Somewhere in my house right now there’s a stack of three ring binders. Multicolored tabs. Route trees. Protection rules. A couple hundred pages of installed offense, organized down to the last detail. That was my first head coaching job, back in 2001.
Here’s my confession. If I’d put a twenty dollar bill on page fifty of every one of those binders, I’d probably still have most of my money. Nobody got that far. Not because the kids were lazy, but because a binder was never going to be how they learned our offense, no matter how clean the diagrams were.
Keep that twenty dollars in mind. We’ll come back to it later in this series.
Why Traditional Football Playbooks Aren’t Enough to Teach Players
I’m back on the sidelines this year at Bay High School after ten years away studying the game, and I walked right back into the same trap I was in a decade ago: docs, drive folders, Hudl, forms, none of it connected. Our whole staff has a full time job outside of coaching. Only one of us is even in the building during the school day. Our roster is heavy with multi-sport athletes, and summer around here means real, voluntary OTAs, not the “voluntary” that everybody winks at.
Efficiency wasn’t optional. So when I brought in Just Play, our head coach Nick Bigrigg, a former player of mine, didn’t need convincing.
But Just Play isn’t the story here. It’s the vehicle. The system we landed on is simple: teach one concept at a time, check whether the player can actually retrieve it, reinforce it with short reminders, then help him connect that concept to everything around it. We built that process inside Just Play using three types of video. The rest of this article walks through why, and what it looks like.
Why Are Football Players Learning Differently Than They Used To?
This isn’t just a feeling coaches have in a meeting room. National data on student learning shows a decline in reading and math scores beginning around 2013, roughly the same window when smartphone and social media use took off among teenagers. Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor and faculty director of its Center for Education Policy Research, has called this a “learning recession.” Kane points to reduced reading time, sleep disruption, and time spent on social media as likely contributors, while being clear the research hasn’t landed on one single cause.
For coaches, it shows up in a specific way at Bay: players who watch film for an hour without blinking but glaze over in a traditional install meeting. Players who remember a 60-second video clearly but can’t tell you what was on a packet handed out Thursday afternoon. There’s a real, well-documented phenomenon behind part of that gap, the picture superiority effect, which shows people simply remember images better than words. For a player trying to connect a rule to an alignment or a movement, video shows him the picture instead of asking him to build it in his head from a page.
Even the NFL has adjusted. Several teams have added instructional-design roles focused specifically on how information gets taught, not just what gets taught. John Vieira has held that title with the Packers, the Broncos, and now the Jets. He’s not a football coach. His background is learning science, and he was a classroom teacher before he ever sat in an NFL meeting room. If NFL staffs are paying someone whose entire job is coaching the coaches on how to teach, that tells the rest of us something.
The Three Tier Video Framework We Built With Just Play
We didn’t just dump every diagram and cutup into the Just Play playbook. We built it around three tiers, each one tied to how memory actually works.
Tier one: Foundation. Five to seven minute videos, never longer than ten. Each one covers exactly one concept. Cognitive load theory tells us working memory can only process about four new chunks of information at a time, so we stay inside that window. Every foundational video is paired with a short quiz, not for compliance but for retrieval practice. In their landmark 2006 study, researchers Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke found that students who were tested on material after studying it retained substantially more of it on a delayed test than students who simply restudied the material again.
Tier two: Reminders. We call these quick hitters. Under two minutes, usually 30 to 60 seconds. Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, first documented in the 1880s and replicated many times since, shows how quickly newly learned material can decay without reinforcement, especially soon after learning. Our reminders aren’t new installs. They’re short opportunities to bring previously taught information back to the surface, the same way you stop needing GPS voice prompts after driving the same route 50 times.
Tier three: Connection. Two to three minute videos that show players how concepts relate to each other, released progressively through the season. A beginner looking at a chessboard sees 32 pieces. A master sees patterns and relationships. That’s schema theory, and it’s why experienced players process a football field faster than new ones. This is the tier that turns a player who can execute his assignment into a player who can adjust when the assignment breaks down.
Every video in the playbook opens with a color coded slide, blue for teaching, red for quick hitters, white for connection, so players know exactly what kind of learning is coming before it starts.
Here’s what it looks like applied to one concept. Foundation: the player gets the full teaching video covering the rule, the technique, and why it works. Reminder: later that week he gets a 45 second clip reinforcing one coaching point from that video. Connection: later in the install, he sees how that same rule changes when the formation or the defensive look changes. Three touches, three different jobs, one concept.
How This Teaching System Shows Up on the Field
Six months ago, before we rebuilt this, our players had decent play knowledge but looked like robots running their assignments. The moment something changed, a defender showed up somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, they had no answer. They knew the play. They didn’t understand it.
At an early 7-on-7, I watched a receiver from another program jog over to his coach between reps, not confused, just asking a detailed question about a leverage adjustment he’d noticed two reps earlier. That’s a question you can only ask once you understand a concept well enough to notice something was off. Our players weren’t there yet. They had the map. They hadn’t walked the trail.
One of our sophomores told me, unprompted, that the quiz after a teaching video was the first time he actually knew whether he understood something instead of just assuming he did. He wasn’t complimenting the technology. He was describing what honest, real-time feedback on your own understanding feels like, instead of finding out you were wrong on a Friday night in front of everybody.
And it’s paying off for the players we don’t see every day. Guys who played baseball all summer and never set foot on our field still came back able to execute, because they were building their knowledge base in the background the entire time.
Where This Series Goes From Here
With Just Play, I know exactly how much of our teaching our players completed this summer, something those old binders could never tell me. Later in this series, I’ll share what that data showed us, along with how we built the install calendar week to week, how we handle kids who missed summer for other sports, and how our quarterbacks use the platform differently than our linemen.
The underlying problem isn’t unique to Bay High School. It’s the mismatch between how coaches teach and how players actually learn. This series is one way to close that gap, and Just Play is the platform that’s made it possible to build the fix without adding hours to a staff that already has full time jobs outside of football.
One Play at a Time is presented by Just Play on the Coach and Coordinator Network.
Quick Answers
How do you teach a football playbook to high school players? Break it into single concepts taught through short video (five to seven minutes), test whether the player can actually retrieve the concept with a quiz, reinforce it later with short 30 to 60 second reminders, then show how the concept connects to the rest of the offense as the season goes on.
How can football coaches help players retain what they install? Retention drops off fast without reinforcement, so a single install meeting isn’t enough. Spaced, short reminders through the week and a quiz right after teaching a new concept both help move it from short-term to long-term memory.
How long should football teaching videos be? Keep foundational teaching videos between five and seven minutes and covering exactly one concept. Reminder videos should run 30 to 60 seconds. Longer videos covering multiple concepts at once tend to overload what players can actually retain.
Should football coaches quiz players on the playbook? Yes. A short quiz after a teaching video isn’t about compliance, it’s retrieval practice, and it gives both the coach and the player honest, immediate feedback on whether the concept actually landed.
How do you teach multi-sport athletes who miss summer football practice? Build the install into short video modules players can work through on their own schedule instead of requiring in-person meetings. Players who missed summer workouts for other sports can still absorb the foundational concepts in the background
Learn more about Just Play Sports Solutions
Just Play Sports Solutions is the coaching platform we use to build, teach, and deliver our offensive system at Bay High School. Throughout this series, you’ll see how we’re using Just Play for installation, player learning, practice preparation, communication, quizzes, and staff collaboration.
Related:
Okay, let’s go. Here’s the honest answer. Every piece I just described, the color coding, the position tagging, the quiz gating isn’t a formatting trick I layered on top of a general tool. It’s how the platform is actually built. When I build a play, the diagram, the teaching video, the quick hitter, and the quiz all live attached to that same play. If I update a rule, it updates everywhere that.
The concept shows up, not in four separate documents. I now have to remember to go fix by hand. When I assign a quiz, I’m not manually building a distribution list. I tag it to a position group once and it automatically routes to my lineman or my skill guys or just my hybrids, whoever it’s actually built for. And I can see a and I can see player by player who watched the video all the way through versus who clicked it and closed the tab, and whether a quiz result
Reflects real understanding or a lucky guess.
You can get documents into one share folder. What you can’t get from Google Drive or any general purpose tool is a system that was actually designed around how football gets taught. Plays, personnel, install calendars, and player-by-player accountability built as a n built as native pieces of the same platform instead of five tools stitched together with Hope. I spent a decade stitching.
That’s exactly the frustration I described in our first episode. Just play is the first tool I’ve used in this game where I wasn’t the one doing the stitching anymore. It’s the system I’ve found that was actually built for this job, not repurposed for it.
So let’s actually so let’s walk so let’s walk through what’s on that page for our very first practice because the scope of it tells you something and I’ll say up front, I’m not gonna hand you our actual terminology here. We’re bringing a new offense to bay this year, and I’d rather our opponents learn it on Friday nights than off this podcast. So think of the categories, not the code words.
Practice one is 90 minutes, and it is by design our heaviest install day of the entire preseason. It’s a handful of procedure calls, the operational war the operational words that tell a player to run a play, reset, or run it again, or that the play is dead. A few personnel groupings will call them personnel one, two, and three. Several formation calls with directional read built right in.
Plus the number adjustment rule that goes with them. A motion, a run concept, two full pass concepts with its entire family of tags, two protections, a quick game concept, a play action concept, a screen concept, and even a trick play. Situational football for first, second, and third down are emphasized as well. And that’s a lot for day one. And I’ll be honest, it’s on purpose. Practice one.
isn’t really about the plays, it’s about the vocabulary. Every single term a player is going to hear for the rest of the season gets introduced that day in its smallest, cleanest form, so that everything so that everything after is addition, not translation. We’re not re explaining what personal we’re not re explaining what personnel one mean we’re not re explaining what personnel one means in week four. We already spent
Day one making sure that word means something specific and permanent in a kid’s head.
Then here’s what happens across the next four. And then here’s what happens across the next four practices. Practice two is 50 minutes. It adds one new personnel grouping and a couple of new formations and tags. Nothing close to the volume of day one. Practice three is back to 90 minutes, and that’s where we add our first full slide protections, some more advanced pass concepts, because by day three, they’ve got enough foundation to handle it. And practice four is shorter again, and it’s mostly
Protection variations, a situational red zone, and goal line work. Practice five then is the day before our scrimmage. And it’s almost entirely about tags and wrinkles on the past concepts they already know. Plus a screen and a trick play. You can see the shape of it if you step back. It’s heavy, then lighter, then heavy, then lighter, and then more of a wrinkle day. And it’s not random that’s
respecting exactly what I talked about the last time. You can only load so much new information into working memory before retention starts to drop. So we don’t do that. We stack the biggest concepts early and then when the well is empty, we get lighter as the well starts to fill up.
Now here’s the one piece that actually protects all of that, the quizzes and specifically how we built them. Every quiz on that page is tagged to a group, not just the team. There’s a set every player takes, procedures and the handful of concepts that touch everybody, like our play action pass concepts and our screen game. Then there’s a skill player set for receivers and backs, the hybrids in that room, covering personnel, groupings.
covering personnel groupings, formations, motions, and our core pass concept. There’s a separate offensive line set, different quizzes entirely built around their protection rules and the run scheme from their perspective. Running backs get those ver own running back get their own version of some of those concepts because a tailback’s job is different on a given run concept than a than an offensive lineman or a tight end. And and they’re not the same quiz. Our tight ends then
Our hybrid players along with them get a set built specifically around the jobs they’re actually going to be asked to do. And I made all of this possible and easier for myself by creating a knowledge base within Chat GPT and then cranking out the quizzes, cranking out descriptions for our playbook. there’s a lot of fields you could fill in and just play. And I felt that they’re there for a reason and we wanted to take advantage of them. So if you
were to dig into our just play playbook, every single place that content can be, we have it there. It’s designed by purpose and it’s utilized to help the teaching and the learning. And it’s utilized to help the teaching and the learning.
So I I want you to think about that for a minute because when we build a quiz, so I want you to think about that for a minute because I think most of us I did it in the past when we built a quiz, it was for the whole team. it was it was done just because at the time it wasn’t very efficient for me. As I said, using AI now I can tailor these specifically and then using just play as the platform allows me to distribute them to who they’re supposed to go to. the
I think the general quizzes, you know, they don’t work for the recall. That’s the whole purpose for us. It’s not just compliance. It’s about recall. So a kid who exclusively is an offensive lineman, he doesn’t need to have mastery of our formation system. It’s not important to him. It doesn’t touch him. But the kid who’s cross trained to maybe be a tight end, who does need to know some of those things that an offensive lineman does and needs to know receiver jobs, he’s gonna get both quizzes because he’s asked to perform
Parts of both of those jobs on Friday night. So again, we’ll tailor that quiz specifically to him. So things like the quiz we developed that are tight end on run concept one. Building it any other way wastes his time or it leaves a hole in his preparation with a rosterage size. We just can’t afford either one of those things. And we don’t treat these as optional. Right at the top of the quiz for practice.
Right at the top of the quiz section for practice one, it says this explicitly: complete these beforehand, or you will not get reps in team. And it’s not a threat, it’s just the truth of how our practice time works. We don’t have enough snaps in a 50 or a 90-minute practice to let a kid guess his way through a rep he hasn’t proven he understands yet on paper first. In the last episode.
I told you about retrieval practice that it is the single most effective tool we have for moving something into long-term memory. And this is where that stops being research citation and becomes the gate for us. If you haven’t retrieved it through the quiz, you don’t get the rep. Most of you listening to this already know the term that I’m about to use: flip learning. And it isn’t new, it’s not a fringe idea, it’s something that I’ve written about.
started writing about it fifteen years ago. and I just walk you through how we do it. the video, the quizzes before practice, the meeting and the field time spent doing instead of listening is a flip model. I’m not telling you we invented something. I’m telling you that we finally built an infrastructure to do it properly. And I would say what I did in the early days was very much limited by the tools that I had.
The part that doesn’t get said enough though is that research on flipped learning is not a slam dunk. So did some research on this. The largest meta-analysis on it, which was 114 studies out of the University of Utrecht published in 2019, found that the average benefit is real but small. And translated into plain terms, the average student in a flipped classroom performed like they’d landed around the 64th percentile compared to
a traditional classroom. And it’s good, but it’s not the revolution that the buzzword promised. And a separate study that was tightly controlled out of Johnson and Wales was even more sobering in than that when they actually pre-imposed when they actually pre-impost tested learning, flipping the classroom moved the needle for under 15% of the students. Over 80% showed no significant change
And a few actually did worse, even though the overwhelming majority of those same students said on a survey that they liked the flip format better. That gap between we liked it and we actually learned is the whole ballgame. And both studies point to the same reason for it. It’s not the concept, it’s the execution. In the U-Trect research, the classrooms that quietly cut into real face-to-face application time saw students learn less, not more.
The ones that protected and built out real in-person practice time saw the actual gains. The lead researcher’s own conclusion was that flipped learning could work better, but only when it’s designed appropriately. And designing it properly is such a heavy lift that he doesn’t recommend a teacher try to do it alone. And I think that’s the piece we really need to sit with here because the difference.
And that’s the piece I think we really need to sit with here because it’s the difference between a flip that helps your players and a flip that just moves the same problem online. Flip learning fails most of the time, not because the idea is wrong, but because most people who attempt it record a lecture, record their presentation, post it, and hope the in-person half sorts itself out. That’s still a manual. It just now has a play button on it.
So everything I walked you through in this episode for us, it was the color coding so the kids know what he’s about to watch before he clicks it, the quiz gating for us, how we say, take it or you’re not getting reps. Whether he learns a rep.
The quiz gating, whether he earns a rep, the meeting rebuilt down to fifteen or twenty minutes of actual application of me.
the the meeting rebuilt down to 15 or 20 minutes of actual application instead of me talking, the 30 minutes on the field before practice ever starts, that’s not flipped learning bolted onto an old system. That’s what the research that’s what the research says a flip actually has to look like to move the needle. And I’ll be honest, I could not have built that myself on the side the way most of us attempt to do it.
It took a platform that was built to carry the structure, not just host the videos. And I think this is where I missed before. I thought we did a decent job at it. I know it helped our players in a lot of ways, but it certainly did not maximize their l learning like we are right now. So back to the syllabus and the flight simular and the flight simulator analogy of the check ride.
Notice what happens across our nine practices. The first five are almost entirely about installing new football, new personnel, new formations, new concept, stacked practice over practice. And then we play our first scrimmage. After that, something shifts. Practices six through nine barely add any new plays at all for us. What they add is operational football.
More procedure calls like how we check at the line or how we handle our two minute and clock management situations, how we kill the clock, how we open a series, how we handle our last plays of the half of the game. Those are procedures, not plays. They’re about how the team functions in real time under a clock in exactly the kind of pressure that shows up in a game and never shows up in a walkthrough. We didn’t sequence it that way by accident and we didn’t
do it because we ran out of new plays to teach. We did it because you can’t install situational football on top of a foundation that isn’t there yet. A two minute drill only means something to a kid who already trusts his assignment well enough to execute them fast.
A two-minute drill only means something to a kid who already trusts his assignments well enough to execute them fast, under pressure, without re-deriving them in his head. So the first scrimmage isn’t the final exam on this install. It’s the check ride that tells us the foundation is solid enough to build the situational layer on top of it. And that scrimmage functions exactly like that. It’s the typical 10-play scrimmage, maybe a drive at the end of it. Then we play our second scrimmage.
After practice nine, and the season starts. Pract that scrimmage then has some of these situations. Now we’re testing those. So the real install never actually stops. It changes shape once the games start counting. It goes to a weekly rhythm of install and how we’re going back through and doing that. Something we’ll show you later in this series.
Before I get to what I’d ask you to take from this one, sit with a number that I haven’t given to you yet, because I think it’s the one that actually explains why we built all of this in the first place. A college program gets 25 practices before their first game. That’s 25, full staffs, one-way players, a position coach dedicated to nearly every spot on the roster, probably multiple position coaches. We get nine before game week.
We get nine before game week even starts. And that’s not a number we chose. It’s a number our roster hands us because our guys are playing both sides of the ball. And there’s only so much practice time you can split between two units, between two units before game week has to start eating into it. And the four practices we get once the game week begins, that’s 13 practices total, standing between our first snap of camp and our first snap that counts. That’s 13 against 25.
So if anybody hears video platform and pictures something built for programs with a full complement of assistants, one-way players and time to burn, they got the whole thing backwards. We have less than half the practice time a college staff gets, a fraction of the coaching bodies, and players learning multiple jobs instead of one. A program our size isn’t the exception,
this doesn’t apply to, it’s exactly the program that needs it most because we can’t afford to spend a single one of those thirteen practices reteaching something a kid could have already learned on his own.
Here’s what I’d ask you to take away from this episode. Whatever platform you’re using, or whether you’re using one at all, build one front door for your install, not four. Use color codes or ways to flag it or tag it in the content so the kid knows that, so a kid knows what he’s clicking before he clicks it. Tag your quizzes to the jobs your players actually do, not just to the team as a whole, especially if you’re running a roster like ours where kids are wearing more than one hat.
And sequence your install like a syllabus, not a manual. Load the vocabulary early, get lighter as you go. Save the situational football for after you’ve proven in a live scrimmage that the foundation can hold it. And if you’re already flipping your meetings or thinking about it, don’t stop at recording a lecture or presentation and posting it. That’s the version the research says. That’s the version the research says barely moves the needle. Protect the in-person time, spend it on real application.
Spend it on real applic, protect the in-person time, spend it on real application, and build the structure to actually gate and track it. And that’s the difference between a flip that works and one that’s just a manual with a play button. Think back to that first episode and and I said I could put a twenty dollar bill on that first binder I designed as a head coach. I’m still not gonna tell you the exact number, but I can tell you this that it is very encouraging to see
our players in our playbook learning. The difference this year isn’t that our players are smarter or work harder than the ones I coached 20 years ago. It’s that we finally built a system for them, a syllabus, instead of handing them a manual and pointing at the interstate.
In the next episode, we’re going to get into the part of this that starts to get messier. How did we handle the kids who missed all of this over the summer? Whether that was another sport or a family vacation, kids we didn’t see till tomorrow, which is day one of camp, and how our quarterbacks actually use the platform differently than our offensive linemen do. Everything from today, a look at how our general information page is structured, will be in a separate video. We’ll link that in the show notes.
I want to thank Just Play for presenting this series. Everything I walked you through today, the one page, the color coding, the role-based quizzes, the gate on reps that we’re using isn’t something you can bolt together out of Google Docs and good intentions. It’s possible because Just Play built a system specifically for how football actually gets taught. That’s the difference, and that’s why they’re the perfect partner for a series about teaching the modern player.
So we’ll see you next time on One Play at a time presented by Just Play on the Coach and Coordinator Network. Be sure to follow all we’re doing at coachandcoordinator dot com and follow us on X at Coach K Grabowski.