Why We Quiz Our Players Alone First, and Then Together
One Play at a Time • Presented by Just Play • Episode 7 Companion
Dante Scarnecchia coached the New England Patriots’ offensive line for 34 years. In a C.O.O.L. Clinic talk on position meetings, he described how he tested his linemen: written tests, words or diagrams, “show me the blocking for this protection against this blitz.” A lot of the time, he said, he made those tests collaborative. Twenty minutes, talk it out, get it done together. What better way to get guys to communicate?
Then, almost in the same breath, he named the cost. If the test isn’t collaborative, your center has to know the guard and tackle calls himself. Every player has to know every block on his own.
He was describing two different tests that do two different jobs, and he was right about both. This season, we stopped choosing between them.
Stage One: Alone
Our players take an individual quiz on their phones. On many of the questions, they don’t pick an answer from a list. They draw the route.
The drawing isn’t precise, and it doesn’t need to be. What I’m looking for is whether a player understands what he’s supposed to do and understands the whole concept. There’s nobody to lean on or copy from. It’s just the player and what’s actually in his head.
That matters more than it sounds. Picking the right route out of four options and drawing it on a blank screen aren’t the same skill. One is recognizing; the other is producing. On Friday night, nobody hands a receiver four choices. He has to produce the depth, the stem, the break and any adjustment against what he sees, from nothing, in about a second and a half.
Stage Two: Together
Two days later, the same material comes back as a group quiz on the whiteboard. How we build the groups is the whole point.
Our varsity offensive line takes it together. The skill players split into three groups, two varsity and one JV, and each varsity skill group has a player from every position: quarterback, receivers, running backs, all working the same material at the same table.
The group stage is not a second chance to draw the same route. By then, most of these players can draw their route. What we want is detail: hearing why and how the player next to you does his job, how that affects you, and how the quarterback is processing the whole thing while it happens.
So a quarterback might tell a receiver, “When you run your route that way, it takes me off of it, and here’s why.” That receiver drew a perfectly good route on his phone two days earlier. Now, for the first time, he learns what his route looks like from the other end of the throw.
That’s what the group stage is for. It brings each player out of isolation.
Every coach has watched a version of this happen on the bench. A series ends, the quarterback and a receiver huddle over the tablet, and the quarterback says, “You drifted on that one. You ran into the guy I was reading, and it took me off you.” The receiver looks, sees it, and they fix it before they go back out. That conversation works because both of them just played the snaps, and each one brings what he saw from his own spot on the field.
The individual quiz is the series. The group quiz is the sideline conversation, held on a Wednesday instead of a Friday night, with no scoreboard and time to get it right.
Why the Order Matters
Most coaches have seen group work fail. One kid does the work, two watch, one is on his phone, and everybody gets the same grade.
Memory researchers have a name for part of that problem: collaborative inhibition. In a 2010 review, Suparna Rajaram and Luciane Pereira-Pasarin pulled together years of findings showing that when a group tries to remember something together, cold, its members usually come up with less than they would have working alone and pooling their answers afterward. One person starts talking and knocks everyone else off their own train of thought.
There’s another problem coaches recognize immediately, and it isn’t a memory issue: a player can decide somebody else will carry the group. Put the two together and you get a group that looks busy and learns little.
That risk is built into Scarnecchia’s own description of collaborative tests: your best players take over the room and carry the guys who aren’t as strong mentally. That gives your leaders a forum to teach. But a player who is always carried never has to find out what he doesn’t know.
That’s why we put the individual stage first. When each player works through the material on his own, he walks into the group already committed to his own picture. The conversation doesn’t start at “What’s the route?” It starts at “Here’s why I run it this way. What does that do to you?”
What the Research Does and Doesn’t Say
We didn’t build this from a research paper, but there is a body of research behind it, and some of it is humbling.
In college classrooms this is called a two-stage exam: take it alone, then take it as a group. Group scores are almost always higher than individual scores, which isn’t surprising. The real question is whether the individual walks out knowing more than he walked in with. In a controlled 2014 study, Gilley and Clarkston gave students a surprise retest three days after the exam. Questions the students had worked through in a group came back stronger than questions they had answered alone.
Not every study finds that. A 2012 study of a large introductory biology course by Leight and colleagues found collaborative testing raised scores on the test itself without improving retention. A 2019 follow-up using only open-ended questions, closer to drawing a route, found a real but smaller benefit that showed up about three weeks out rather than at nine days.
Two more caveats. Most of this research runs the group stage immediately after the individual one; we put two days in between, and the studies cited here don’t test our exact version. And those studies involve students learning the same material side by side. At our skill tables, the quarterback is learning the receiver’s job and the receiver is learning the quarterback’s. That lines up more closely with team cross-training research from Cannon-Bowers, Salas and colleagues. Teams that learn each other’s roles build what they call interpositional knowledge: you know enough of your teammate’s job to anticipate it.
That’s the group quiz’s real target. The question isn’t whether a player can draw his route. It’s whether he knows what his route does to everybody else on the field.
The Coach’s Job: Listen
The group quiz turned out to be one of the best diagnostic tools I have. Scarnecchia turned his meeting room around so he could see confused faces. A group quiz goes one step further: you don’t have to read the look, because you hear it. When a quarterback says, “That takes me off of it,” and the receiver answers, “Wait, I didn’t know you were reading that guy,” I know exactly where the gap is. A score on a phone would have told me he drew the route right. It never would have told me he didn’t know why.
My job during that quiz is mostly to listen, step in to keep the conversation moving, and ask questions that push the players deeper into the why.
It also gives players cover to ask. Scarnecchia took a line from the Marine Corps: the dumbest question is the one never asked, because when one player finally asks it, five others in the room didn’t have the nerve. A sophomore won’t raise his hand in a full position meeting to say he doesn’t get it. At a small table, with the quarterback explaining what he sees, he will, because there it isn’t a confession. It’s part of the job.
What It Looks Like on Friday Night
The quiz isn’t the only thing that changed. After a summer built around OTAs rather than typical camp days, we took time to settle on an identity as an offense and simplified what we were asking our players to do. The two-stage quiz is one piece of how that simpler system got into their heads.
The offense has continued to produce while that understanding has grown. The week two injuries forced new starters in at center and receiver, we set school records with 501 passing yards and six touchdowns. Over the past three games, our quarterback has completed close to 70 percent of his passes. We have called one run in that stretch, so every defense knows we’re throwing, and we still lead our local paper’s coverage area in passing. Six to eight different players catch the ball every game. That distribution is what we want from an offense in which players understand more than their own assignment.
On JV, our quarterback went 32 of 46 for 472 yards and five touchdowns in a 42–41 win. Late in our record-setting varsity game, he came in, read the defense, checked a quick-game route on his own and threw a 17-yard touchdown.
I call that educated freedom. We aren’t making every check from the sideline anymore. Players see middle-of-the-field open and adjust their routes, and they know that an adjustment is sometimes designed to get another receiver open. You can’t give a player freedom he hasn’t been educated for. Once he has been, you’d be crazy not to.
If You Want to Try It
- Individual first, always. The solo stage is what makes the group stage work. Without it, the group turns into players agreeing with whoever talks loudest.
- Build groups across positions. A table of receivers teaches receivers. A table with a quarterback, receivers and running backs teaches the concept.
- Ask for the why, not the what. If every player can already draw it, the group stage should be about what each assignment does to everyone else.
- Listen more than you talk. The group quiz shows you exactly where the understanding breaks, as long as you let the players do the talking.
Where Just Play Fits
The individual stage could be done on paper in a meeting room. For a part-time staff like ours, Just Play is what makes it practical. Players complete that retrieval work on their own time, and their answers are waiting for us before we ever get to the meeting room. That lets the meeting focus on the part technology can’t replace: a quarterback telling a receiver what he sees until they both see it the same way.
One Play at a Time is presented by Just Play. Learn more at justplaysolutions.com.
Related
Keith Grabowski (00:01.506)
Dante Skarneccia coached the offensive line for the New England Patriots for nearly. Dante Skarneccia coached the offensive line for the New England Patriots for 34 years. He had 40 plus years in the profession. If anybody on earth has earned the right to say, I know how to run a meeting room, it’s him. In a talk he gave on position meetings as part of the Cool Clinic, he tells a story about the last four years of his career.
He came back to the Patriots after two years of retirement and walked into his old meeting room and somebody had turned it around. His teaching station was now at the front facing the players with the screen behind him, and for the first time he wasn’t looking at the backs of heads, he was looking at faces. And here’s what he said about what he saw. He said a few guys in the room were what he called validators. When he makes a point, they’re nodding. They’ve got it and they’re going to make sure it gets done right on the field.
But he could also see the other guys, the ones glancing sideways at the players next to them. And he had a name for that expression that I probably can’t repeat here. you could go ahead and guess. But every time he saw it, he’d stop and he’d say, I’m not saying this right. He called turning that room around an epiphany for him, and then he said this. I could have done a lot better job in the pre- I and then he said that. And then he said this.
And then he said this: I could have done a lot better job in the previous 44 if I would have done this. That was 44 years for coach. And he’s the best off one of that’s 44 years for one of the best offensive line coaches in his generation. And he’s still changing how he teaches in the last four. In that same talk, he explained how he tested his linemen, written test, words or diagrams.
It was show me the blocking for this protection against this blitz. And a lot of the time he says he made those tests collaborative. Give him 20 minutes, talk it out, get it done together. And what a greater way to get guys to communicate. And then almost in the same breath, he points out what you give up when you do that. If it’s not collaborative, your center has to know the guard and tackle calls himself. Every guy has to know every block on his own.
Keith Grabowski (02:25.451)
And he’s describing two different tests that do two different jobs. And he’s right about both. This episode is what happened when we stopped choosing between them and what it’s looked like for us on Friday nights since. Welcome back to One Play at a time, presented by Just Play on the Coach and Coordinator Network. Today is about how we quiz our players, not whether we quiz them. And if you’ve been listening, you know how much we lean on quizzes to make sure that a check mark actually means something.
Today is about two stage Today is about a two-stage structure we’ve been running. Why the second stage is where some of the best teaching of our week happens without a coach saying much and what we’ve seen from our offense at both the varsity and JV levels since it’s been in place. Here’s how it works. Stage one is individual. Our guys take a quiz on their phones and a lot of questions they don’t pick and answer. Damn it.
Stage one is individual. Our guys take a quiz on their phones, and on a lot of questions, they don’t pick an answer from a list. They have to draw the route. This is something that’s easily done on their phones. Now it’s not necessarily the most precise thing, but what I’m looking for is do they understand what they’re supposed to do? Do they understand what the whole concept is? There’s nobody to lean on or copy from. It’s just that player and what’s actually in his head.
I want to say one thing about that drawing because I think it matters more than it sounds like. Picking the right route out of four options and drawing it from a blank screen aren’t the same skill. One is about recognizing, the other is about producing. And on Friday night, nobody hands a receiver four choices. He has to produce. And that’s the depth, the stem, the break, any adjustments against what he sees from nothing in about a second and a half. Coach
Coach Skarnekia said it about his chalkboards. Guys see it, they write it, they say it, and drawing is the writing part. Stage two comes for us two days later, and it’s a group quiz. How we build the groups is the whole point. So I’ll be specific. It’s our varsity offensive line, they take it together. That’s basically exactly Coach Scarnekia’s room. The skill guys get split into three groups.
Keith Grabowski (04:47.672)
The skill guys get split into three groups, and that’s where we have a little bit more depth. So there’s two varsity and one JV. And each varsity skill group is built with a guy from every position. So quarterback, receivers, running backs, all at the same, all in the same quiz, working on the same material. And we do this on a whiteboard. Here’s what we’re after, and it’s not just a second chance to draw the same route.
And honestly, by stage two, most of these guys can draw their route. So the question isn’t that anymore. It’s what do we want out of this group stage? And that’s detail. We want you hearing why and how the guy next to you does his job. How does this affect you? And how does the quarterback process the whole thing while it’s happening? So a quarterback might say to the receiver, When you run your route that way, it takes me off of it. And here’s why.
And that receiver who drew a perfectly good route on his phone two days earlier finds out for the first time what his route looks like from the other end of the throw. That’s what this group stage is for. It brings out that’s what this group stage is for. It brings each player out of isolation.
Keith Grabowski (06:04.63)
Every coach listening to this has watched the best teaching of the night happen on the bench. A series ends, the quarterback comes off, and a receiver walks over to the iPad or tablet with him, and nobody’s giving a lecture. The quarterback says, “You drifted in on this one. you ran into the guy I was reading off of, and it took me off of you.” The receiver looks at the screen, sees it, and says, “oh yeah, that’s it.” And so by the time they go back out there, they’ve fixed something that
I didn’t necessarily have to get involved for. And I like that they’re able to do some of that themselves on the sideline… Think about why that conversation works. It works because both of them just played those snaps. Nobody’s repeating what somebody else told him. Each guy is bringing what he saw from his own spot on the field. And when you put the two pictures together, you get something that neither of them had alone.
Take away the snaps, and the sideline conversation turns into a couple of guys nodding at whoever talks the loudest. Cut that part. That’s the whole design in one picture. The individual quiz is the series. The group quiz is the sideline conversation on a Wednesday instead of a Friday night, with no scoreboard and plenty of time to get it right. And because every varsity skill group has one of each position at the table.
It’s not just two guys at the tablet, it’s the whole route concept seen from every spot on the field at once.
You already know what group work usually looks like if you’ve done any of this on your own, because you’ve either sat through it in school or you assigned it. One kid does the work, two kids watch, one kid’s on his phone or computer, and everybody gets the same grade. That isn’t just a feeling. Memory researchers have a name for part of it, and it’s called collaborative inhibition. I’ll put the names, which are long ones, of the researchers, in the show notes.
Keith Grabowski (08:01.654)
but they pulled this from years of research in a 2010 review and find and the finding and the finding surprises people. When a group tries to remember something together cold, they usually come up with less than the same people would have if they each worked alone and pulled their answers afterwards. One person starts talking and it knocks everybody else off their own train of thought. Add in the kid who figures
Somebody else will carry it, and you get a group that looks busy but learns very little. That’s the danger hiding inside the best line.
Keith Grabowski (08:41.954)
That’s the danger hiding inside of Coach Garnekia’s talk. He said, in a collaborative test, your best players will be the ones that take over the room, and they’ll be carrying guys that aren’t as good mentally along with them. That is an upside because your leaders get a form to teach, but it’s also exactly the risk. Carrying is great on the field.
Keith Grabowski (09:07.544)
Caring is great on a
Keith Grabowski (09:11.66)
In a meeting room, a guy who’s always being carried never has to find out what he doesn’t know. The same research that shows the problem also points at the fix and it’s the order. When people pull it from memory on their own first and then come together, the group stops scrambling and everybody starts correcting everybody. Every guy walks in already committed to his own picture. So the conversation doesn’t start at what’s the route. It starts at, here’s why I run it this way. What does that do to you?
Here’s why I run it this way. What does that do to you? That’s the individual stage doing its job. It’s the snaps before the sideline. We didn’t build this off a research paper, but it turns out there’s a real body of research behind it, and some of it is humbling. So here’s the honest version. What we’re running has a name in college classrooms, a two-stage exam. Take it alone, then take it as a group.
And it’s been used for years in university science courses. Carl Wyman, who’s a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, spent half of his career on how science gets taught on how science gets taught, and he pushed it through his education and if and he pushed it through his education initiative at the University of British Columbia. The first finding is the obvious one. The group score is almost always higher than the individual scores, which, sure, more brains, better answers.
That’s not the interesting question. The interesting question is whether the individual walks out of the room knowing more than he walked in with. The best controlled answer I found was a 2014 study by Gillian Clarkson in the Journal of College Science Teaching, and they gave students a surprising retest three days after the exam without warning, and the questions students had worked through in a group came back stronger than the ones they’d answered alone. The group stage didn’t just raise the group score.
It’s stuck to the individual. Now, here’s the part that can be humbling. Not every study finds that. A 2012 study of large introduct A 2012 study of a large introductory biology course by Leite and colleagues found collaborative testing raised scores on the test itself, but it didn’t improve what the students retained. In a 2019 follow-up, Clarkson again, Cook and Weir.
Keith Grabowski (11:35.087)
Clarkston again with Cook and Weir used only open-ended questions where students have to produce an answer instead of choosing one. That’s closer to what we do with drawing the route. The benefit was real but smaller, and it showed up about three work weeks later rather than nine days. And that’s certainly not the timeline we work with in football. So my honest read is the same one. We landed on it with flip learning back in episode two. The concept is sound.
But the execution decides whether it works. So group testing isn’t magic. It works when every kid commits to his own answer first. The group stays small, and the conversation is about why, not in splitting up the questions and trading answers. Two more things. First, of that research, two more things. First, most of that research runs the group stage right after the individual one. We put it two days in between. Nobody’s testing our exact version.
And I am not going to pr pretend that we have, but
Keith Grabowski (12:42.242)
But what I can say is that the two-day gap makes the group quiz another pull from their memory after some forgetting has set in. And we talked about that in episode five, the learning, getting a second work shift. Second, the research I just walked you through is about students learning the same material side by side. What we’re doing at those tables to what we’re doing in those small groups is a little different.
Quarterback learning the receiver’s job and the receiver learning the quarterbacks, for example. And that has its own research, which is called the Cannon, Bowers and Solace. And that one has its own research. The Cannon Bowers and Salais, the Cannon, Bowers and Salais, the Cannon, Bowers and Solas cross-training work we talked about in episode four. Teams that learn each other’s roles build what they call interpositional knowledge.
You don’t just know your job, you know enough of your teammates to anticipate it. And that’s the group quiz’ target. Not can you draw it, but do you know what your route does to everybody else on the field.
Here’s what I didn’t expect from this, and that’s that the group quiz turned out to be one of the best diagnostic tools that I have. Remember Coach Snarnekia. Remember Coach Star Remember Coach Garneccia? Remember Coach Sgarneccia turning his room around so he could see the confused looks on a kid’s face. A group quiz does him one better. You don’t have to read the look, you hear it. So when a receiver tells a quarterback, that takes me off.
So when a quarterback tells a receiver that takes me off of it, the receiver says, wait, I didn’t know you were reading that guy, then I know exactly where the gap was. A score on a phone would have told me he drew the route right. It never would have told me that he didn’t know why. My job during that quiz is mostly to shut up and listen, maybe to step in to keep the conversation moving along, or ask them a question that gets them deeper into some of these why.
Keith Grabowski (14:51.576)
Type of things. There’s more than one thing the group stage does that I didn’t design for. Coach Skarnekia learned, Coach Skarnekia learned it in the Marine Corps, and he said that the dumbest question is the one that’s never asked because when one guy finally asks it, there’s five other guys in the room who didn’t have the guts to. In front of a full position meeting, a sophomore isn’t raising his hand to say he doesn’t get it.
But in a small group with a quarterback right there explaining what he sees, he will because now he isn’t because now it isn’t a confession, it’s just part of his job.
So what does all of it look like on a Friday night? And I want to be careful here because the quiz isn’t the only thing that changed. So we settled on an identity as an offense, and it did take us some time. I explained that. Our our summer wasn’t necessarily built around typical camp days. It was more OTAs and we didn’t get guys together. So I think it put us behind in the learning. but we were simplifying what we are asking our players to do. So the Tuesdays quiz is one piece of how that simpler system
got into their heads. But the understanding has kept it growing and you can see it. Three games three games ago, we operated better, much more proficiently than we had in the prior games before. And even though we lost the game, we took the first lead of the season and we had a lot of efficient and explosive reps. And we comp and we competed for four quarters, which I think was an important step for our program. The next week then
The but the next week injuries forced two new starters in the lineup, one at center and one at receiver. But that Friday night, we set school records, 501 yards passing and six touchdowns. And over the last three games, our quarterback is completing close to 70% of his throws and even higher than 80% if you take out some drops, which is something that is a completely different issue that we’re going handle in practice. So
Keith Grabowski (16:58.946)
The part that’s impressed me more than the numbers is it it’s no secret what we’re doing. In our change, we’ve called one run, and that was three weeks ago. Yes, I said that right. We’ve had one play where we’ve handed the ball off. So we’ve called zero runs in the past two games since. So every defense we see knows we’re throwing it. And right now we lead our local papers coverage area in passing.
When the other team knows what’s coming and it still works, it’s not a trick play. That’s the understanding and execution showing up from our players. The best part is that it’s spread out too. This isn’t just one receiver who’s dominating. We get six to eight different players catching the ball every game. And it seems in every game there’s maybe one who excels more than the others. And it doesn’t happen when one receiver knows the offense and everybody else just knows his own routes.
And it’s also not just our varsity, our JV quarterback in his most recent game went 32 of 46, completed 70% of his passes with five touchdowns and 472 yards and a 42 to 41 win. And remember that those JV skilled guys, they’re also in their own little group there working on that group quiz. But I think the moment I’d put above all the shows some of the understanding that’s happening was at the end of that
record-setting win when our JV quarterback went into the game late and he went out there, he looked at the defense, he checked one of our quick game concepts, checked one of the routes on his own and threw a touchdown for it and threw a touchdown on it. he was one for one 17 yards and a score. and that’s where we are now. for them, I call it educated freedom. we aren’t making every check from the sideline anymore. our players are making adjustments
without us. They see, for example, this is a middle of the field open. I know I’m gonna adjust my route to this. So they don’t just know their job, they know why it works and what it does to the guy next to them. Because sometimes adjusting their route is designed to help get another receiver open. And the quarterback is seeing it all as well. So So you can’t give a kid freedom he hasn’t been educated on. But once he has been, I think you’d be crazy not to.
Keith Grabowski (19:22.72)
If you coach, you already run a version of this every Friday night. Your guys play that series, they come to the sideline, they teach each other some things. They have those conversations, you know, after you’re done talking sometimes, but they’re always giving that feedback to each other. And I think the question isn’t whether you’re building that same conversation.
The question is whether you’re building that same conversation into your week on purpose or waiting for a game to force it. Coach Scarnekia was still changing how he taught 44 years later. The part I keep coming back to isn’t that he found something new. It’s that he noticed his old way was keeping him from seeing what he actually understood. And that’s the whole thing. Test them alone so every kid has to find out what’s really in his own head, but then put them together.
The quarterback next to the receiver, the receiver next to the running back. So nobody’s learning his job in isolation. That’s how you earn the right to hand them some of that freedom so they can better execute on a Friday night. None of this works without the first stage. And the first stage only works if every kid can take it on his own, on his own time… and the answers are what he can actually
Keith Grabowski (20:40.108)
With answers landing somewhere, I can actually use them. That’s what just play gives a part-time staff like ours. The individual rep drawn from a blank screen on a phone before a kid ever comes to the room, before the kid ever comes to the meeting room. So that when the group sits down two days later, every guy at the table has something to bring. The Just Play platform handles that part that used to eat into our meeting time, and that frees us up for.
That frees, and that frees the meeting up for the part only people can do, a quarterback telling a receiver what he sees until they both see it the same way. This has been One Play at a time presented by Just Play on the Coach and Coordinator Network. We’ll see you next time and be sure to check out Just Play. The link is in the show notes.