DESIGNING A WELL-ROUNDED offensive philosophy is the most important step toward building a solid offense. Before selecting the offensive system that you want to install into your program, remember these 7 critical keys.

1  Discipline. Your players need to play with discipline for your team to have success offensively. This goes beyond knowing who to block, how to block and knowing the terminology for your particular offense and technique emphasis.
Discipline implies being a disciple. Your players must believe in your entire offensive package. Their confidence in your system will carry over to their play. In order to be disciples, players must understand the “whys” behind all of your teachings.

2 Teaching. Breaking down a play to its most basic fundamentals, refining all of those parts to perfection and combining the parts into the whole, represents your offensive teaching. You must teach your players the play.
It’s not how much the coach knows that counts, but how the coach relays his knowledge to each of his players. Our motto is, “Don’t blame the lemon on the workers.”

3 Execution. The formula for successful offensive execution is as follows: 
Complete Player Understanding + Perfect Repetitions
= Great Execution.

Execution has a positive and negative side. The positive side emphasizes simplicity of assignment and technique. Subscribe to the K.I.S.S. principle and help make it easy for your players to learn their assignments. Your play notebook and gameplan should be based upon your players being able to repeatedly run the play at practice vs. whatever your opponent does defensively.

Make sure you’re less interested in confusing your opponent and absolutely sure that you don’t confuse your own players.

4 Consistency. The negative side of execution comes from a lack of consistency. If your players can’t perform their assigned duties consistently, you’ll never be able to run your offense to its maximum potential.

Consistency breaks down because of poor execution, badly called plays, missed assignments, fumbles, interceptions and penalties. Other things that contribute to inconsistency include a lack of trained replacements for players who have to leave the game, no poor-weather offense, failure to utilize the kicking game as a weapon and poor or inconsistent communication. The formula for consistency is as follows:

Simplicity + Security + Confidence = Consistency.

5 Totality. You want to develop a well-rounded, fully prepared offensive philosophy and not a grab bag of tricky plays. The design or strategy of your offense should be to take advantage of what the defense is doing to stop your base plays.

Our team’s gameplan changes very little from game to game. Our tactics or adjustments are key for us and will be built into our game preparation. Our utmost game concern is the total understanding of our opponent’s defense.

6 Personnel. There are two major personnel considerations when it comes to designing your offensive philosophy.
O  Teach what you know best with a constant consideration of which player is going to be that “X” or “O”. Never ask something of a player that he can’t do.
O  Adjust your offense (not change it) to best utilize the exceptional abilities or the shortcomings of your personnel. Be very positive on this aspect of your offensive thinking — real creativity is the essence of personnel utilization.

7 Communications. The phrase, “Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance” is the key to reliable communication. Huddle organization, formations, play calling, starting count, line calls and incoming information must be clear, concise and simple.

Emphasis on listening, as well as talking, are keys to communication. Utilizing uniform terminology which means the same to the coach on the phone and the players on the field is essential. Short meaningful descriptive words are a must. Use of numbers should be limited.