More on endzone offense
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Loading ...Jim Parinella adds his thoughts. The standard DoG endzone O is also, coincidentally, the standard endzone O for most all of the teams in New England.
Anyway, reading his post for whatever reason made me think of the importance of working on this endzone offense via drilling. You’ve perhaps done 5-pull–Offense gets 5 pulls (or maybe starts at a set position on the field–particularly for a D line), if they turn defense gets a shot to score, if they turn the ground wins the point. Repeat for a total of 5 (or insert arbitrary number here) times, then do the same while having the defensive line start with possession.
At any rate, you should extend this same mindset–getting reps in with a specific focus for the offense (in the case of 5-pull, the focus is on valuing possession), to the endzone as well. In the same way that you would do marker drill or a dump drill to work on marking, I think it would behoove teams looking to improve their endzone O to do offensive possessions starting at the endzone. If you want to excel at something, you should have no problem with doing it to the point of redundancy (efficiency for use of practice time concerns aside).
Progression would include doing this sort of work after conditioning to simulate end-of-hell-point conditions, starting with a lone receiver (and a trailing defender) as if off of a deep reception to work on endzone O in flow, running the same situations with the depth chart shifted–take out stud playmaker A and see if you can fill the gaps, or better yet, put him on defense…I’m sure there are other intelligent permutations to be had out there too.
My teams (both Pike and Rutgers) do this periodically. My favorite thing to do, though, is 5-pull (or a straight game to 5) with double-score, meaning after you score you take the disc 10-15yds outside the endzone, set O and set D, and try to score again. No goal counts unless you score both. You can also mix and match if you have unbalanced O/D teams (say, only O has to double-score, but D has only one shot to score after the turn.
If you’re playing a game to 7 with both teams double-scoring, you get a lot of hell-points and the scrimmage might take a while.
Yeah, we’ve done double-score at Dartmouth, too.
As you mention, though, this can take a while. Definitely has its uses…I think if you really want to focus and refine your endzone O (and D), it’s a bit more efficient to focus on JUST the endzone work. Double score is a great way to tie endzone work in to everything else (and the potential for hell points when a team turns on their second scoring attempt is very valuable experience).
At some point I’ll make a post relating to this…I think there’s a definite progression to skill learning and application in terms of how you teach and learn with a team. I’d put double-score at just a tick under the real thing (or even a tick above), while focused endzone setups is a few ticks below that (doing it without D is a couple ticks below that, otherwise running some kind of drill is a couple ticks below that…).