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Show Sporfslocular September 13. 1979 Page 3 No telling what goes into a simple football garner By Bliss Fullmer - Fom the comfort of the grand stands, football looks simple, ten men gather around a quarterback who calls the play, and tells the center when to snap the ball. The team members know their assignments for blocking and or running and the play sometimes works but is sometimes foiled by the opposition. We cheer madly when our favorite team is successful, or groan when we are stopped for no gain. What we dont realize is that there is a great chess match going on out there on the field; a chess match involving countless hours of strategy meetings, filmwatching, study and just plain guessing, and it began long before the teams took to the field. Both sides have game plans and must be ready for the unpredictable. Both have exploited each other through game films and scouting procedures like you cant believe. I spent some time with Coach Pete Riehlman and Jack Eatinger, one of his offensive assistants, looking at take-of- f sheets, used in scouting and at their play book. In their scouting book, they try to prepare for every possible situation, and have code books, identifying just about anything that could happen in a football game. In the interval between the time the offensive line is set and the ball is snapped, each player must Read the defense and determine how he must react to it. Linemen talk to each other by code, according to how the defense sets up against them. At Weber State they do this by code name. If one guard calls the other, George he may be telling him to block on a slant or block. The quargiving his position on a high-loterback may spot a weakness in the defense, or suspect a blitz and call an audible at the line. He (toes this by w inserting a number like 52 in the middle of his cadence, and each number has a definite message to his team. On defense if one of the players calls out a name like THUNDER, BULLET, SLUG OR LIGHTNING he is talking blitz. Slug, for instance is a blitz where the end, tackle and guard shoot to the inside gap on the line and the linebacker has outside responsibility. The playing field is set off in zones, and each zone is numbered for identification. The number 3 is deep zone, 6 is the linebacker zones, etc. Team captains and the coaches merely have to call out numbers, and players on both the offense and defense get the message. Weber States offensive unit has nine different methods of protection for its quarterback. Should the opposing defense start penetrating the pocket, and rushing the passer, the team can switch defense for next time. Of course, the defensive unit of any team has a variety of attacks to employ against the passing team. Favorite code names of the Wild Cat passing unit include CUP, WAGGLE, BOOTLEG, FLOOD, SPRINT and others. The receivers run patterns called passing trees. They may run a delay, behind the line backer, or the FLAG which takes them toward the red flag in the end zone, or the POST, which is in the general vicinity of the goal poet, or the Go which is straight down field for, what we sports fans call The Bomb. Weber State coaches spend countless hours analyzing films of their opponents. Brigham Young University furnished them with films of its game with Texas A and M, and in turn got Weber States films of the North Dakota State game. Each side will spend the entire game, going over every play, and will coder every little detail in their respective scouting books. They will be watching for such things as tendency of individual players, and especially 'the signal caller. They will be aware of what he calls on third and six on the twenty, as opposed to the same situation on the far hash-marif at midfield, when in the first or third k, quarter, etc., etc. Each tedm has only one game, for which to draw data on the B.Y.U. - Weber State game, so they will manually review the data gleaned. If this were the last game of the season, the coaches would feed the data of seven or eight games into a computer, which has been programmed to furnish almost anything they ask for. Well even know the name of Marc Wilsons girl friend at B.Y.U. said Coach Eatinger. But hes married and has a baby," I corrected. Then well know his wife and childs name from the data we keep on him, insisted the coach. The coaches keep a file on key personnel of the teams they play, and from the data try to figure out what he will do on given situations. In addition to this the coaches feed results of an opponents games into the IBM sheet computer and come out with a twenty-fiv- e for further study., report The Weber State coaches were Very generous in sharing their coaching expertise with me, but I felt like I had only a glimpse of the iceberg of college football scouting. I began to realize that football is not a dumb-man- s game. I now understand why each player is given a book of plays, early in his football career and told to start studying. I marvelled at the volumes of pertinent information a coach must commit to memory to drill into his gladiators, and I learned to respect those men like Pete Riehlman and his capable assistants who are spending 16 to 18 hours a day preparing for their first-evgame with powerful B.Y.U. er |