How to Create a Play-Call Sheet

hi everybody welcome to the qb school i am jt o'sullivan today we are talking about creating your own play calling sheet how does it happen how do you do it how do things fit together why are you doing it certain ways we are breaking all of that down fired up for this one let's get into it welcome to the qb school so before we get going just a quick reminder we have revamped relaunch the quarterback school patreon community if you've ever wanted to be part of that community and really what it is is it's a group of people trying to take their football to the next level really an environment what it's like in an nfl quarterback room deep dives all sorts of detail nuance about the quarterback position high level offense if you're interested in that i think you would absolutely love the quarterback school patreon community you can find the link in the description of this video get over there check it out join i appreciate it as for this one question the question comes from twitter hey man recently discovered your channel and have been loving it it has taught me a ton of stuff and i just accepted my first teaching coaching job here in georgia congrats so i'm all in on learning everything i can to get better my question is and sorry if you've already touched on this could you do a video possibly on the best way to start creating a playbook or a call sheet for game days i know the latter is more game specific and opponent specific so it might be tough honestly any tips for our first year coach play caller would be appreciated thanks again bryce bonner bryce outstanding questions there lots there really things that could take you know years to necessarily digest when you start getting into the playbook element of it for me anecdotally i'll give you kind of the condensed pseudo-condensed version of what that looks like i essentially was creating my playbook that i used as a coach at the high school level essentially thinking about it my entire life different ways that we would structure things and fit together the communication the language of it the hybrid nature of necessarily what it is and at the end of the day you know it's available for everyone now it's a course i call it the jto but really it's just a framework for how i think offense can be run at the absolute highest level i think it can be applicable to any level of football so if you're interested in that get over there check it out in the courses now it's not free it isn't because it really is a lifetime of my football process but i want more people to experience it share it enjoy it i think it could help a lot of people so if you're interested in what that looks like and how i created an offense i think you're really going to love that course so playbook specifically i really at the high school level didn't want to use a playbook intentionally because i wanted things to be so simple that we wouldn't have to use a playbook so what that meant was that you'd have to have in person classroom on the field teaching and really we did that the first year and did it at a pretty high level for a first year program running a new offense but when covet hit and we just couldn't be around each other i essentially had to create a playbook and so i used just play as the software i think there are a number of different ways to be able to do it you probably find a way to do it for free i prefer just play they're not giving me anything to say that other than access to use it whenever for my own courses but this idea being it's a really simple easy clean way to be able to create images that i think allow your players to learn well and quickly now you have to create them they have templates but you got to create it and it takes a hell of a long time and inevitably it will be too big but issues with all or most playbooks so what we're really going to talk about in this specific video is how to create a play calling sheet now a few things to get out the way here there are many ways to do this in fact there are no right ways to do this other than right for you right for your system your situation your level of ball i would say if you can keep the framework or the scaffolding to be as simple and clean for you or usable and not necessarily think of it as busy work because when you get to the highest of high levels these documents are really living documents and this they change constantly they change from walk through to practice from practice to meeting from film to the next day and so it's constantly evolving and changing i will say and from this point on it's really you know just my own personal experience anecdotally how i created my play sheet was that i wanted it to be really adaptive i had no kind of overarching kind of ideology going into it going hey must be structured like this template and i think that there are many free templates available online where you can go kind of get an idea of how play sheets are put together i certainly brought a lot of experience from being able to see those and be in those meetings and understand how those things are put together so i had an idea of how i wanted to do mine but at the end of the day i thought a lot of it was just wasted work because yeah you need some of it i don't necessarily think you need all of that all the time specifically at lower levels and so i wanted to make sure if i was going to do this and i was going to have to build the play sheet myself i wanted it to be super usable super easy to replicate week in and week out because things were gonna you know change game to game those types of things and so for me it was easy to default to xl now i think in excel so put that in kind of a lens as far as how you think and you're thinking about creating your own play call sheet you know do you think in word do you think in some other program do you think handwritten uh there's a bunch of different ways to do it i just think in excel i like using excel it's easy you know recovering pivot table type guy and so i can manage that well i like it and think it's easy to share on like google sheets to make available to other coaches and things like that and so that's where i started from now within that the actual columns you know and the in the information that's going in there really changed year to year because what we were as an offense changed year to year so it wasn't necessarily a static document but it wasn't kind of moving around concepts or little windows or rows all the time every single week because it's just a ridiculous amount of work and most people coaching at lower levels don't have you know a staff of assistance that you necessarily want to delegate that type of stuff for at least i didn't you know i was going to do it myself i was going to make it super usable that i could use it not only to call plays during the week in practice but i also wanted to give it to the quarterbacks give it to the skill players give it to people who wanted it share the information but also use it in the game to call plays like how is that going to differentiate you know how many plays are you going to carry how many how are you gonna construct them together and so what we're gonna do here is talk about kind of the final iteration of this i've had i coached high school football for three years calling plays and each year this play call sheet would have looked different but this is the final year what i think was kind of the most streamlined version of it now the other part about it is it has to fit your system your structure we i don't know you know y'all let me know if you think i'm crazy after you watch this video but we carried what i would consider a high volume of plays for the high school level maybe you don't maybe you can just you know aerate it and write it on a notepad and be fine i couldn't that's not how i operated now in addition i was calling plays from the sideline and signaling and so i needed a way to kind of do all of that all in real time and so the other part about it that i think is important if you're talking about column plays and tips is you really have to have your sideline procedure on lock and and and talked out and planned and practiced really because we would practice this quite a bit and on the sideline for us i needed in an assistant coach to essentially be the personnel director this person communicate on the headphones hey next series we're going our next play we're going 12 personnel next play we're going 10. next play we're going 21 and how to change if you have multiple 12 personnels and we carried a high number of personnels because i thought it was advantageous to what we were as an offense some teams might only have 11. you know some teams might whatever and so that was how we operated and that needed to be a real seamless thing and that was really a thankless job for an assistant coach but a really important job for what we did and how we operated in a kind of a pseudo up tempo or have the capacity to be up tempo whenever we wanted so the sideline communication is really important but when you're talking about the play calling cheat i needed to be able to find plays really quickly so on the play calling sheet there's a lot of little you know hints and indicators to make sure hey must call this i like this play or things like that that are unique to me that might not necessarily make sense to someone else and so to really my kind of like final piece of overarching advice is make it your own make the play calling sheet make sense to you it's like a cheat sheet you get to bring it to the test you manage might as well make it useful and so the other part about it is to just make it as you know as easy as possible i can't tell you how you know this is one of those things for me this is how i call plays during the practice usually during the practice week it was constantly evolving deleting changing those types of things that excel allows you to do but at the end of the day if something was misspelled i didn't care you know i wasn't freaking out i didn't know no one else was going to look at this as detailed as i was going to look at it and so that's just the reality of it so now let's look at a few templates here uh not a few templates the template that i use this past year to just get an idea and then i will actually show you a game plan from the previous year of me coaching actually the first game of that season now some of it a lot of it probably won't make sense to you but it will give you a nice little window into the actual structure of what it looked like and how it looked for me and it doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to look that way for you but you can see how i made it my own to allow me to be what i considered my best play calling self right out the gate and so let's look at a few templates here so this is just the clean template version this is kind of the overarching normal game plan and then we've got a little bit of the situational stuff over here and so what are these columns i'll pull it up zoom in for us here so that template was essentially going to allow me to be able to sort by personnel by types of formation that would be like two by two three by one didn't really use that that much by concept and then when we're actually calling the plays on the hashes so when we're an uptempo team i needed to know kind of formation what i wanted on the left hash would be opposite on the right hash and i didn't want to necessarily have to do the mental gymnastics on the sideline i just wanted it hey if we're going to run you know duo out of some formation i want to what do we want it on the left hash what do we want it on the right hash if we have a middle to have it in the middle and just that's how my generic kind of good from anywhere plays were structured then the opposite side of that game plan was series openers so on the back of the game plan it would be series openers for me which is a really important part whole different video really about where i spent my time as a play caller and then we got into situational football i started our red area from the 40 but you can start it wherever the hell you want to start it in addition occasionally we would do four downs as well just because we were gonna go for it on third down almost all the time so my third down calls were really fourth down calls but really my third down calls were all the time calls but you can see here this is just how i broke it down so here it is kind of the overarching template first game 2021 for us it was against mount miguel really good head coach long time great local head coach want to make sure we are locked in for this game this is what it looked like front and back now i'm pretty sure i don't know if i went legal or normal sized paper with this one but what i would do is just go front and back i would laminate it and put it on my hip with a little kind of like key card wire so i could let it go and it would just fall to my side so we'll talk about exactly what this looks like but you can see here you know i think in excel i categorize things a lot by color put little specific emojis versus things i really liked needed to get to make sure i get to we'll look at the detail of what this looks like but this is front and back kind of how it went as far as how i thought about it overall you can see here these are all the normal down and distance ones that i would want to get to and then on the back we would have kind of the situational i've got the starters up top i've got the red zone i've got the fourth down we've got some specials down here got some notes for half time and this is just how it worked for me now this might look like blinding color rush but when you're on the sideline under the lights and you need to find something and all your past plays are green you can easily find what you need to look for or you're looking for a specific personnel well you need to make sure you know that your personnels are color code coded or i needed to so different ways to go about it you can also see here some of these plays are left hash only plays there is no right hash option different things like that so now let's look at some detail here to see exactly what i'm talking about so now this is a zoomed in version of what would be the top of kind of the generic from anywhere plays broken down by personnel you can see the personnels on the left you can see the formations you can see the different concepts and then the left hash right hash again the little emojis are little indicators for me what i really liked for the hearts some of these other ones are signals that we use for different plays you can see here just the greens were runs the yellows were screens light greens look like passes here and whites are some drop back passes so i did that for each personnel so that was 11 personnel get into the 12 personnel again at the bottom we've got some 11 and 12 that we like both got some 13 some 20 some 21 some 22 some zero some one some two some ten again a lot of plays that we really liked it's a good problem to have you can see the number of specials that we were carried this first game i think we actually started this game off with the special we did that green heart tackled inside the five come on got different quarterback in there plays specifically for him and then some up-tempo plays that we usually carry for each game that we really liked so that was kind of the front page that i could get to in normal down and distance love all those plays but you can see how they're kind of chunked together then this would be the back side and again same setup as far as personnel formation concept hash if i like it hash middle but i spent a lot of time and this is getting into the weeds weeds as far as how i think about offense and specifically at the high school level but how important series openers were for us and so you can see here the different series openers that we carried just quickly here go through exactly see if i can tell you what all these are again first play of the game pin and pull bash gt play action shot down the field split flow inside zone ins and comebacks on the outside little duo rpo unbalanced pin and pull this is an empty pass play pin and pull again out of a different personnel rpo power and hitches straight up hitches a little y cross with smash and you can see here being really intentional with what those personnels are just because we probably were going to stay in that personnel right out the gate for a couple plays and then now we get into the red area so i lied i actually had to put one in from the 50 here double reverse pass you know just how you chunk it again there's no reason to carry eight plays from the 40 to 31 because you're not going to take eight shots so just different ways to be able to do it you know this to me if i was giving myself feedback is too many plays for 30 to 31 but you can see here just as far as the thought process of what i was trying to do and again it's good to have a lot of plays that you really like again 10 to 6 20 to 11 and again you can any way you can sort these things and then at the end here i had some fourth down plays for us just because our fourth down was really our third down and that's about a wrap and again some of these fourth down fourth and third to five fourth and one to two could also carry us two point plays then the back sheet i used to put the official's name in there i wanted to know who i was yelling at and just to make sure i leave some room for some sort of notes or something from the second half so obviously make sure you're carrying a sharpie around those types of things but for me this is just how it was put together how it worked for us so hopefully that's a nice little inside peek behind the curtain as far as how it worked for me creating a play calling sheet i think that there really is no wrong way to do it as long as it makes sense for you it allows you to operate as quickly as you want to operate as a play caller the other thing that i would just bookend this thing with is to make sure you make it as adaptive as possible and being okay changing it as often as you need to change it and then just be forgiving to yourself because there's gonna be mistakes on there i got over the fact in the league it was like it must be perfect no misspellings no anything can be wrong things are gonna be wrong and it's okay it's not the end of the world in reality it's probably not gonna impact the game at all and so just get over it and maybe it was my own ocd elements of it but i think once i did that i started having a lot more fun with this thing and made it a lot more user-friendly and both creator friendly so if you're interested in more about this type of thing and really all of it because i'll give you when you enroll in the jto course the offensive framework i give you every offensive game plan that i created at the high school level give you every single note get you every single cut up of film so you can really see kind of how i call plays how we call plays how we structure things how we game plan things how we put things together all through that course and so if you're interested in that i'm excited to share it i really do want more people to enroll in it and get a chance to operate within the system because i think the system is easy allows you to carry a lot of volume uh allows you to operate at a really fast tempo if you want to and be multiple and adaptive and all those types of things that i think make great current offense kind of its absolute best self so if you're interested in that hop over there check out the course as for this one really appreciate the question bryce well done keep the questions coming in i appreciate you hanging to the end i will see you next time have a good one

Channel: The QB School

Views: 29,439

Keywords: The QB School, QB School, Quarterback, All-22, NFL

Id: YQnLjPEmNzU

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022