Practice question - Benefit of Team time?

Are you an offensive or defensive coach?

I'm a bit confused by "I don't have objectives or goals or anything for what I want from that period."

Offensively, you want to see you're plays work like they're drawn up, you want to see your guys make the right adjustments against the different looks that they come across.

Defensively, the opposite, you want your defense to line up against different looks the way they're supposed to line up, you want them to play their keys the way they're supposed to play they're keys.

Grade it the same way you would a game, what you want out of it is for the grades to go up.

Honestly, I would go the other way, in most of the practices I've seen, the 11:11 time is the most educationally dense time, the feedback is the most real, either the play works or it doesn't, either you kept them from making the play or your didn't

Lots of indy time, strikes me as working on 'fake fundamentals' (from: www.amazon.com/Fake-Fundamentals-Brian-McCormick-ebook/dp/B00SVEJIKA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541083571&sr=8-1&keywords=fake+fundamentals , different sport, but thought provoking thesis)

I would maximize 11:11 time, not minimize it

So from an offensive perspective we seem team time as a way for offensive players to identify techniques, coverages and throw to right player based on read. It is not a competitive period but a period based around being mentally sharp and focused in fro 20-25 straight reps.

Line has to block right people, wr have to run right routes and qb has to be able to read right coverage. Now this takes some time to coach the scout to line up right.... our scout team will never be as good as the team way play on friday-- but they can give the same alingment and initial techniques that the other team does.

I understand where the OP is coming from- and I think its a question we all should ask: what is the purpose of team period? Just as we ask what the purpose of any period and drill is.

Carookie makes a good point and I think is the real purpose of team: to take all the teaching that has occurred and put it together as a whole. Team really shouldn't be about teaching- that was what the rest of practice was for. But it is an opportunity to put all the pieces together including: huddling, personnel groupings, communicating, etc. All of these are rehearsed during team session.

Now, this isn't to say that some "cleanup" might be necessary during team: address a mis-read that now looks different 11v11 versus during group or perhaps an issue arises that wasn't thought through in full during game-planning. Often, team time is when I have found we make adjustments to the play because we see that what we had designed just isn't practical for one reason or another.

I remember having a coach who would put us in the worst possible scenario defensively during team practice. That was his goal- to strain us a little and see how we reacted/adjusted on the fly.

I think the OP is right though: if you don't go into team session with clear objectives that you (the coach) want to accomplish, it ends up being a waste of time for everyone.

We have moved to a 44 man drill- 2 offensive huddles and 2 defensive units (usually one is the opponents base and the other is a variant) offenses start in the middle and both run the same play- then sprint to opposite side to run the same play again against the other look. We only do this on the offensive side and we try to keep a 1's unit and 2's unit together. We also keep personnel change guys in the middle. I would love to say we film it and coach from that but it hasn't happened yet. And yes the defensive groups are not stellar but our main point in this session is alignment, assignment and technique.
OC- calls plays as scripted (QB/WR)
OL- coach watch position for glaring errors and replace and teach if needed
RB- watch tracks and blocking assignments
F/Y- watch to make sure motion and assignment are correct
DL- set up one defense
DB- set up other defense

This season we were able to take the remaining players and have them run team against our freshmen.

104 kids out for football 9-12 77 of them were active participants on each snap of the ball. We tried to rotate players in beyond this but all of the coaches had responsibilities...athletes were directed to rotate in on defense every 3 plays if they were not called on to take offensive reps.

I feel that this is one of the best things we do during the week.

Defensive Team is not as good: 2 offensive units- 1 defensive unit-
DC- calls defense and makes DL substitutions his volunteer assistant coaches individual players
DE- coaches DE's and helps with personnel changes on scout O's
LB- coaches his kids from the secondary and makes secondary adjustments and makes subsitutions
Volunteer- displays the scout cards and tells kids what they should be doing.
WR- works with JV group scrimmaging freshmen
F/Y coach works with JV group
OC takes rest of kids and does 1 on 1 drills- usually 15 athletes

I think the "run and play and talk about it" stuff comes from not doing enough group stuff.

We got so much better once we started breaking things down into groups:

BPU (blitz pick up)
7-on-7
1/2 line run drill (favorite!)
Inside Run
Various Skelly's

All the teaching ("if they do this, we do that") takes place in these periods.....that is where you can stop the drill and teach.

Come Team time, you can only REMIND them of what you've already worked on.......RB missed on slide protection and let the DE come underneath him......I didn't stop team for 40 seconds, I just said "Where's your hat suppose to be?" He knew the answer from the 1,000 times we went over it in BPU. Next time, he did it right.

Indy should be about how to do things.
Group should be about when to do things.
Team should be about creating the atmosphere in which you have to do things.

Nothing worse that having everybody else stand around while you correct a receiver's route. 

I think you have to do some team action. Perimeter runs/screens/RPO stuff. That’s all in team. However, I rarely do more than 10 minutes of it. Now we may have another 5 min period of team where we work on a specific play or a specific priority for that week. But it won’t be right before/after our designated team time. There will be a break and a group/Indy period in between them.

You can work skills in indy and group periods and spend a lot of time there, but until your QB has to get a feel for getting the ball to receivers with a live rush and until your entire defense has to know their live fits with alley support, cutback, and BCR, your kids are just not going to have much of a feel for the game and you're going to have a hard time finding things to troubleshoot.  We all have those kids who get good at drills for the sake of being good at drills, but then struggle to translate that to the game field.

I'm not a huge fan of the traditional "team" period where you get together and scrimmage 11 on 11 from the same spot in the MOF for 30 minutes with a coach in the huddle telling everybody precisely what to do for a minute before the play.  To me, there's just not as much value in that as doing things that more accurately simulate the game with specific purposes in mind.  Instead, do team as situational offense vs. defense game simulations (short yardage, going out, going in, 2 minute drill, etc.), or defensive pursuit drills, or offensive "perfect play" periods, or whatever.

I also hate the typical way that scout teams are put together and organized.  Instead of just showing a scout card, use your own terminology whenever possible.  If you're running Power on scout, put an OL out there and tell them to block your version of Power.  It saves time and leads to an infinitely better look, when possible.

With low numbers, I'd look at doing as much 1/2 and 3/4 line stuff as possible for "team," but getting "good on good" in team periods is pretty much always impossible, and even if you get it, the actual value of that extra competition is a bit dubious.  For some offenses, like full house teams, team can be almost the whole practice since the difference between "individual" and "group" periods are often negligible, while a spread team can do almost all of their stuff in Individual and Group periods.

If it works for you, great. I have a couple problems with this. First, we don't platoon. This means that a lot of the offensive plauers are on defense during defensive team time. Some of the scout team are on the scout team for a reason, often because they don't know the plays. Second, what if we play a different offense from ours? Telling our guys to run buck swep isn't very useful. 

It's not always 100% and it's not always perfect.

Scout cards have their place.  I'm not saying not to use cards--I'm saying to do more than just show a card.

I got this from my last stop, where we ran Power, Counter, Zone, Trap, Buck Sweep, and even dicked around a little with Stretch at my last stop and we didn't 2 platoon, either.  We had about 50 in the program at a larger school that we would practice together but split up for JV and freshman games, so it might not work as well at a small school (which I have coached at) but we were able to make it work there.  Usually our scout OL would be our starters on the JV and freshman OL.

We could still put some JV/backup kids together for an OL and on 90% of the scout stuff, we could tell them "OK, just gap down to the left on this" or "This is Power right, y'all" and the kids could do it well enough.  It wasn't perfect, but it was "close enough."  If it's something radically different from the scheme you use up front, that's different.  When we played a veer team we had a tough time explaining Midline and the scout kids never quite did it right, but they did well enough to give the defense a taste.

tiderpride, I like the sound of your team drill. Something I am going to keep in my back pocket for sure.

Belichick especially loves scrimmages during training camp.

“This gives us a chance to simulate the moving game — first down, second down, third down, ball moves, field position moves, the kicking unit comes on the field, other offensive or defensive unit comes out on the exchange — and that’s how you play,” Belichick said. “You don’t run 10 first-down plays in a row. You don’t run eight third-down plays in a row or eight sub-blitzes in a row or 10 punts in a row.”

www.bostonglobe.com/sports/patriots/2017/09/06/for-bill-belichick-and-patriots-attention-detail-everything/MJ5hau42tG66vDRqQmYdxN/story.html

I like to include a predetermined QB scramble off of a called dropback pass to practice secondary contain and help keep cover guys in coverage. Sometimes, to make sure, I'll tell the contain player to take a knee to make sure that the QB breaks contain.