Strategies to Avoid overlooking Opponent

Start the 2nd string. They're anxious to get on the field and show their stuff. They won't overlook anything.

If you're better than them I will tell the kids "lets go out there and kick their a$$ for two quarters and let the young pups finish this one out."

If your kids aren't pumped up to play a game, I don't know why they would keep showing up.

My advice is the same as every week, focus on us. It's about us getting better, us understanding our game plan, and us executing our scheme as well as we can.

If you have some guys that are likely to look ahead of the opponent, I think it's a decent opportunity to challenge them for playing time, etc. Anything you can do to emphasize that complacency is not an option.

"If you don't think they are good enough to command your full attention and effort then we are good enough to beat them without you."

That's a hard sell to your starters.

Nothing , go out and play your game , tell your kids that this team is way better than they look on paper. Get the lead play your younger kids , get the game over with .

In essence THIS IS A PLAY-OFF GAME for you and your team. This game has become a part of the single elimination tournament of which you speak...as you said, if you lose, your season is over!!

Prepare like it is what it is!!

It starts with the culture and expectations of your program. We don't talk a lot about our opponents. We are trying to be our best every day, every drill, every rep. If you work hard each and every day. We faced a couple of teams this year that we were physically much better than, and we had an extra edge in practice as coaches. I learned a valuable lesson my third year of coaching. We came out flat and found ourselves down 23-6 at halftime to a terrible team. We ended up winning 34-33. We took them lightly as coaches. We coached them that week like it was a bye week and it got us beat.

1. Coach a little bit harder in preparation for a weaker opponent.
2. Focus your team on yourselves and getting better at what you do. Challenge them to give everything they have every single rep in practice and in the game.
3. Talk to your guys about no plays off.
4. Don't let yourself relax as a coach because you think you have them overmatched. That is how you get beat.

There's a team in our league that has no business playing tackle football. Not sure why they're still members of our league but that's above my paygrade. Every year we play them, we play poorly because our kids know they're going to win and don't take practice that week very seriously.

So this year, instead of focusing on them and what they do, we focused on our previous game and our flaws in our fundamentals and made an emphasis of correcting that during the week. I think other than a block of alignment and assignment for the defense once a day, we didn't do any unit stuff all week.

And this year was the first time in recent memory that we actually went out against them and did our jobs without committing a bunch of stupid penalties and letting them hang around when they have no business being on the same field as us.

But I say that hesitantly. This year they were exceptionally (even by their standards) bad and our team was peaking around the week we played them. So for all I know our idea was idiotic.

Do you use goals for individual games? If so, set the bar REDICULOUSLY high....

1) +3 TO margin
2) Hold them to 2.5 yd per play
3) Score on 75 or 80% of drives
4) <5 missed tackles for the game
5) >4 TFL

Stuff like that. Make the focus more on reaching the goals than the crappy opponent,