Notes from "Coaching Football's Double Eagle Flex Defense" by Ted Amorosi

Purpose of football drills, whether they are for DL, LB'S or DB'S should be to:
1. Enhance athleticism
2. Develop a teaching progression that will create habits that will enable the athlete to perform the basic fundamentals of his position with maximum efficiency.
3. Develop the intense level of effort necessary to attain the highest level of success.

DL Practices should include the following
1. Movement drills that develop agility, quickness, balance, coordination, and intense effort
2. Tackling drills from different angles
3. Drills that teach fundamentals of defeating a one on one run block (hook, drive, kick-out, trap,)
4. Drills that teach the fundamentals of defeating 2 on 1 blocks (kiss, fold, zone, double team, etc.)
5. Drills that teach the fundamentals of full and or half-line blocking schemes (may or may not include RB)
6. Drills that teach the fundamental skills of defeating a 1 on 1 pass block (emphasizing specific techniques such as rip under, swim etc.)
7. Drills that teach the skills of slanting, stunting, twisting etc.
8. Game line scrimmages (team, half-line, run hull, etc.)

Four Cardinal rules of Defensive Line
1. Do not get reached
2. Collapse the backside
3. Wrong shoulder all kick out blocks
4. Force double-teams and do not get driven back when they occur.

Each day in practice every defensive lineman should be drilled in game-like situations that make these 4 cardinal rules second nature.

Truthes

Plenty of our young men play high.
Plenty of our young men steal.
Plenty of our young men date rape.
Plenty of our young men murder.
Plenty of our young men are pedophiles (far more prevalent than anyone thinks.....or is willing to admit......about 25% of your team are victims of sexual abuse, about 5% are abusers themselves).

As a coach, I would let the parents who want to pull their kids pull them......you'd be amazed how much a {censored} off 16 year old can convince his parents to let him play.

I would then coach the players on my team.......my job is not to delegate morality, it is to coach football.

And football, in it's purest form is not about your last name, color of your skin, country of origin, sexual orientation, religion, sex, height, weight, or socio-economic class........


It's about FIGHTING! It's about quitters and perservering. It's about struggle. It's about glory and honor, in victory and defeat. It's about breaking down BS walls of society's safeguards and boiling it down to the original question of human existence: Me and mine will survive, or we will die, BUT BY GOD, we will never quit.

Football coaches don't delegate morality, but they do teach it, and it is the most important kind:

Heroes are simply those who did the right thing, the right way, the first time, EVERY time.

And EVERYONE needs these truths......the true evil here is denying young men access to one of the last places where these lessons can be learned at a young age.

Running Routes

The steps work out really well... odd steps for in breaking routes (5 steps = slant, 7 steps = post, etc.), and even steps for out breaking routes (4 steps = quick out, 8 steps = intermediate out, etc.)... this is with the outside foot back... all of this ties in with the original "digit system" pioneered by Gillman.