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ShareThisCheckdowns: Actual NFL/College Team Playbooks, Free in PDF Form
Yesterday, I was reading Brian Burke's great Advanced NFL Stats blog, and I found a post on Bill Walsh's randomizing strategy (for blitzing, run-pass mix, etc.). The post is interesting, but the link contained therein is solid gold -- Brian directs us to Fast & Furious Football, a site devoted to football playbooks. Although it looks like a pay site at first glance, it actually has an amazing archive of free playbooks from NFL, college, and high school teams (including many recent squads like the 2003 Patriots). I never played football beyond middle school, but I absolutely love this kind of thing... it really gives ordinary fans like me an inside look at the terminology and complexity of the game.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 10:01 am and is filed under Checkdowns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Yeah these checkdownns are useless.
/sarcasm, off
Holy hell, thats excellent!
Checked out the 2000 Rams...cannot believe these guys can remember 400+ pages of this stuff. Was really surprised by how descriptive these books have gotten...the attention to detail is mind-boggling. Also found the excessive use of exclamation points pretty damn funny.
Also, comparing 2000 Rams to 1969 Lombardi Redskins...wow. What's crazy is, it seems the average NFL team today runs far fewer plays than the average team 10/25/40 years ago, and yet the playbooks have exponentially grown in size and complexity.
An excellent resource, but I'm amazed you'd never heard or seen this before. You read Smart Football right?
Sadly, not as much as I'd like.
Sadly, none of Tom Landry's playbooks are on display. One of the "old man in the hat's" players said, "You never win or lose to the Cowboys, you win or lose to Tom Landry." I truly believe that player was on to something (and not on something). While the 1960s Packers under Vince Lombardi relied on pure execution and no foolery, Landry's teams saturated the gridiron with multiple sets, men in motion, and a complicated playbook that disguised the playcall. Not only on offense but defense with the flex and situations subs. Dallas was labeled as a finesse team for so many years because of the computerized approach to football.
Both approaches had their merit but Landry's system made the Cowboys arguably the most difficult team to prepare for. Hank Stram's Chiefs of the late 60s and early 70s also had the same intracacies of Dallas. It would be nice to compare the bare bones of Lombardi versus the multi-layered Landry system. Wishful thinking on my part.