Bronco and His “Game Plan”
I feel like this topic has been misconstrued from day one and my hope is that this will help everyone understand what Coach means when he says, “we don’t focus on the other team, we focus on ourselves.”
I wrote an entire post dedicated to the players preparation last season and I will not repeat it, but I do want to offer a few tid-bits from the Coaches Point of View.
It is impossible to approach a football game without having first scouted out your opponent to find out 3 very important things; what they like to do, what they are good at doing, and what they are not good at doing. It then becomes the job of the coaching staff to take that information and devise a GAME PLAN that will address those areas.
The problem for the fan is that there are two meanings for the term Game Plan. The first definition is, Creating new plays or schemes designed specifically for one opponent and to be used exclusively in that game alone.
Examples of this type of game planning are when teams (BYU included in ‘04 and ‘05) will only put 2 D Linemen in the game thinking “We can’t sack the QB so let’s play a ton of Pass Coverage so there is no where to throw the ball. Another example is Tulsa’s game plan against us in ‘07. All the trick plays and shenanigans were designed specifically for us. They could not run their normal stuff against us and expect to win the game.
This kind of game planning is the kind that Coach Mendenhall is not going to partake in. His stance is that he will not ruin the integrity of what we do, by changing everything week to week to out smart the opponent.
The second kind of game planning is what our coaches preach to us as players and that is, Take what you do best and adapt it to the opponent in order to neutralize their strengths and attack their weaknesses. Basically, find the plays within our system that will work best against what the other team does, and then spend the week of practice perfecting the execution of those plays.
Every week we tweak our alignments, coverage, routes and blocking just a little in order to gain a competitive advantage over our opponent and to sure up any perceived weaknesses.
To sum it up, our coaches get to the office around 6:00am each morning and are game planning until meetings start at 2:10pm. Then it is on the players to EXECUTE the game plan.
So, to summarize, at BYU, “game planning” does not refer to creating gadget plays to expose the opponent’s weaknesses. It relates more to favoring the plays that you already have that will exploit those known weaknesses based on execution alone.
Good insight, Quinn. My only question is, shouldn’t there be a compromise between preparing for your opponent’s tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses; and throwing in one or two caveats that are specifically geared towards their team? I suppose that this could be accomplished through the coaching staff following the preparation process that you outlined above, without creating new plays specifically for them.
I think that the unrest amongst the fans is rooted in the fact that we see a team that has followed the Tulsa formula you mentioned by spending a disproportionate amount of time prepping/scheming for us (TCU 2008) clobber us. I also think that it leads to the perception that Bronco & Co. can’t get the team up for the big games.
Perfect, thanks for the insights Markell. After the UCLA win last year Bronco said that the coaches brainstormed in the preseason for that game, and that worked perfectly hopefully they do the same with similar results for our big games this year as well.
The UCLA game is a PERFECT example! We did not do anything tricky. We just ran the Offensive plays we thought they could not defend and we made the necessary adjustments on defense. Above all we executed perfectly and the ball always seemed to bounce our way.
I always like using movie analogies and this case, “Remember The Titans” is a good example of the different philosophies of game planning. At the beginning of the film, Coach Boone hands the coaching the staff his offensive playbook who scoff at the thinness of it. Boone insists these plays will work every time with perfect execution. The team coasts undefeated to the state championship game and find themselves struggling against an opponent who knows their every move. The Asst coach Yoast, tells Boone he needs throw a wrinkle in the playbook and give them something they haven’t prepared for. Sure enough they score the winning TD.
To tie it back in BYU football, BYU’s offense works because they stay with who they are but at the same time, will throw in a few gadget plays every now and then to keep the defense honest.
Sorry to kill it for you Seasider, but what actually happened in the Titan’s championship game is that they won something like 60-0. But yes, I understand what you’re saying…
Nice info Staff-
I cant stand when fans will complain about how ill prepared a team is to play another team. No doubt we as fans don’t fully appreciate the preparation that goes into each weeks game plan. I think the frustration comes from when game time adjustments don’t seem to be working. I think that sometimes one team is just better than the other team. Or that a coaches adjustments don’t seem to work.
I’m sure sometimes it’s just that the players just aren’t able to carry out the game plan well.
My biggest frustration with watching games with my dad was when he would say, “They just don’t want to win bad enough”. I’m sure that is never the case.
I think that there has to be an emotion component to gameplanning included somewhere, and I’ll use the TCU game to illustrate my point. Prior to the game, I was worried by the different levels of energy on the two sidelines. BYU was listless and TCU was completely amped up. The results were immediate. TCU used emotion as a ‘force multiplier’ that enhanced its X’s and O’s gameplanning. BYU panicked and completely lost sight of its pre-game preparation. The game was over before it began.
I see that game as a collective failure by the coaches and players to plan for the emotion. Someone should have realized that TCU was itching for some payback for ‘06 and ‘07. Heck, TCU fans were talking last summer about how the tackling tummies in Ft. Worth all had big ‘Y’s on them. There was a lack of foresight going into that one.
I love Bronco, but I think that he’s still seeking the right balance between having tight emotional focus/discipline and bringing an emotional spark to the game.
That’s interesting, so what do you think about Jake Heaps? i want to see your thoughts about him. Looks like he’s really good, and he brought Apo and Stout in.
“His stance is that he will not ruin the integrity of what we do, by changing everything week to week to out smart the opponent.”
Sorry, but to me that comes across as both lazy and ignorant. “INTEGRITY” means noth game-planning for one specific opponent? Bull. It has nothing to do with ethics or morals. If winning is a sin, then let’s just hang up football altogether.
Especially when it comes to the very last game of the year (ex. Arizona) and the last game of the regular season (ie, Utah), when any weak arguments made against evolving and adapting are completely thrown out the window anyway.
There’s no excuse for bad coaching in this one extreme example, so quit trying to make them.
No offense Mars, but you’re post is so horrifically flawed I don’t even know where to begin and I don’t have the time to mount a lengthy response as tempting as that is.
What Staffieri is accurate. However, I feel BYU can be too predictable. I know that we should not “ruin the integrity of what we do,” but having a few trick plays in the play book seemed to work for Utah, Tulsa, Boise State and others recently. BYU needs to have a little more up their sleeve to add to their perfected, usual playbook. This seems to be an even more significant point if we find ourselves out-matched athletically (speed especially). Thanks for the amazing blog posts. I read it almost daily.
Mars,
I am not sure if that needs a response, but I will say this…
As a player I am glad that we didn’t have to be a different team every week to win games. We ran our stuff, made the adjustments we felt were necessary and we won a lot of games.
The team last year only lost 3 games and you and your comrades think all hell has broken loose. We’re OK…everything is still on track.
We lost those games more from OVER CONFIDENCE and LACK OF EXECUTION than they did from game planning.
I really appreciate your insight on our coaches preparation and planning for game day. You are absolutely right regarding the fans perspective but I don’t see it as being all too bad. Creating plays to outsmart or outplay an opponent seems to be playing to one’s strengths and exploiting the opponents weaknesses.
I may be naive, however, I still believe we can make weekly adjustments and plays specific for each opponent.
The great players and great teams in any sport learn to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses.
For me, without too much knowledge of the X’s/O’s, I think that the TCU and Utah games lost last year were more due to lack of execution than overconfidence. I would say that especially the games against TCU and Utah that both Patterson and Whittingham found weaknesses in our defense and went to them over and over again. We likely knew what was coming, but didn’t execute soundly to stop the play. The AZ game I think overconfidence WAS an issue and with TCU and Utah both getting big bowl games we felt snubbed by getting an “inferior” opponent.
TCU was Kerley in the wildcat formation – they rushed for 270 against us, with Kerley getting 77 of those yards, often in key situations. We adjusted for Kerley at halftime, but it was too late. Once the run was established, TCU mixed in a few huge pass plays which were back breakers. All it takes is for one defensive player to be out of position or miss an assignment and a Horned Frog is running free in open space. Defensively, TCU played a cover 2 and Hall had nowhere to go downfield. They were able to use the All-American end Hughes and an experienced linebacking corps to stuff the run (we had 23 yards) and sack Hall 6 times.
Where were our strengths last year? Hall to Collie was good all year. Hall to Pitta was also a good combo. TCU let Collie get his hundred; Pitta got a few catches; but they shut the running game down and we became one-dimensional. And every catch Pitta had was underneath a safety and over a linebacker (they weren’t easy).
Remember, also that TCU prepped for us with a game against Oklahoma. We are prepping for the MWC against Oklahoma and I think you will see a better prepared Cougar team in MWC play.
I’m not going to go in depth on the Utah game – it is too painful. But a similar argument exists. I don’t know that there were any trick plays, gimmicks or unexpected game plans. Utah just used their strengths and exposed our weaknesses over and over again. They dropped EVERYONE (even their D line) back into pass coverage, and took away our pass. If you would have told me before the game that Max would have NO sacks and Utah would win, I would have laughed. After the game, I was NOT laughing.
In both games, the other team executed their usual game plans, made some minor adjustments and exploited our weaknesses. Offensively, they went to their strengths and we couldn’t make the key stops.
It’s amazing that we actually stayed in contention in both of those games with how poorly we were playing.
I didn’t see the same energy dropoff that Dave saw at the TCU game. We had our usual 15,000 in the stands at Amon Carter and the BYU team came out with plenty of emotion. But, we went toe to toe and all of a sudden its 23-0 at halftime. Harvey fumbling to end a first half drive hurt BIG TIME. We score there and I think we are able to continue to try to run the ball.
This year’s team will have more offensive weapons. Defensively, they return quite a few and will be able to hopefully throw in some different coverages that they just couldn’t get last year due to personnel or inexperience.
Awesome post Staff! This is the type of stuff that I love reading about.
I don’t have any argument with Bronco’s approach, but if you are only going to draw from your bank of established plays to attack an opponent’s weakness, then you’d better have a reasonably large selection to begin with. It seems to me that BYU’s approach of having relatively few (albeit well executed) plays may hamstring the coaching staff to some degree when they are looking for the best weapon to use in exploiting the other team’s Achille’s heel. I felt like I saw some expansion of the playbook last year with some Wildcat and more play action. I hope to see further expansion this year.
Bronco gets blasted in two games last year, and he is a bad coach? How many games did Lavell get blasted in? It happens. Bronco is an excellent coach and may even be better than Lavell when all is said and done. He has brought the right elements into the program.
Markell, the insight is greatly appreciated and I fully agree. I think that unknowing fans listen to sports talk radio as gospel, and we all know they simply want something to talk about. Local sports radio absolutely roasted Robert Anae for his unwillingness to adjust last year. This article shows how much goes into a game plan. Seriously, if you’ve spent all those hours trying to get into the opponent’s head during the week, then you have to make a decision whether to throw your game plan out the window after the first quarter, or stick with what the team has prepared for, it’s a very tough decision. 65,000 fans know better that you do every week. I know, I’m one of them, I yell at the coaching staff during the game from the staduim just like everybody else.
One other comment, I have continued to be amazed at how BYU’s 10-3 season was deemed a near failure by so many. Bronco goes 33-7 (.825) in three consecutive seasons, and some idiots are seriously saying he needs to go?!? Compare with the rest of the NCAA elite and we’re 5th in the last 3 years. Boise 35-4 (.897), USC 34-5 (.872), Florida 35-6 (.854), OSU 33-6 (.846), BYU 33-7 (.825), Texas 32-7 (.821), OU 34-8 (.810), TTU 28-7 (.800), Utah 30-9 (.769), TCU 30-9 (.769), PSU 29-10 (.746), BCU 30-11(.731), Notre Dame 20-18 (.526). And don’t try to give me the ‘we play in the MWC crap, we’ve proved time and again that this is a conference to be reckoned with.
I’m the first to admit that last year was disappointing, and I do think it had to do with the whole “Quest for Perfection” that got blown out of proportion, doubled by Utah’s actual perfect season (Congratulations Kyle and the U). But when you look at the whole picture, it’s easy to see where this program is headed, and it’s very exciting.
Consider the recruits just landed, and figuring that we’ll likely get more simply because of Heaps & Co’s verbal commits, this is only the tip of the iceburg.
Please keep the insight from the sidelines coming, and please write about what the Jake Heaps thing means to BYU. Does it mean anything until he signs? How much does this affect further recruiting for 2010? Can a recruit really have that much sway?
Markell,
Thanks for a succinct and insightful window into what the Cougars’ approach to game planning is really like. I think fans tend to exagerate the coaching staff’s remarks at times, and your article puts its topic in perspective.
I think the more frustrating thing to the Cougar nation (if you can be frustrated with 3 10 win seasons in a row) is the times when we appeared to play into the teeth of what the opposition had prepared with no answers of our own. The two glaring examples are the UCLA bowl game–a game we won, but in which the offense was completely bottled up at times. After having learned who Bruce Davis was the hard way once, he got off to at least as fast a start against us the second time. The Bruins appeared to be in our playbook and were in fact in our backfield much of the game. Thank goodness for the jail break PAT block and Ethan’s big paw. Example B would be last year’s Utah game, a contest in which the run was paying consistent dividends but saw BYU insist on throwing into Whittingham’s deceptions, stunt packages, and defensive strength. We literally turned a winnable game over to the Utes, allowing for their dream season to proceed.
While Tulsa caught us with a buzz saw…that stuff happens, and I agree that despite their tricked out tactics, that game still came down to BYU’s own execution. A very athletic TCU team just came to play and beat us. Neither’s a good memory, but that’s football. Care to offer any comments on the earlier games I mentioned? Was gameplanning a factor?
I have to laugh at Mars post (Have you ever played or coached?) Lazy is not a word that can ever be applied to the staff of a Football program that is 32-7 the last three years.
The hours spent breaking down film, drawing up formations, dissecting plays and talking through adjustments are insane. At the High School level we watch film on saturday (our last game and 2-3 games from our next opponent) for 9-10 hours straight, then Sunday is spent preparing a game plan and then the week starts Monday, watching another 30-45 minutes of film/cutups with the Players before practice every day. It is a 30-40 hours a week job on top of our teaching/9-5 jobs. Put that in perspective at the next level and you have coaches working 60-70 hours a week on strictly Football…..That my friend is not lazy.
You saw how well the “change things up every week” thing worked under Crowton when the team was struggling….It doesn’t. for a game here and there, OK, but with that as your philosophy you are dooming your team to failure. Successful programs do it just as described by Markell. Take their core philosophy, throw in some adjustments on both sides of the ball (Blocking schemes, coverage and alignment, MAYBE a few opponent specific plays) that are designed to take advantage of your strengths and their weaknesses and you roll with it.
Markell,
Great stuff as always. With what is happening with Heaps and co. I was wondering what players in the program typically feel about highly touted in coming recruits. Do the players care? Do they get excited? Is there jealousy? I suppose some of what players think probably should stay in the locker room, but I wonder what the general consensus is amongst the current players.
This type of game plan is nothing new. UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, utilized the same approach. He wanted his players to focus on becoming the best they could be day-in and day-out rather than worry so much about their opponent. It has been said that Coach Wooden did not scout other teams but I listened to an interview where he said that wasn’t necessarily true. However, he did want to create a level of execution that would work regardless of who his teams played and judging by the results below, I’d say he was pretty successful:
10 national championships in 12 years (7 of them occurring in a row)
88-game winning streak
38 consecutive wins in NCAA March Madness tournaments
4 perfect seasons
Lifetime winning percentage of more than .800
Only one losing season – his very first year
Coach Mendenhall is the best coach for BYU…period. Just look at what he has accomplished in such a short amount of time at BYU. He has worked hard to help his players be successful not only on the field but also off the field. He has aligned the football program with the goals of the University to not only produce a quality football team and player but also students and individuals. Fans need to understand playing time will never be substituted for missions, football will never be the first priority and national championships will difficult to come by. I don’t understand why BYU “fans” expect an undefeated season every year or expect the players to play perfectly every game or (insert unreasonable expectation). I feel these “fans” are most likely people who have never played competitive sports. I appreciate the passion a fan has for wanting his/her team to be successful. Considering how much time the coaches and players invest in practicing and preparing year round I’d dare say they share a passion to be as successful as the fans want them to be. Unfortunately, despite the level of talent and pre-game preparations every team is going to fumble, throw interceptions, miss tackles and even lose games. As fans, we need to have more realistic expecations and be more supportive of what Coach Mendenhall and his players are trying to accomplish.
In my opinion preparation and game planning is what separates the very good coaches from the great coaches. This is what makes football such a great game. People who say this game is simple are ignorant. Football is the most complicated strategic game there is which requires hours upon hours of preparation and execution to be better then very good at the D-1 college level.
I don’t believe a coach can take his basic core and change it from week to week expecting to be successful. However, a great coach can successfully exploit a weakness, advantage or tendency in an opponent and can hide or cover his own. He can put the right 11 pieces in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things more times then not.
I for one was not always sold on some of the strategy the coaches chose, but that is part of what makes football and “fandom” so great is our inherit right to second guess, question and constructively criticize. I honestly was not impressed with how we played our front 7 on defense most of last year at all, even though I understood the reasoning and explanations; however, I believe we have very very good coaches now at BYU.
Staff another great read from you. Thank you.
Seth,
Obviously there is a lot of hype around these guys. More than we have had around a recruit since probably Ben Olsen. I wrote a post at then end of the season about recruiting that I would refer you to. Basically my stance is this.
So what if you were a stud in high school, let’s see what you can do at this level.
I think any player worth his salt in the program will not be intimidated by these big recruits. I never was, I bet John, Kelly, Cameron, Bryan, etc never were either.
The good news is that these guys are supposed to be so amazing that it should bring a lot of attention to the program and hopefully help us land more good recruits.
Don’t get me wrong, I am excited, I just don’t like to count my chickens before they hatch.
Greg,
You NAILED IT!!! Congrats. Coach Mendenhall has adapted this philosophy from Coach Wooden. As you all know Coach Mendenhall has his own quest for perfection and he will focus on anything that will make him better at what he does. He has read a lot of Coach Wooden’s books and has shared a lot of the principles with the players.
Great Post Greg! That is the essence of what I was trying to say!
Hi Markell,
I see a lot of parallels between Coach Wooden and Coach Mendenhall. They both focus on developing the individual and not just the player. Drop me an email if you’d like a copy of the interview with Coach Wooden, I think you’ll enjoy it!
Greg
Great stuff! I am glad to see the site is back up and running.
What’s the latest on Manase?
Thank you for the reply Markell. I appreciate it. It seems to me that the coaching staff has either been aware of the public’s criticism of being too vanilla or they realized of their own accord the need to throw a twist in. I think you may have noticed the wildcat type of play run by Max doing a fake audible and Harvey taking the direct snap, in addition, there were a couple of balls that Austin threw last year, but consistency seems to be the better option in this case.
I learned a lot from this post. I still have one burning question though…what did Utah do that was different in their BSC bowl game? They didn’t run a ton of trick plays but stunted a lot on the line and rushed the snap on offense. May we follow suit and make the changes that through the other teams off their game plan. Thanks for the posts! Keep it up.
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