Who's Team Is Really, Really Bad?

My most frustrating season sounds very similar, and was my last season coaching schoolbased ball (and tackle football in general)


Middle school level, just to help out a school that needed it.  I didn't know the HC, but others said he was a good guy and he was a really good guy, just not a really good football guy.  The problem  was he didn't recognize/own that last part.  

Out of the 6 teams in the league we probably had 7 of the top 10 players, including the top 4.  Each game should have been over after the first 4 possessions.  Instead the team ended as "co champs".  

Kids would miss practice to get hair cuts.  Offensive practice consisted of skill players running plays while OL "fired out" (read: stood up) and jogged to cones in front of them.  OL rules - Block the guy in front of you.  Offensive system... obviously shotgun spread.  Amount of time spent teaching/working the snap? Zero. Amount of time spent yelling that we had to "get the snap"? Plentiful.  Defensive system: Stand in front of the OL and try and grab/pull the OL's shoulder pads, swim move/get into the backfield.  

I thought about walking out several times, it REALLY wasn't worth my time, but just finished the season, collected my little pittance of stipend, and pretty much decided to never coach again. 

Earlier in this thread, when I told the story of that RB who got praised for “leadership” for throwing a temper tantrum over his stats, the culture at that school was basically this.

As OL and DL coach, I can’t begin to express how frustrating it was to spend most of practice time in team just running plays on air or “working against the wind.” We’d install new offenses and defenses we’d every other week. The play calls made no sense, with the same verbiage meaning different things for the OL depending on what our HC was picturing in his head at that moment. It was a cluster.

The haircut thing reminded me of the time the new Madden game came out the night before practice, so over 1/3 of our team skipped actual football practice to go home and play Madden.

We had a senior lineman transfer in who skipped like 2 weeks of practice (and a game!) during the season and was honesty pretty terrible, but the DC kept starting him because he was big and looked tough, so that meant he must be a stud. I was his DL coach. He was not a stud. He wasn’t even in our top 4 DL.

We started out with 45 at a 1a school of just under 400 kids. We’d worked hard for a year to get kids out, get them lifting, and improve the talent level and had become one of the bigger, stronger, and probably fastest team in the conference.

That’s when an Assistant Principal, who had been there in the past when they had a bunch of D1 athletes including a D1 caliber RB and WR, suddenly decided to “come out of retirement and help out.” He named himself to my job (OC) without anyone even talking with me first and then named himself HC a few months later when he pushed the HC out. We finished the year with 18 dressed for our last game after half the remaining roster quit rather than play our final game against the team they were afraid of.

We went 0-10. I will never, ever allow myself to be sucked into a position like that again. That final game, where I was standing on the sloppy, muddy sideline coaching in the snow on Halloween wearing nothing but a t-shirt and khaki shorts because that was “the uniform” while the opponent’s 8th graders took the field and scored on us in the 2nd quarter (we lost 63-0) was my personal career low point as a coach.