Coaching and the Playoffs

favorites, but there is one truism in kids football above maybe all else, which victimized you here: An undefeated youth football team that does not have dominant talent is ripe to be beaten in the playoffs. I've seen it happen many more times than not.

Kids have to work so hard to maintain their edge, and its very easy for them to fall victim to the complacency you saw, but could not correct. Don't feel too bad. I've done this for twenty years and still don't have a great way of handling it.

It is especially liable to happen to the coach who really pours effort into all his regular season games. Because the edge you might create through your hard work disappears when every coach makes that kind of effort in the playoffs.

The last time I coached two years ago, I walked off the practice field in the middle of our last practice before the championship game against a team we had beaten by three touchdowns in the regular season. Talentwise, our kids didn't believe it when I told them they weren't any more talented than the other guys and we weren't. But they practiced like they were expecting a cakewalk. If every break hadn't gone our way in the playoff game, they would have had the same result your team experienced. I still feel that although I am always glad to win, that those kids would maybe have been better served as people if they had gone home as the runner up team.

I will say one other thing. A good coach will take the blame in front of his team in an effort to keep the kids from feeling bad about it when it truly was his fault. A great coach will do it when it really was the kids fault and he knows it. Unfortunately, in this day and time, the parents will believe him and seek another coach next time around.

But I learned this trick from my old high school coach. I remember my senior year, when our school was competing in class AAA in Texas for the first time as the defending AA State Champs. When we lost our final predistrict game before playing the predistrict favorite in our district opener, he didn't want to sap the team's confidence, so he and the staff made up some story about the team having stolen our line calls, when they really just stuffed us.

Playing against the favorites, our guys responded with their best effort of the season and won 14-12 in rout to a district championship in their first year in AAA. One of the running backs on that opponent later played at Texas. The other went to Arkansas. They were really better than us, but they didn't win.

Our coach ended up with a AAA state championship three years later. He also is in the Texas High School football hall of fame and has the stadium in our football crazy town named after him. Taking the blame, when it really wasn't his fault served him rather well, I'd say.

By the way, his district record in 10 years of coaching was 68-2.