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    Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call: A 21st Century Survival Guide for High School Football Coaches
    Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call: A 21st Century Survival Guide for High School Football Coaches
    Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call: A 21st Century Survival Guide for High School Football Coaches
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call: A 21st Century Survival Guide for High School Football Coaches

    By K. Russell DePriest and Adam DePriest

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    About this ebook

    The conclusions drawn by analyzing statistics from college and professional football often do not translate to the high school game because the games are so different. This book puts those powerful statistical techniques for maximizing a team's chance of winning into the hands of high school coaches and fans. These techniques are illustrated using the Pulaski Academy Bruins as a case study.

    Techniques such as Expected Point Value and Points Per Possession analysis are demonstrated with examples. The authors explore the utility of onside kicks, 4th down decision making, and two point conversion attempts. In addition, the book touches on the aspects of game theory as it relates to the opponents psychological state.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherK. Russell DePriest
    Release dateAug 27, 2012
    ISBN9781476258539
    Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call: A 21st Century Survival Guide for High School Football Coaches
    Author

    K. Russell DePriest

    Russell is a native of Mena, Arkansas, and he is a 1992 graduate of Mena High School. During his time at Mena High School, Russ earned 10 athletic letters in 3 sports (football, basketball, and baseball) including 2-time All-District honors in football and All-District honors in baseball. He received a B.A. in Physics (summa cum laude) from Hendrix College (Conway, AR) while lettering 3 times for the Hendrix Warrior varsity baseball team. He earned an M.S. in Health Physics and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from Texas A&M University (College Station, TX). He is currently a Principal R&D Scientist/Engineer in the Applied Nuclear Technologies organization at Sandia National Laboratories located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He serves as Principal Investigator for the Neutron Gamma Energy Transport (NuGET) Advanced Simulation & Computing software development project. Russ is a voting member of 3 ASTM International Committees (E10 - Nuclear Technology & Applications, E54 - Homeland Security Applications, and E61 - Radiation Processing). He serves as the U.S. Program Chair for the 15th and 16th International Symposium on Reactor Dosimetry. Russ is also Assistant Director of the microEP Graduate Program at the University of Arkansas. He has authored or co-authored more than 10 peer-reviewed scientific publications in the last 15 years. Russ telecommutes to Sandia National Laboratories from Fayetteville, Arkansas where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He enjoys reading (mostly science fiction and science history), discussing sports and statistics, tinkering with an essentially useless Texas Hold’em poker analysis code that he has written, and complaining about both the Fightin’ Texas Aggie football team and the state of science literacy in this country. You can find out about all these things and more on his Minimum Publishable Unit (MPU) blog (http://depriest-mpu.blogspot.com/).

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      Book preview

      Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call - K. Russell DePriest

      Saturday Morning Wake-up Call:

      A 21st Century Survival Guide for High School Football Coaches

      By

      K. Russell DePriest and Adam DePriest

      Copyright 2012 – K. Russell DePriest and Adam DePriest

      Smashwords Edition

      ***~~~***

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Background

      Current State of High School Football

      The Future of High School Football

      Strategies to Approach the Future

      Conclusions

      Acknowledgements

      Appendix A: Football Revolution

      Appendix B: A Matter of Belief

      Appendix C: Why 7-on-7

      Appendix D: Data Charts

      About the Authors

      ***~~~***

      Preface

      This book is the result of a convergence of several events in our lives and several ideas that are circulating throughout professional athletics at the current time. The most accurate starting event for the journey that led to this book is the acceptance of Adam on the football coaching staff at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas. Shortly after Adam started coaching there, I was given the responsibility for the verification and validation (V&V) of a massively parallel Advanced Simulation & Computing (ASC) computer program. Adam was learning to coach football under Kevin Kelley (a pioneer in implementing the statistician’s dream for the way football should be played) while I was gathering the statistical and analytic skills required to evaluate how well really sophisticated computer models match the world around us.

      In the fall of 2004, I made a trip to see Pulaski Academy play for the first time. The Bruins were going to be playing the Harrison Goblins at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. Adam warned me on the bus trip over, You are not going to recognize the game you are about to watch. Coach Kelley does things a little differently. He was absolutely right. My high school football experience in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s had been dominated by the wishbone, the wing-T, and numerous other run first offenses. Coach Kelley had yet to go all out with the no punt philosophy, but he was starting down that path. I felt as if I was watching someone implement a PlayStation offense and coaching philosophy with real players, and he was winning while doing it. I found myself wondering, Is Coach Kelley lucky? Is he just a better coach than the guy across the field from him? Does he just have better players? It also crossed my mind that Kevin Kelley might know something that other coaches and fans do not know.

      Shortly after that trip over to Searcy, Arkansas with the Bruins, I read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. I was fascinated by the possibility that the games that we know so well may contain an incredible amount of conventional wisdom that is just plain wrong. If this could happen in a game like baseball that counts and records everything, could the same thing be happening in other sports and businesses that don’t keep such careful records? This idea and concept continued to bubble through my thought processes and discussions with Adam.

      As this mental bubbling continued, a colleague from Texas A&M University sent me a research paper published in the Journal of Political Economy called Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football. University of California professor David Romer presented a compelling case that something other than the chance of winning was being optimized by the head coaches at the NFL level. This conclusion was drawn from their decision making trends on 4th down and short yardage. Once again, I saw that the conventional (or should I say, criticism free) decision making for a sport that every fan supposedly understands was most likely wrong.

      So, with this as the background, Adam and I have decided to make some predictions about how high school football will be played in the coming years. Our predictions stem from the fact that coaches and quirky fans (or in Adam’s case, a weirdly analytic geek of a brother) can now gather meaningful statistics and (relatively) easily process those statistics in ways that may give a team the winning edge. We hope that this book provides a catalyst for getting to that future state of the game a bit more rapidly. After we detail what we think the game will look like, we will then give coaches a number of strategies for adapting their systems and approaches to this future state of the game. We do this by providing a real life case study (the Pulaski Academy Bruins) and a thought experiment (the Cabot Panthers).

      If you are a high school football coach and reading this book doesn’t challenge you to question what you know about your profession, then we would suggest reading it again. Your next opponent may have already started playing the game by assumptions that are very different from yours. He may think he has already found the answer to the question Is it really gambling if the odds are stacked in my favor?

      -KRD-

      ***~~~***

      Background

      Although the modern game of the National Football League drives many of the trends that we find in the lower levels of football (particularly the college game), that was not always the case. In the early history of the game, college football was the force behind the popularity of the game. In fact, in the early half of the 20th century, college teams were often superior to the professional teams. As the NFL developed, college football became the farm system of that league. With this shift, college football coaching philosophies mostly mirror the successful methods from the NFL.

      However, from the beginning, high school teams in a given region or state tend

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