There was some unrest on our team near the end of the 1999 season. Several parents, assistant coaches, and players came to me to ask why our offense only had a running attack. " Why don’t we throw the ball?" They wondered. They pointed to the NFL and said: "The San Francisco 49ers throw the football 20-40 times a game and are the most successful dynasty in professional football. Why can’t we pass more?" Parents tried to tell me: "The other teams are going to stack the line and take away the run, and then we won’t be able to move the ball effectively."

There are a number of reasons why I chose not to throw the football very often that year. At the end of the season my quarterback had completed two of five passes, had two passes intercepted, and threw one incomplete pass. Our total passing offense came to -3 yards. That's right, minus three yards!

If you do the math, you'll find that this gave my quarterback an efficiency rating (by NFL standards) of -158.3. (Actually, the lowest the NFL scale goes is 0.0, and the highest is +158.3. My quarterback was as low as they come.) In the NFL we would have been soundly thrashed in every game. In college we'd have been beaten almost as badly, and even in high school we'd have had a hard time winning.

In the Kodiak Football League's Senior Division, we were the undefeated division champions. Why? Because we didn't waste our possessions trying to pass.

To begin with, passing takes a lot of work that we simply didn’t have time for. Passing in the pros looks easy, but there are several steps that must be properly performed if you are going to have a single complete pass. An effective passing game means completing multiple passes, which means these steps must be performed correctly on every single passing play, which means in turn that you had better put some serious practice time in on them.

Before the pass can be thrown, the center must get the ball to the quarterback. Every play must start with this, but the snap on a passing play is especially crucial because the quarterback's grip dictates when the ball can be thrown and how much accuracy and force can be applied. To put this another way, it hampers the quarterback to have to stop and adjust the football before he can throw it, and the careful timing of such passes as the tight end "look in" and "streak" routes can be adversely affected by that delay. 

Running teams only care about one part of the snap: did the quarterback get the ball? If not, then someone's got some explaining to do.

Before the ball can be thrown the offensive line must pass block effectively. Pass blocking is entirely different than run blocking, and takes an entirely different mindset. Coaches who do not understand this are hurting their team when they try to pass. Run blocking is aggressive. Pass blocking is passive. To run block you go after the man you are assigned to block. To pass block you must allow your man to charge the quarterback while you try to keep your own body in the way. When pass blocking, the rusher has the initiative. I prefer my offensive line have the initiative and attack the defense aggressively. I tell my linemen constantly that blocking is a personal choice; they must ask themselves before every single play whether or not they can, and will, block their man. I want them to be feisty and hit. When the ball is snapped our line should drive out and blast the defensive line all over the field. Asking those players to abandon that mentality and let the defense come to them is too much of a stretch for me.

Before the ball can be thrown, the receiver must get open. In a run oriented league this sometimes isn’t that big of a problem, but if the defensive backs are halfway disciplined, then you can expect decent, if not exceptional coverage. I only saw a "wide open" receiver twice in 1999; both of which were in our first game because I screwed up teaching the coverage rules to my defense. We fixed that by the end of the next practice. 

You would think that after five games, in which we threw the football a grand total of three times (all extra point attempts), that my receivers should have been lonelier than a nerd at a high school prom by our final game. Instead, when I foolishly called the last two passes of our season, the defensive backs I'd been watching were right where their coach wanted them: in front of my receiver. This is a sign of careful coaching, and expert discipline, and I am impressed by the job the ACS Environmental Chiefs' coach did with his players over that season. Such discipline is rare enough to be nearly unique in youth defensive backfields. The unfortunate part is that I was the one trying to pass against him.

Before the ball can be thrown, the quarterback must be able to see the receiver, and be able to tell whether or not the receiver is open. Most youth quarterbacks throw to a receiver whether the man is covered or not or whether they can see him or not. When we are on defense, I hope that sort of thing happens. Even Steve Young and Brett Favre sometimes throw interceptions, and they have each been playing football for over twenty years. Some of the players in my league had been playing football for six weeks, and that was at the end of our season! Could I reasonably expect them to be able to tell when a receiver is open or not? The answer to that question is not without hours and hours of passing drills that we simply did not have time for.

Only if all of these things happen perfectly can the ball be thrown. If any one of them is blown you are looking at a sack for a loss. Worse, the potential for a turnover is vastly increased once the ball is in the air. Maybe, just maybe your quarterback will be able to dodge the rush and get the pass off or tuck the ball down and scramble for a gain. I don’t like those odds. "Maybe" is not written into my playbook anywhere. Is it in yours?

The snap must be good, the line must block effectively, the receiver must get open, the quarterback must be able to see the receiver and correctly judge whether or not he is open, and then, and only then may the quarterback throw that football.

After the ball is thrown, it still has to be caught. My defense is taught to think of the football as our football. We refer to it that way in practice and we play like that on the field. I am sure other defensive coaches do similar things. While a pass is in the air it belongs to neither team. (Actually, I tell my defense that a pass in the air belongs to our team. Unfortunately, I think that is what led to four pass interference calls against us.)

Before the ball can be caught, the quarterback must get it to the right location. This is harder than it sounds. Simply add up the factors:

1) There is a pass rush charging in at the quarterback. If you are playing my team our defensive line will be screaming at the quarterback to break his concentration and waving their hands in the air to distract him and take away his passing lanes. When our quarterbacks were working with the centers on practicing snaps I sometimes stepped in as a quarterback during defensive practice. I’m not tall, but I’m taller than the average twelve-year-old quarterback is, and I’m much more experienced than most youth players are. Even with me filling in we could barely complete a pass in practice. The combination of seven screaming players in my face (right where they were supposed to be) and man to man coverage made it nearly impossible to find let alone throw to my intended receivers. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be eleven years old and facing down that group of frothing maniacs!

2) One thing that is almost always left out of books and videos on youth football is the difference between throwing the football with pads on, and throwing while wearing a tee-shirt in a two-hand touch game at the park. Football pads, even well fitting ones, bind the shoulders and interfere with the arm’s range of motion. Try to get a football player to clap his hands over his head with his pads on! Throwing while wearing pads takes hundreds of practice reps to get right. Most coaches don’t spend nearly the amount of time they should getting their quarterbacks acclimated after they put on pads for the first time. The helmet and facemask also interfere with the quarterback’s vision and take some time to get used to.

3) Any moisture on the football- dew, mud, water- will interfere with the quarterback’s ability to grip the football. This, in turn, will interfere with his ability to throw the football with any accuracy. The slightest hint of poor weather should make a passing coach rethink his game plan. Since my team played and practiced in extremely bad weather, even practicing passing plays was a difficult task. Using them in games was nearly impossible. Fortunately for us the opposing coaches felt differently and still tried to pass against us in pouring rain and high winds. Since I am a defense-oriented coach I used to tell my defensive players to do a rain dance the night before games. I don’t know if that worked, but we played in some truly miserable weather this year.

Now, let’s say that you’ve succeeded in getting a pass off. It looks like it’s heading towards your intended receiver, who is in position to make a play. What else has to occur?

Before the ball can be caught, the receiver must get to it. If it’s thrown over his head he must be coached to open up and run to the completion point. An astonishing number of youth players try to backpedal to the pass. This slows them down and prevents them from getting to the ball. If the ball is thrown behind him he must be taught to come back to the football. Most youth players seem to be afraid to lay out to make a catch, or they simply stand and wait for the ball to get to them. A quick defender may cut that ball off in flight if the receiver doesn’t come back to it. If it’s a pass over the middle he must be taught to gear down and get into the seam if it’s a zone defense or he’ll get his head handed to him by the defender. This all takes training and practice time, a lot of training and practice time.

Before the ball can be caught, it must get past the defensive back covering the receiver. Just because the receiver was open when the ball was thrown does not mean he will be open when the ball gets to him. If the other team is running a zone defense he may end up moving back into coverage as he completes his pass route because he doesn’t recognize it. Or, the quarterback may lead the receiver into a defender with an off target throw. It may also be that the defensive back is fast enough to catch up to a receiver that had him momentarily beaten. With the wide disparity of athletic ability in youth sports, this is entirely conceivable.

Only if the ball actually gets to the receiver can he finally make an attempt to catch it. Now we have a new set of things that must happen.

Before the receiver can catch the ball, he must concentrate on it. He must ignore the defensive back bearing down on him and getting ready to take his head off. He must ignore any wind, rain, or cold weather. He must make the catch despite any distractions. He sometimes must make the catch after a defensive back has tipped the ball in flight or a defensive lineman has batted it.

Now, figure in the weather. Add a wet field, some mud, and some wind. What are the odds the ball will go where we want it to when we are playing in 40-degree weather, rain, and 25 MPH winds? How about a nice, safe, effective 24 Blast instead?

A humorous story from that same 1999 season: during our fourth game we played in absolutely horrible weather. The referees had to hold the ball until the center came to the line of scrimmage because every time they set it on the turf it floated downfield. The wind was blowing at 28 miles per hour with gusts above 32. 

Late in the fourth quarter we were up, 9-0 on a safety and touchdown drive from the first half, and our opponents began a drive of their own. Since they were short on clock, they felt they had to risk a pass, even under those conditions. 

The pass route they ran was a "quick out", where the receiver takes three short steps downfield and breaks for the sideline. The quarterback was also a pitcher for a little league baseball team, who happened to have the best arm on Kodiak Island.

The pass was blown off course, and intercepted by my free safety on the opposite hash mark!

Weather absolutely must be factored into your game plan. If you see a forecast for bad weather, a bad passing day is just as likely.

Here’s a bit of trivia for you: According to John Madden, the FOX Sports football analyst who coached the Oakland Raiders to a victory in Superbowl XI, the NFL, which has the best passing game in the world, experiences a 12% drop in pass completions during games played in heavy weather. Translated that means a passer who completes 80% of his passes in sunshine and no wind, only completes 68% in bad weather.

Youth football teams usually complete about 20% of their passes. Now subtract 12% from that and you are left with eight percent! Of course that is assuming that youth players are as able to handle bad weather as the pros, which we know is definitely not the case.

Ninety-two times out of a hundred when our opponents drop back to pass during bad weather they either throw an incomplete pass or an interception. Most of the rest of the time they don’t even get the pass off, because our pass rush feeds them their own helmets. Eight times they actually manage to complete a pass.

Let’s do the math for perfect weather passing. If you are like the youth coaches I coached against you probably call five to fifteen passes in a game. We’ll say ten to make the math easier.

Normally you would complete 2 of those passes for positive yards. That’s 20% of ten, right?

But wait, what happened on the rest of your passing attempts? What if we sacked your quarterback 30% of the time? (That’s a conservative estimate. In actuality, my defensive team sacked the quarterback 60% of the time.) Now you’re looking at only getting the ball off seven times. Twenty percent of seven is 1.4. So you’ve completed one pass for positive yardage, but you’ve wasted ten plays to do it.

Okay, now how many interceptions have you thrown? My defense picked off every third pass that was actually thrown against them this year. Call two of your thrown passes that were not caught for a gain interceptions. You turned the ball over twice, wasted ten plays, and lost yardage on three plays. Only one play got your team positive yardage! Tell me again why passing is such a great thing? Can you truthfully say that it really does anything for you but waste your downs? Instead of needing 2.5 yards per down to get a first down in four plays, now you have to gain 3.33, and that's a big difference! If you punt on fourth down, then now you have to get five yards per play on second and third down before you kick the ball away. All because you decided to pass on first down and it was incomplete.

I am no expert, but virtually everything I have read about youth football states that the pass defenses are better than the passing offenses at that level. I’m not saying you cannot pass, but if you want to pass, you had better take the time in practice to make certain your team can do it right.

In 1999 we played a game against the Buskin River Eagles that was decided by a score of 7-0. The Eagles threw seven passes. They attempted to throw four more, but we sacked their quarterback (once he fumbled and we recovered) before he could throw the ball. Of their thrown passes, we intercepted two and knocked five down. Not one was completed.

With a score of 7-0, wouldn’t you rather have those eleven plays back?

Someone told me once that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result every time. If I were the offensive coordinator of the Eagles I’d have stopped passing after the first interception (it was their fourth pass attempt of the game.)

Coach Jack Reed, in his book: Coaching Youth Football says the following:

"When you pass, twelve things can happen and nine of them are bad:

1) Completion for positive yardage.

2) Incompletion

3) Interception

4) Sack

5) Quarterback fumble

6) Receiver fumble

7) Defensive pass interference

8) Offensive pass interference

9) Ineligible receiver downfield

10) Roughing the passer

11) Illegal forward pass

12) Intentional grounding" (Reed, p.184)

With odds like that, why do so many youth teams try to pass all the time?

We did not pass for another reason: We didn’t need to pass! We had an effective, clock eating, powerful running attack that got us positive yardage on nearly every play. Why should we waste the time practicing passing plays and passing fundamentals we didn’t need to use? Why should we risk giving up our football when we can punch the ball down the defense’s throat and get the yards we need to win the game?

Understand that I do believe a passing game is an effective weapon when properly applied. Had this season been longer, or if I’d had more experience as a football coach, I would have loved to establish a passing game. Passing is an important part of offensive football, and should be a part of every offense.

Unfortunately, the weather in Kodiak, Alaska, a late start on the season, and the lack of daylight after September forced our season to be several weeks shorter than a normal youth season. With only six practices (only four in pads) prior to our first game, it was extremely difficult to set up a decent offensive system. In fact, one of the plays in our playbook, the I Right 25 Counter, never got added to our offense because we simply didn’t have time to teach the players how to run it. We ended up with three running plays (32 Dive, 24 Blast, and 28 Pitch) that could be run to the other side by flipping our offensive formation. We began the season with a single passing play, a screen, that we tried to use for three extra point attempts. It failed miserably, so we cut it by the start of the second game. Nearing the end of the season we tried to add another pass, a quarterback waggle, but it was turned into a quarterback keeper because we couldn’t seem to get the timing down to make it a pass. My conservative offensive outlook probably got in the way of coaching the pass correctly. We scored a touchdown and two PAT conversions on the keeper in our last two games because the defensive backs dropped into pass coverage when the quarterback rolled out, and we had a pulling guard and a running back who was the league’s best hitter both lead blocking for the quarterback.

We did try to throw the waggle as a pass twice in our last game. Both attempts were picked off and I finally asked my assistant to stop calling the pass. When we ran the ball as a keeper my little quarterback fought and scrapped and picked up 40 yards and a PAT conversion on five carries. The Chiefs' corners played their man to man coverage picture-perfect, and that opened the door a crack for our quarterback, who was 80 pounds of broken glass and barbed wire. He might not have had NFL caliber passing stats, but he had an All-Pro attitude and commitment to his teammates.

Those two interceptions he threw early in the game forced the corners to stay in tight coverage, which meant the keeper was there for him. Essentially, the "threat of the pass was more effective than the pass itself-* ", because it pulled the backs deep when we were trying to run the ball.

One last time: I don’t believe youth football teams should never pass, I simply believe that before you try to put in a passing play, you have got to realize that there’s more to using it successfully than simply drawing X’s and O’s.

It is possible to be quite successful without passing, but  there has never been a football team that was successful without some form of the running game. Even the highly touted "West Coast Offense", a short yardage and possession passing offense run in some fashion by 18 of the 30 current NFL teams, has a need for a strong, reliable running attack. At the youth level, you absolutely cannot be successful without running. Adding a passing game means that you now have to divide your practice time. You must now practice passing and running fundamentals. If you instead concentrate on running plays then you can devote all or most of your practice time to running fundamentals. That is the approach I used in 1999, mostly due to inexperience, but I found that it worked quite well for us. I believe very strongly that it will also work well for you.

Good luck with whatever approach you use!

~D.

*- Author's note: In the first version of this article, I made the mistake of assuming that I was the first person to put those words together in that particular order. It was only after reading a few more of my books on football that I realized the mistake I'd made. The quote is attributed to Woody Hayes, and I sincerely apologize for appearing to take credit for his insight.