It’s clinic season again. The annual re-occurrence of the American Football Coaches Assocaition convention always marks an exciting time of year for football coaches, myself included. We will spend the next couple of months scurrying through every online webinar we get can our fingers on while pouring through clinic programs to see what topics are coming to an area nearby.

It’s our official mulligan, a time to start fresh by pouring through every offensive, defensive and special team structure that we can get our eyes on. We would do anything to improve our program.

But before scrapping every minute detail from last season, I’m here to prevent you from falling into the abysmal cavity of “learning everything and utilizing nothing” by trying to work everything you learn into your program. Trust me, I’ve been there. I’ve fallen into the late night trap of filling every page of those marble notebooks just because a concept looks good on paper – only to realize I didn’t have the time (or more accurately the quarterback) to effectively run all the schemes I was seeing and hearing about.

Now, I consider myself less of a novice these days when I attend clinics. Sure, my days of hanging out in the lobby drawing on cocktail napkins have dissipated – at least somewhat – but now I go in with a plan. The first premise is don’t always look at the topic but look at the speaker. I learned long ago that great speakers can discuss anything related to football, and participants will come out of that session as smarter coaches.

For example, my defensive staff have sat down and assessed the following:

• What front did we have the most/least success with?
• What coverage did our players understand most/least?
• Which kinds of tackles did we miss most (straight-on, angle, etc.)?
• Did we take the ball away enough?
• Did we run to the ball with enough relentlessness (yes, there are ways to coach that)?
• Which offensive structures did we have the hardest time defending?
• Which offensive schemes/concepts in the running and passing games did we have the hardest time defending?

With this inventory done, the decision that follows is simple: Do you choose to scrap what you were doing, or do you choose to improve it? If you choose to improve it, that’s what your research is tailored to.

That’s just our methodology as a staff, but if you’re still wondering about to invest your time this offseason, XandOLabs.com recently released a reader survey on topics that are of most interest this offseason. Here’s a little of what we found:

• Nothing is more important that offensive line play. 41 percent of coaches – regardless of position grouping – want to learn about the players up front. We all know games are won on the line of scrimmage.
• Spread option is all the rage. We’re not just talking about double- and triple-option run concepts. We’re talking about the fancy run/pass option concepts that Gus Malzahn is using at Auburn. There should be plenty out there on it. We released our study on this topic this month.

For the first time in three offseasons, secondary play was more in vogue than line play on defense. After all, you’re going to have to learn to defend all those multi-concept postsnap reads somehow.

Just a couple thoughts as you prepare to round up your staff and search the ends of the earth for what will make your program better. Happy clinic season.

Mike Kuchar is co-founder and senior research manager at XandOLabs.com, a private research company specializing in coaching concepts and trends. Reach him at: mailto:mike@xandolabs.com.