Less Is More: How Russ Phillips Transformed Hendrix’s Offense by Simplifying Everything

John Snell (00:01)
We start on the offensive side of the ball where Hendricks College put up a massive 60 points against Austin this past week. Offense coordinator Russ Phillips had his group rolling over 600 yards of offense in a balanced attack. Russ, we appreciate your time. Congratulations on a great win. And we look forward to hearing from you and give you an opportunity to ⁓ recognize your staff.

Russ Phillips (00:28)
Yeah, and first I would like to thank you and Keith, ⁓ you know, on reaching out to us and giving our college and our athletes, you know, props for the hard work and commitment that they put in. know, our head coach, Buck Buchanan, our athletic director, Amy Weaver, our president, Dr. Peterson, ⁓ we have outstanding support here that allows us to do our job the way that needs to be done. never, we’ve never been told no when we need something.

And that’s the kind of place you want to be at and you have a chance to be successful. I’ll start by, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. I, I’m, this is my 31st year of coaching. I spent my first 23, I’m a Dallas foot worth guy. I coached 23 years at the Texas high school football level at places like South Lake Carroll, which is a very well known place, Denton Geyer, Louisville. So I never thought I’d do anything else.

Coach Buck recruited my son out of South Lake Carroll as a wire receiver to come here and play. And essentially he recruited the whole family about a month later and we’ve been here for eight years and we absolutely love what we’re doing now. So that’s kind of how that happened. But I’ll say this, it’s all about family for us and building relationships. Five of my offensive staff members, ⁓ three of those five, I coached here and they played for us here at Hendricks.

John Snell (01:34)
Hehehe.

Russ Phillips (01:48)
⁓ My wide receiver coach, Mason Doar, he was a quarterback here at Hendricks. He does a phenomenal job. My offensive line coach, Keith Taylor, he played for us here and I coached him as well. Does a great job. My tight end coach, Deuce Carter, he played for us here and does a great job with our tight ends. And then my running back coach, Doug Peterson, we recruited his son out of Mississippi about four or five years ago. We built that relationship and then he’s retired police force. He wanted to coach college football.

So through that relationship we had five or six years ago, we were able to hire him and he’s done a phenomenal job for us with our running backs. And then Michael Vera, who is our assistant wide receiver coach, he actually played with Coach Buchanan at Austin College, the team that we just played. So again, it’s about relationships and trust in this business is about trust and relationships and you’ve got to have that to be successful. So that’s a little bit about my staff. Like I said,

And even on the defensive side, two of those guys played for us as well here at Hendricks. So when those guys stay around, it’s important to those guys. It’s important for this place to be successful and do everything we can to give our guys the best chance to win.

John Snell (03:01)
Yeah, Russ, I think you know, whenever you grow your own, ⁓ that makes a difference in a program and keeping them around, think makes a huge difference. So kudos to you guys for being able to do that. So ⁓ as you know, part of the format is we ask that you share a little bit to our listeners. And you mentioned revamping, simplifying, less is more, and something about your roster. So.

Russ Phillips (03:09)
Yes, sir.

John Snell (03:29)
Please share with our listeners some of your thoughts on those topics.

Russ Phillips (03:34)
Okay, I’ll start with ⁓ what I call less is more. And I think this will be beneficial to some young coaches and even I’m 50 about turn 53 years old. you sometimes you have to take a look in the mirror at yourself, even though you’ve been doing this job a long time and you have to make changes ⁓ to make everyone better around you. ⁓ After our third game of the season this year, we had been, we were, we were wanting to ⁓ beat a good ⁓ team in Huntington lost to a really good Maryville team.

Lost to Millsaps who’s definitely better than they have been in the past four or five years. And we just weren’t producing the kind of points we weren’t running. We were averaging about 65 plays a game, which is not what we do here. So I sat down ⁓ over that weekend after that that third game, that loss, and I said, you know what? What we’re doing is not working. I fell into a trap of we have really smart guys here.

You know, our players are intelligent. So sometimes you feel like you can just put so much offense in because we can handle it, right? We’re smart. We can go out and teach it one time. We’re going to line up right. We’re going to do it right for the most part. And we’re going to roll on. But what that does is it reduces your reps that you get on those plays in practice. And I sat down and took a, took a deep look at myself and I said, you know what? Something has to change. So.

I came in on that Monday morning with my offensive staff. said, we’ll meet at 930. And ⁓ just to give you kind of an insight on what my call sheet looked like in that third game of the season, I took four sheets up with me full of jargon, I’ll call it, okay? So sometimes I couldn’t even find what I was looking for, you know, in a particular section. So I went from those four sheets to basically a half a sheet of paper.

John Snell (05:17)
Yeah.

Russ Phillips (05:29)
in these last two games and we’ve put up 1184 yards and 107 points in the last two games that we’ve played. So you can take away what you want from it, but I just like to say less is more. We’ve gotten, we may have repped something two or three times previously and now we’re getting 12 to 15 reps of that same particular play ⁓ each week in practice, which.

makes a huge difference. Even if you have smart guys, it’s still about repping that play over and over and over and those guys being comfortable with what we’re doing and playing fast. ⁓ Let me go back to the 60 plays a game. You know, we always called ourselves a tempo team and really we weren’t playing with tempo. I mean, I look back and we were playing slow. ⁓ But the last two games, our goal was to hit 80 against Rhodes three weeks ago and we hit 79.

And then we had an off, we had a bye week. And then this week, our goal was still that 80 number and we hit 98. And I’ve never done that in my seven years of calling offense here. We’ve never run 98 plays in a game at a 6.6 yard average. So it works for us. And that’ll be the plan moving forward. It’s about us being good at what we’re doing. And the tempo forces people to line up a lot more and not be able to bring people.

John Snell (06:33)
Wow.

Yeah, that’s a lot.

Russ Phillips (06:54)
and do all the blitz and stunts and the perimeter stuff and different coverages and they have to play a little more base, a little more sound. And we know where we’re going with the ball and we’ve got great players. Let me talk about that because I talked about the coaches, but when I was a young coach, I thought it was all about coaching, right? We’re the greatest thing ever. We’re winning state championships at Denton Geyer and Louisville and South Lake Carroll winning 14, 15 games a year. But let’s be honest.

You’re only as good as those guys you have on the field and we’ve done a great job here recruiting players. You know we’re the only division three well now Lyon College is also division three so we have two but forever we were the only one here in Arkansas. There are no division threes in Oklahoma. know Texas obviously is is division three heavy somewhat and that’s where a lot of our recruiting base comes from and me being from that area. But I just feel like our staff has done a phenomenal job on identifying.

the type of kid that we need here to be successful on the academic side of the street and the athletic side of the street. And that’s the balance that has to take place here for it to be successful.

John Snell (08:05)
No doubt. You mentioned that you increased your roster and because of the size roster now, your practices are different. ⁓ Talk about that just a little bit.

Russ Phillips (08:16)
Yeah, so when I first got here in 2018, our roster, we were holding usually about 82 to 84 guys on a roster. And then last year was our largest roster at 107. And we were like, you know, that’s a big number, but we’re going to try to push the envelope because let’s be honest, competition makes everyone better, right? And guys get comfortable on the field, guys get comfortable as coaches.

At Southlake Carroll, I’ll just say that it was the most uncomfortable place I had ever worked because of the expectation. But you know what? I learned more from that place and I became a better coach because of those three years that I was there because I was uncomfortable every day when I went out onto the football field. And I think that’s important. But and our guys, it’s about competition. We brought some freshmen in. We have five freshmen on the field Saturday at any given time at the same time. And those dudes are playing their tail off. ⁓

So it’s college football, the best guys play. And that’s what I always tell them. My job is to recruit the best player, your job is to not get your job taken. And that’s the best way I know how to put it. ⁓ But with that roster size, we brought in a class of about 83 freshmen, which the largest we had had was around 47 to 48 previously in a class. So it took us from 107 to 153 when we started this season. And we’ve only lost, I think, three guys we counted yesterday off of that.

off of that roster, which is unbelievable. ⁓ And what it’s done, you know, we were having to go good on good, one on two, slow practices, keep everybody healthy. And now we’re able to split up, know, on both, we only have one practice surface. So we’re on one end, defense is on one end, and we’re hitting it and getting it on our end because we’re playing as fast as we can. you know, we’re running, we’ll get 20, we’ll get 30 plays in in a 10-minute team period.

John Snell (09:47)
Yeah, it is.

Russ Phillips (10:13)
which is phenomenal, we break that up into two different periods. we’re running 60, that’s 60 plays a day on the ground and then we got another 26, 707 plays that we get in in a 12 minute span. the quality of work is exponentially better than what it was.

John Snell (10:31)
No doubt. We always felt that BW, that Ross’s size was critical for practice purposes. And as you said, competition. mean, competition hopefully brings the best out of everybody. And when you got to compete every day for a job, boy, you come to practice with a little different mindset, don’t you, Ross?

Russ Phillips (10:45)
Yes, sir.

You’re right. There’s no doubt

about it. And that’s what it’s done. ⁓ Guys know. They look at that dude behind them and say, hey, if I don’t get my stuff together, somebody’s going to be playing. They don’t want that. So like you said, it makes everybody better. Obviously, it makes us better as coaches when we have those guys competing hard on the field in practice. And it makes us play harder on game day, too. mean, the expectation is always to play hard here.

until the whistle blows, you know, again, when you’ve got that guy behind you that’s gonna go hard no matter what, if he’s the backup, then you better get your job done.

John Snell (11:28)
Well, love your ideas, revamp and simplify. Love your idea of less is more. And again, congrats on a great win. We wish you the best of luck the rest of the way, Russ. We’ll be watching the rest of your season, and we look forward to you having continued success.

Russ Phillips (11:43)
Awesome.

I appreciate it. I want to thank you guys so much for recognizing us and you know, it truly is a team effort and a family effort here. ⁓ if I’ve said anything in this interview, I hope that hit home that it’s definitely not what this guy’s doing right here. It’s what the people around me are doing because I’m only as good as they are.

But I appreciate you guys.