Playing fast is not just about tempo or simplicity. Andrew Coverdale explains how to give players enough answers while organizing the offense so they can see it, trust it, and react without hesitation.

Andrew Coverdale is the pass game coordinator at the University of Kentucky, coming off the Wildcats’ 31-21 upset win over No. 9 Texas A&M.

Andrew Coverdale has spent years thinking about phrases coaches repeat so often that the meaning can get lost inside the repetition.

Play fast is one of them.

“We say things and sometimes we say them and we say them so often there’s truth in them,” Coverdale said. The problem comes when coaches stop asking what those phrases actually require from a player.

Coverdale, now the passing game coordinator at Kentucky, has spent much of his career studying that question through football, communication, motor learning and human performance. He is quick to qualify his expertise.

“Nobody’s going to confuse me with a neuroscientist.”

What he has tried to understand is what football feels like from inside the helmet. What slows a player down? What allows something complicated to feel simple? How much offense is enough to give players answers without loading them with so much information that they have to consciously work through it after the ball is snapped?

For Coverdale, playing fast starts there.

Be as Simple as You Can, But No Simpler

One of the ideas that pushed Coverdale down this path came from his friend Shane Day, who shared with him a quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

“Be as simple as you can, but no simpler.”

Coverdale sees a responsibility on both sides of that sentence.

A coach can give players so many techniques, assignments, adjustments and concepts that they are forced into conscious thought when they should be reacting. Coverdale believes that immediately slows a player down.

But he is just as wary of chasing simplicity for its own sake.

If a limited offense constantly asks linemen to block bad angles, receivers to run routes into leverage or a quarterback to work through concepts without good answers against the coverage, then the simplicity has stopped serving the player.

“The point is your kids playing fast, and having enough tools,” Coverdale said.

There is no magic number of formations, concepts or adjustments that creates that balance. In the conversation, Keith Grabowski raised practice repetitions and teaching time as part of the equation, and Coverdale agreed. What a team can carry depends in part on how much time it has to practice it, how well the staff can teach it and how naturally the players can execute it.

Coverdale also knows his own tendency. He describes himself as a creative coach who loves originality and new ideas. His danger is not becoming too simple. It is continuing to add.

Coverdale knows not every coach leans the same way. Some simplify so aggressively that they end up short on answers.

Watch What Looks Natural

Coverdale believes part of finding the right amount of offense is an art. A coach has to spend enough time immersed in his system to recognize what good execution is supposed to look like, then pay attention when the players show him something.

During an initial install, Coverdale mentally puts concepts into three groups.

Some look natural almost immediately. The quarterback, receiver or other player looks as if he has been doing it for years.

Others are not natural yet, but Coverdale sees enough to believe repetitions and time could turn them into something the player can execute well.

Then there are the concepts that do not look natural and do not appear likely to become strengths.

Coverdale went through that process with a new quarterback who had very little varsity starting experience. As they installed the offense, certain route concepts that Coverdale had hardly featured with previous teams suddenly looked different.

The quarterback “just came alive” when he processed them.

Coverdale asked him directly: “Do you feel, when we run this, this and this, do you feel faster because you look faster?”

The quarterback told him he did.

“I feel like I just see it.”

That matters more than whether the concept happened to be one of Coverdale’s favorites. There were concepts that had barely existed in previous versions of his offense that became important because this quarterback processed them naturally.

The roster helped determine what the offense became.

The same conversation extended to the run game. Grabowski described years when an offensive line or back simply functioned better in one family of schemes than another, even when the staff could not perfectly explain why. The larger point was that an install gives the staff information. At some point, coaches have to decide whether something needs more work or whether it belongs back on the shelf.

Coverdale admits that can be difficult when the coach is the one who loves the concept.

“There’s definitely such a thing as getting so personally invested in something that you love something so much, it becomes like the sunk cost balance, and you just keep riding it and riding it.”

Build Around What Your Players Do Best

Once the offense discovers something the players execute well, Coverdale wants to protect it.

He used Stick as an example. For years, it had not been a major strength of his offense.

“You would think Stick is just like eating vegetables,” he joked.

Then one team became good at it.

That changed what went around it.

Instead of adding offense simply because another concept looked attractive, Coverdale began building what he called Stick reactives. If the defense adjusted one way to take away Stick, the offense needed an answer for that adjustment. If the defense changed again, that reaction exposed something else.

The offense began functioning through if-then statements.

If they defend our core concept this way, then we have this answer.

“You build your offense to protect that core of things that you know you’re going to be really good at,” Coverdale said.

That is where some of the volume can come from without necessarily creating more uncertainty. The new answers are attached to something the players already know.

Coverdale gave another example from a concept his teams had rarely featured before.

“We had never been a boundary fade-flat team ever in my life,” he said.

Then it became one of that team’s best answers.

“That was our dance music.”

If Coverdale knew he was going to call it four or five times in a game, his job was to understand how defenses would try to stop it and make sure the offense could protect its best players doing their best things.

Lighten the Player’s Mental Luggage

Coverdale describes everything a player has to process as luggage.

Take a Z receiver running a curl.

There is his split. The corner’s alignment and technique. The overhang defender. The safety structure. The release. The route depth. His relationship to the other receivers. The technique at the top of the break. What happens after the catch. Whether it is third-and-8 or first-and-10 and how that affects the route.

Coverdale does not believe those details are unimportant.

The problem is making the receiver consciously retrieve them one at a time while trying to play.

“The more baggage I load him down with mentally to do that job and the less intuitive I make it, the more I slow him down.”

The goal is to organize the information until the player can recognize the entire situation as a picture rather than a checklist.

Because he has learned it, processed it and experienced it enough, “it’s not 15 different thoughts that he cycles through. It’s one picture. It’s one reaction.”

That is Coverdale’s version of playing fast.

He is not removing the information. He is trying to arrange it so the player can apply the right information without experiencing every coaching point as a separate thought.

Start With the Why

Coverdale tries to lighten that luggage by making the information connect logically.

He thinks about a play through its goal, the player’s assignment and the technique required to execute the assignment.

Those could become three unrelated things a receiver has to memorize.

Or they can flow from one another.

If the player understands the goal of the play, his assignment makes more sense. If he understands his assignment inside the goal, the technique required to execute it has a reason.

“So I want all the whys to line up in a way that it just becomes one logical streamlined thought process.”

Coverdale has even started by teaching offensive players defense.

In Zoom meetings, his players have learned what a five-technique is, what a force player is, how alignments affect the next level, the difference between spot-drop and match coverage and what defensive shells look like.

He is not trying to make every offensive player a defensive coordinator.

He wants them to understand the problems the offense was built to solve.

When the staff eventually draws a flat route, Coverdale wants the player to understand why that route exists in relation to how a defense is likely to play it instead of simply memorizing where to stand and where to run.

Teach the Goal, Then the Roadblocks

When Coverdale introduces a play, he starts with what he calls a goal slide.

Suppose the offense wants to throw a flat route to the slot receiver.

That is the goal.

Then Coverdale works backward with the players.

How can the defense stop it?

A corner could squat on the route. An overhang defender could undercut it. If the flat is taken away, how should the other routes be built so the offense still has an answer?

Only after the goal is clear does Coverdale move into what he calls roadblocks.

What could prevent the offense from accomplishing the goal?

Spacing can be wrong. The quarterback can be indecisive. A receiver can use poor technique at the top of the route and allow a defender to undercut it.

By the time the staff reaches assignments and techniques, those details are answers to questions the players have already considered. The spacing, timing and technique are connected to a problem rather than presented as isolated coaching points.

That gives the players what Coverdale calls a vocabulary and framework for their experience on the field. As the repetitions accumulate, they can begin recognizing what went wrong and why.

The objective is a player who can diagnose and fix problems inside the structure instead of waiting for the coach to give him another rule.

Stop Talking and Make the Players Retrieve It

Coverdale admits the next part requires discipline from him.

“Sometimes I like the sound of my own voice a little too much.”

Initial teaching requires explanation. Coverdale does not want the meeting to stay there.

Once the initial teaching is finished, he wants more quizzing, more feedback from the players and more opportunities for them to explain the concept back to the staff using the offense’s own language.

What did you see?

Why are you doing this?

What happens if the defense does that?

What is our terminology for it?

Coverdale pointed to Make It Stick as an influence on this part of his teaching. He specifically discussed effortful learning and having players retrieve information at intervals instead of continually hearing it again from the coach.

That gives the staff a better read on what players actually understand.

A player nodding while the coach explains something is different from a player producing the answer himself, explaining the concept in the offense’s terminology and showing that he can connect it to what he sees.

Coverdale wants that information coming back from the players.

The Plays Are Not the Whole System

Later in the conversation, Grabowski framed another piece of Coverdale’s approach: coaches talk constantly about having an offensive system, but the teaching process may be as important to that system as the collection of plays.

Coverdale agreed.

Curl-flat, four verticals, Stick and other common concepts are available to everybody. The differentiator is not simply knowing the play. It is having a cohesive thought process players understand well enough to operate inside and eventually fix problems inside.

Coverdale pointed to Wing-T football as an example. He believes those teams have often been able to outperform their talent because everybody understands the framework and how one part leads to another.

He also referenced Tubby Raymond and Tiger Ellison, not simply because of the offenses they ran, but because of the teaching systems behind them.

That is why Coverdale believes a coach could potentially be handed a different playbook and still succeed if the teaching process remains sound.

The scheme can change.

The method for helping players understand football does not have to start over with it.

Which Ditch Do You Fall Into?

Coverdale finished the conversation by bringing the issue back to the coach.

Which ditch do you naturally lean toward?

Coverdale knows his. He loves creativity and new ideas, so he has to be careful that solving every problem with another concept, adjustment or tag does not eventually slow his players down.

Another coach may lean toward the opposite ditch, using simplicity as a blanket answer until the offense does not have enough tools to handle what defenses present.

Coverdale experienced the value of having someone who pulled him back toward the middle during his years working with Bob Beatty. Coverdale could explore creatively while Beatty remained highly tuned into execution, discipline and structure.

Coverdale believes that tension made both of them better.

His challenge to coaches is not to declare simplicity or multiplicity the winner. It is to be honest about their own tendencies, empower people on the staff who see the issue differently and keep asking two questions:

How fast are we really allowing our players to play?

And do we actually have the answers we say we have?

For Coverdale, that is what “play fast” finally comes down to: giving players enough tools to solve the game without making them carry so much mental luggage that those tools slow them down.

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