Rich Hargitt via Coaches Choice Football Coaching Library
What Is Play Calling?
The first item to consider when defining play calling is to attach the human element to it immediately. The decision must be made on each staff as to who the play caller will be. It is not a semantic slip to say play caller and not play callers. Staffs across the nation have proven, quite well in fact, that multiple people can have a role in calling plays on game day. However, this approach is not the norm, and it is far more likely that the offense will run smoothly when only one person is directly responsible for making the calls.
This is not to say that multiple coaches cannot or should not be involved in game planning, spotting, and adjusting the offense. What should be clearly understood is who makes the final call. The act of play calling is not a democratic process to be scrutinized over and debated endlessly on the sidelines. Such banter will lead to mistakes, a loss of time and tempo, and above call will cause the athletes to lose confidence in their coaches. The play caller makes whatever calls he wishes to make free from second-guessing and debate. If mistakes are made or a coach wishes to discuss the plan, that can be done at predetermined times including between series, at the end of periods, or after the game.
Offensive staff members may be assigned tasks that come very close to calling the plays. For instance, a staff member may be charged with telling the play caller when a particular play is open or when a defender has over committed and a certain play is open to run. The play caller may structure his staff in any way that highlights the capabilities of his assistants, and some of these assistants may be given an expanded and wide scope role in the offense, but it is best if one—and only one—person is the final arbiter of all major decisions.
Scripting Plays
Once the hierarchy has been established on an offensive coaching staff, the next order of business is to determine what type of play caller the offense will have. The question is really to script or not to script. Play scripting has been around for some time, but found an upsurge in popularity with the legendary Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers. Coach Walsh not only scripted the first few series of a game, but then maintained a script on the sideline that had downs and distances with assigned plays that worked with those situations readily at hand. It must be said that again there is no correct way to call plays except what works for an individual team and their needs.
The decision of many air raid teams has been to abandon the early game scripting. It has proven difficult to script plays early in the game at the high school levelbecause many defenses do not react the same from week to week. At the high school level, an opponent may face a wing-T team one week and then an I formation team the next week before playing your air raid/spread team the following week.
The defense oftentimes changes from one week to the next, and so scripting may become very problematic. Therefore, some teams, at least at the high school level, no longer do early game scripting. Some teams maintain the down-and-distance scripting while some teams have abandoned those as well. While many teams have abandoned the script in favor of enhanced flexibility, some teams have stuck to the script. It is essential that the play caller provide a script to the other coaches on staff if he has one or provide them a general outline of how he plans to call the game if he does not use a script. The key is that the other coaches on the staff are constantly aware of what their duties are and have a working knowledge of what the play caller wishes to do.
