Scrimmage

We had our annual football scrimmage on Saturday. While the varsity scrimmaged on Old Prowler Field, the JV scrimmaged on the practice field just north of there.

It was a typical scrimmage. Things looked solid for the first few series, but then players tired out. Once that happened, their technique went out the window and things turned ugly.

But it was a good teaching experience since the coaches were able to be out on the field.

But scrimmages are damned funny things. Some coaches treat them like games (I recall the varsity coaches talking about one program who lined up 11 men on the line of scrimmage and blitzed every play and when they dominated the scrimmage, they ran and screamed like they had won the conference championship). Some coaches are paranoid about showing too much. No need for us to worry about that. We run the straight T. That's not going to change. We run the Iso until it's stopped. Then we run the Belly. To change things up we run a series of counters and a couple of passes. That's Prowler football. Especially at our level.

Some coaches had to take their JV units over to the varsity scrimmage to help fill in because their numbers were down. That's one great thing about where I coach, sophomores are usually left alone to develop on JV. But there is one who is quite gifted and hasn't taken a snap with the JV. The other sophomore is a wild man at linebackers, and he was only with us for a couple of series. But it's nice not having to worry about losing sophomores or pulling up freshman to fill out a JV roster.

The most intriguing thing from our scrimmage is how some teams treat their quarterbacks. Now we don't make it a habit of pummeling ours, but they do get hit. However, one team actually had their quarterback wearing a red pinny on his jersey. Their coached asked if we would refrain from hitting him.

That's a scrimmage for you. Why don't we just play flag football to get warmed up?

Even stranger, the quarterback doubled as a linebacker on defense. I didn't see them asking our linemen not to block him. Plus, he got to hit plenty on there.

Oh well, the kids thought it was bs and couldn't wait to hit him live in a game. Hopefully, they'll get plenty of opportunities for that.