uses zero line splits among other contrarian features. I doubt that Army could or should recruit the sumo wrestler types needed to play a zero-line splits line against the 320-pound defensive linemen in the college ranks these days. On the other hand, the single wing is big on double-team and trap blocks which tend to equalize the size differential. An Army double-team block weighing a combined 440 pounds ought to be able to move a single NCAA 320-pound defensive lineman.

Also, I believe all offense nowadays need some option. My single-wing book uses the weak-side speed option as one of its plays because the mere capability of an option play on the opposing offense screws their defense all up. For years, even when I was not allowed to run an option play, I ran them in pre-season scrimmage (almost always for a touchdown or two) and pre-game warm-ups to scare the other team out of blitzing or man pass coverage. One of the varsity head coaches who prohibited me from running the option also, on his own initiative, had his quarterbacks running option drills in full view of the opposing coaches in pre-game warm-ups.

In the past, coaches said if you ran the option, you needed to commit 100% to it. That is now recognized as incorrect. Any use of the option, even just a couple of times a half, fouls up the defense for the whole game. There is a legendary high school team near where I live. De La Salle High School of Concord, CA runs the Houston Veer option. The broke the old national record of 72 consecutive wins by winning 151 times in a row. Furthermore, they lost one game in 1991 by a close score or they would have set a new record of 176 consecutive wins. Do you know who is known as the Father of the Veer? That would be Bill Yeoman, former head coach at the University of Houston, member of the NCAA Football Hall of Fame, and West Point graduate. He is still alive and well at the University of Houston. I have spoken to him several times about his offense.

I like the ground-game/infantry story line of Army running the single wing. But I am more interested in winning and I’m not sure it would work for a team with relatively undersized linemen. The notion that the single wing is obsolete is total bull and reveals the ignorance of the accuser. Vince Lombardi, who played in and coached the single wing, and who was a coach at Army before he went on to his NFL Hall of Fame career, said

What would happen if someone came out with a single-wing offense? It would embarrass the hell out of us.

You see remnants of the single wing in almost every TV football game. Pulling linemen, double-teams, snaps to a quarterback who is not under center, unbalanced lines, punt and field-goal formations, traps, wingbacks, a back right behind the interior line at the snap (nowadays as a result of motion), the Green Bay Sweep, and quick kicks are all from the single wing. I was watching a two-point conversion play on Monday Night Football five or six years ago when I suddenly said to my son, “Hey, they just ran a single-wing play!” At which time ABC’s Al Michaels said, “Hey, that was a single-wing play!”

In 2007, there are high school teams all over America running the single wing and some are winning the state championship with it. Go to the annual Single Wing Symposium and you can listen to clinics by their coaches and watch videos of their teams. There is also a resurgence of the single wing at the youth level nationwide primarily because of my youth football books. Again, see the testimonials at the SWOcomments.html and CYFcomments.html pages at my Web site.

Many other ways to be contrarian

I am no single wing pusher. There are many ways to be contrarian. I just got from the printers a book of mine called The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense on as many contrarian tactics as I can fit. It has chapters on contrarian line splits, contrarian hand-off techniques, contrarian pass routes, etc., etc.

My message to Army would be do not run any technique, scheme, or tempo that is common among the other opponents of Army’s opponents. Do not let Army opponents get better at stopping Army’s offense when they prepare for and play their other non-Army opponents. Make sure they only have one week to prepare for Army. And make sure that week is frenetic and that Army’s opponents have to totally retool and retrain their defenses just to get ready for the Army game. Some Army opponents would probably take the attitude that U.S. military generals did during Vietnam, i.e., “We’re not going to ruin a perfectly good Army [read defense in football] just to win this lousy little war [read game against Army].” Then, having refused to adjust properly to Army’s contrarian offense, they would get their asses kicked by Army on Saturday.

One of the points in contrarianism is to not only be different, but also to use offensive schemes that the opponent’s scout team has trouble replicating. When Army ran the option, defeated opponents used to say after the games that their scout team could not replicate the speed and precision with which Army ran the option. There are many other contrarian techniques that are also difficult for a scout team to recreate in a week, like the warp-speed no-huddle and the single-wing spin series.

Ju jitsu

NCAA Division I-A defenses have certain habits and strengths as a result of going up against similar offense all season long and season-after-season. But those habits and strengths become weaknesses if Army is smart enough to use schemes where normal keys take defenders the wrong way, where timing of plays is different so the opponent is trying to read the play too soon or too late, where different tempo, like my warp-speed no-huddle, totally throws the defense out of whack, and so on.

Using the opponents’ habits and strengths against them, turning their strengths into weaknesses by giving them a completely different situation where the assumptions on which those habits were based are no longer true—all of those are principles of ju jitsu. Army needs to do that because the interior-line shoving matches, skill player track meets, and passing-accuracy and arm-strength contests they have been participating in since after the Young-Sutton era are not going to be won by a team with Army’s recruiting disadvantages.

Warp-speed no-huddle

Army should run the warp-speed, no-huddle tempo when they are on offense. In that tempo, very simply, you snap the ball within one or two seconds of the referee’s ready-to-play signal. In order to do that, you have to eliminate cadence and audibles and such. (Actually, we had “audibles” that were quite successful, but they were silent, visual-only “audibles” to avoid wasting time or giving a wake-up call to the defense whom we often caught in their huddle or looking away from the offense when we snapped the ball.) Eliminating cadence and audible audibles is not a problem because the opponent spends the game yelling “Base! Base!” meaning they are forced to run their base or simplest defense constantly because they do not have time to call variations and stunts or substitute for situations. I also like to run it toward my sideline which makes it easier and faster for me to substitute and communicate with my players and harder for my opponent to do so.

The warp speed approximately doubles the number of plays the offense runs in a game. Normally, each team runs about one offensive play per minute of game clock time or 60 plays per game per team at the college and NFL levels. If one team runs the warp-speed no-huddle, they will run about 120 offensive plays in the game instead of 60. Using the warp-speed, my youth team ran 80 plays once in a 40-minute game in 1993. The high school record average number of plays per game for a season is only about 68 and they have 48-minute games.

A slower, whole-game, no-huddle was responsible for the Bengals and Bills shooting to the top of their leagues in the NFL. I discussed that one-on-one with Dana Bible, who coached at the Bengals then, and with Marv Levy, the head coach of the Bills during their K-gun, no-huddle days. Bible noted that opponents repeatedly faked injuries in an attempt to slow down the Bengals. Buffalo’s quarterback Jim Kelly said opposing defenders begged him to slow it down because he was “killing” them.

I attended a clinic where a San Diego State coach told us that one of his friends who coached for an opponent told him that their first-string defenders were throwing up on the sideline because of San Diego State’s relatively slow, non-warp-speed, whole-game, no-huddle tempo. After we played Benicia at our warp-speed tempo in 1993, their head coach told me his first-string defenders were begging to be taken out of the game in the first quarter! My players never mentioned any difficulty that day even though the temperature was in the nineties. Actually, my players thought games were easier than our practices because of official’s timeouts, end of quarter, team timeouts, and so forth. We did not do any of that in practice. One of our team’s parents who was on the Benicia sideline as an official told me after the game that the Benicia coaches kept telling their players, “Don’t worry. They can’t keep that up the whole game.” The hell we couldn’t. We did exactly that in the game.

Players and fans love the warp-speed. It freaks out the opponents. They wonder how we can do that because they can’t do it. Their coaches call basketball style timeouts after the first two or three plays of the game to stop our momentum.

Now think about it in the context of Army’s football situation. Army’s non-service-academy opponents have 85 scholarships. Army has 4,000. True, about 600 of those go to women, but that still leaves 3,400 men on scholarships. Seems like Army could focus on recruiting a deep bench—two or three strings depending upon the position—then run their opponents into the ground.

No fat guys

It is fashionable nowadays to recruit fat guys to play line. I know. I know. They can run a 4.7 40 and all that. The fact is, Army can recruit guys who can run faster than that, but they won’t be fat. They would be high school tight ends and fullbacks.

When I went to Airborne (paratrooper) school in December 1968 six months after graduation from West Point, one of my West Point classmates who was a starting linexacker on the Army football team flunked out of Airborne School. You had to do six chin-ups to get in. He could not do any. Since Army cadets all become Army officers after graduation, and Army officers are supposed to be fit and healthy, it is not clear to me how anyone can justify recruiting these unfit guys. Their body mass index is greater than 25, which violates medical advice. And their waist-to-hip ratio is greater than .95, which also violates medical advice.

Army is essentially recruiting some football players who are obese to an unhealthy degree, yet they are not fat enough to compete at the Division I-A level. We are essentially recruiting poor man’s examples of Division I-A linemen and asking them to try to impersonate the rich man’s opposing linemen who outweigh them by 60 pounds a man. Are we also expecting the mess hall to feed the whole Corps of Cadets with five loaves and two fishes?

I got a better idea. Recruit better, healthier athletes, who can not only play football, but also serve as paratroopers after graduation, and line up in spread-out formations (option teams are famous for extremely wide line splits), move the pocket, run away from the lard butts on the opposing lines, etc. It’s the fat guy says, “I’ll kill you” and you answer, “If you can catch me” idea. Army cannot win shoving matches between their small fat guys and the opponents’ big fat guys. But neither can the fashionable fat guys on the lines of Army’s opponents’ lines win foot races with interior linemen who run a 4.5 40 and who were tight ends and fullbacks in high school.

It would require a different style of offense, but then we’d darned well better change something hadn’t we?

Chinese Bandits

The warp-speed, whole-game, no-huddle would be reminiscent of Paul Dietzel’s Chinese Bandits. He was head coach when I was a cadet. The Chinese Bandits were a second-string defensive unit he used at LSU, where he won the national championship, and at Army in the early 60s. The Bandits were very spirited. Like Avis, they had to try harder because they were number two. They were also fresh.

With the warp speed, I am talking about offense not defense as with the Bandits. Although finding fresh troops among our 3,400 scholarships to put in on defense would be helpful to Army as well.

With the warp-speed when you are using it to run the opponent into the ground, you snap the ball immediately after the ready-to-play signal even when the game clock is stopped like after an out-of-bounds play or team timeout. No-huddle offenses typically wait until the end of the play clock, which is a slowdown tempo, to snap the ball, when the game-clock is not running. Screw that! Snap it ASAP every single play. That is how you tire out the opponent fastest and most often.

Can Army’s opponents, none of whom require their players to go to Iraq as a ground pounder after graduation, out-recruit Army? Absolutely. But they can only get about 22 first-string level Division I-A players, only eleven of whom play defense.With the warp-speed no-huddle, we can run those eleven into the ground in the first and third quarters. When that happens, our fresh troops, who have gotten a higher percentage of practice reps than the opponents’ second-string defense, go flying onto the field play after play.

There are some subtle points involved. For example, my 1993 tailback who averaged 8 yards a carry for the whole season, got tired several times a game. When he did, he would cross his forearms across his chest like a corpse in a casket to tell me, “I’m dying out here, coach.” I would then have him hand off to the wing or move to wing for a couple of plays. So you have to learn some new fatigue-management techniques when you run the warp speed. You do not want to take your own first-stringers out until they are so tired that they are less effective than your second-stringers. You learn when that is for each player and position with warp-speed experience.

Can coach stamina but not speed

Also, you can coach stamina but you cannot coach speed. You can only recruit speed, but Army cannot recruit speed, so they’d better coach stamina and learn how to recruit a deep bench, both of which they can do.

By running the warp-speed, you eliminate your opponent’s speed by making their sprinters run a marathon instead of a 20-yard dash and you force them to deal with your players’ superior stamina as well as your deeper bench. Also, it is well known that it is physically harder to play defense than offense because of lack of knowledge of where the play is going. Marv Levy told me his defense was very unhappy about his offense running a whole-game, no-huddle because it shortened their sideline rest time. But he did not run a ball-control offense. His wide-open offense often scored very quickly because of the combination of their no-huddle and deep passing plays.

Ball-control offense

Army also needs to run some sort of ball-control offense. During the Young-Sutton option era, they did. Back then, I remember hearing a TV announcer say something to the effect that Army’s opponent was not going to get the ball for a while when Army got it deep in their own territory. That was because Army could run the three-yard stuff all day and get one first down after another ad infinitum.

Army must run a ball-control offense so they can keep their opponent’s offense off the field and thereby keep Army’s defense off the field. Again, the problem is recruiting. On offense, Army can run tempos and schemes that are contrarian and equalize their less athletic players with their opponents. But on defense, they must respond to the opponent’s defense. There is very little poetic license on defense and Army needs all the poetic license it can find to compensate for its recruiting disadvantages. Army cannot recruit the athletes to play Division I-A defense. So they need to use the contrarianness they can employ on offense, in part, to keep their offense on the field as long as possible.

To put it as simply as possible, Army cannot recruit players as good as its opponents can recruit, therefore it cannot use the same schemes, tempos, and techniques as those opponents. On the contrary, it must use every trick in the book to force the opponents to play a different game. If Army lets its opponents turn games into track meets, Army loses. Army needs to turn those games into forced marches, in which case, Army has a chance to win. You only have that kind of control in football when you are on offense.

As if Army coaches were taking bribes to throw the games

Let me put it one other way. Let’s say the Army coaches were taking bribes from opposing defensive coordinators. In return for the bribes, the Army coaches would run the offense that the opponents most want them to run, namely, the most conventional, fashionable common offense. That would maximize Army’s chances of losing.

Are Army’s coaches taking bribes and deliberately running what the opposing defensive coordinators want them to run in order to lose. No. No bribes. But, prior to 2008 at least, they have been running exactly what the opposing defensive coordinators most want them to run.

Nobel Prize winning economist John Maynard Keynes once said,

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Since the Young-Sutton era, that has been a precise description of the Army coaches’ approach. When you use conventional tactics, you can blame the players for the losses. You say things like “The better team won” or “Someone needed to step up and make a play but no one did.” “It could not have been our offensive scheme that was at fault. We ran the same offense as the national champion.”

When you use unconventional tactics like I am advocating above, you, not the players, will be blamed if they fail, but they have a higher probability of succeeding.

Which exactly are we trying to do? Win? Or avoid responsibility for losing?

How’s about we quit being so suicidal.

To suggest an idea or comment to this Web site, either email to johnreed@johntreed.com or fax to 925-820-1259 or snail mail at 342 Bryan Drive, Alamo, CA 94507.

Best wishes,

John T. Reed