I'm recovering from a spill on the ice and while staring at the four walls of this room I decided to clean out my message boxes. I noticed a recent string from a coach we all. know. I put them on a timeline and it was kind of interesting and thought I'd share.
Coach Big B of the Redzone Show has been trying to get a copy of the Killer Bee from me for quite awhile and so after I finished it for 2012 on Friday, January 21, I sent him a copy. He evidently started reading it right then because I got this message from him that night:
So far it's a system I see myself running pending on if it's workable against unlimited teams. The main reason is the reads. They can't pull or anything in this system. I think once I get the DB reads down I will be fine. This is also a system that I know no one in my league will be able to adjust to. If you look at film it's very hard to get the keys. So far so good tho coach. I see why Mahonz made a big deal about your system.
Coach Big B is moving to Unlimited's next year and so, while reading it, evidently started comparing it to the situation he was in. If so, he didn't have to read very far. In less than hour, he sent a second message:
Coach Wilkins you're one hell of a man. I'm reading your guide and up to the DE and OLB play. You're sick you know that!!!! lol This scheme is a pain in the ass for any team. I see how a dum team would cause problems for this scheme. (meaning if you're playing a team and the kids don't block but sit there it could throw off your read to the players. (you know what I mean more or less)..) This is a very damn good playbook. What I really like so far is the line reads. Then the placement of players. I see how you keep the Mike clean and that's tight. I looked at a few plays and every play I could think of if the player make his reads it a rap. Now the thing I love about it so far is that practice would be very fun. You can run drills to work on defensive stiulus of the players reads. These heavy reps with a basic system leaves a team in great shape. I also see how this could be used at an unlimited level. The key is making sure you have size in certain areas. This is something me and you could talk about in more detail when you have time. This would be huge for me because our league went unlimited. One more thing is the fact you can rotate that DT. This will make a lot of parents happy and you won't get hot if they missed a tackle. Now if you have a hell of a team and can get studs there oh my God it could be nice. My Wife just went upstairs so I will get back on the book. So far you're sick coach...a Mad Man indeed.
The next morning, he's calling me at my home. He hasn't had this defense for 24 hours yet but he is PUMPED. While we're talking about it, I'm still in bed!
Later that day, he posted this:
From what I seen the Killer Bee is sick!!! Coach Wilkins put his foot in this one coaches no question. I wonder how long it took for him to create this system for youth coaches. Good work as always caoch.
24 hours later, this was up:
I was very impressed with it. I'm still looking over the secondary section to get that down. The schem is sound and I see why so many coaches had positive results with it. It is nice to use rules from other systems to enhance another one.
He pretty much did this in a weekend. But I must admit I was flatttered that someone who sees so many systems as he does would be so impressed with mine so fast and even consider running it for himself. I hope the defense does work. We only get to make so many contributions to the game before it passes us by.
But I want to add that I wouldn't have thought of this defense at all if it weren't for Jack Gregory. Jack was one of the first converts to my DC46 back when I was posting on Al's Info Sports. I didn't talk too much about my "D" as it was all I had to take on my league's "Company" team who simply put the rest of us on their schedules to have someone to beat. Yet one coach on Al's who had lost all his games and only had one left against his league's undefeated champions, asked me for my DC46 and I sent it to him. He posted his victory (He turned the other team over five times) on Al's. I don't think a week went by before Jack asked for it (Steve Calande did too.). And a year later Jack later was winning with it in a tournament in Las Vegas.
Jack has this ability to spot the unknown. I think Coach Murphy was discovered by Jack. When the big names of Double Wing were first raised they were Wyatt and Valloton (Jack got me my first Wyatt tape back in the days of VHS and $ 300 a copy). No one knew Murphy. Murphy who? I'd never heard of him and when I did meet him, I noticed his wife before I noticed him. But Jack had lined him up as DW speaker. It was probably the first speaking job he ever got. But he was GOOD! I now have two Murphy DVD's.
After awhile I noticed two things. First, Jack spent a LOT of time figuring out how to beat the DC46 and, second, he wasn't running it anymore. When I asked him why, he replied, "I would but I don't have the talent for it anymore."
Now this rang odd to me because Jack knew all about Speed Training and Dynamic Warmups, the very things I was using to be able to continue running DC46 even with subpar talent. And he couldn't? That didn't make sense.
But then Jack mailed me a free copy of his "6-3" defense and there I am listed alongside J.J. Lawsen as a contributter. Jack had combined my DC46 with Lawsen's 3-3 Stack. Later, Mike Mahonz on this site would figure out the same thing and it appears (I'm just guessing here) that Calande is doing the same thing now. But nobody called Jack and told him how to do it. He just did it.
And then, once I got his book, I was so busy trying to beat it that I wasn't sure I ever got around to endorsing his book (Sorry, Jack. It was your own fault. Your book was too good.). He had me obsessed with how to take advantage of those two MPP's plugging "A" and run a play RIGHT BY THEM. It was shades of the GAM! I consulted the best youth football minds of America to beat those two DT's. I got ONE play. Would it work? Maybe. Maybe not.
While I knew those DT players were MPP's, it hadn't actually occured to me yet that Jack actually was coaching MPP's as he had told me he was.
I made that connection about a year ago. I decided it was time to make sure my DCWT offense could beat Dave Cisar's WT6 and Jack had posted the bold statement that a WT6 could not beat the DW (to Cisar, no less.). Boom! Challenge time! I was going to take Cisar's WT6 and beat Jack's DW. You can't do that without going to Jack's site and downloading TKO blocking. So I did.
It didn't take me very long to realize why Jack had first abandoned GOD (Easy to beat) for SAB and then TKO blocking. He didn't just have two MPP's on defense, he had them all
over the place on offense. Jack was indeed, coaching inferior players.
And he was WINNING!
This is no minor accomplishment. For most of us to see a BAD team beat a good team and, more importantly,
win the championship usually only happens in fictitious Hollywood movies (
The Little Giants). The number of real coaches who can do this number exactly two, and Jack is one of them (And I'm not the other one.).
Watching Jack do this, I realized he was doing something successfully that I had never tried - Beat better with worse.
Oh! I had my tricks to beat better with worse - Like when I would draft a clumsy three legged elephant with a GOOD run time, teach him how to run, and get a GREAT run time. Or when I taught my QB's to throw to area or my FB's how to gain 5 yards. I created talent out of nothing. But Jack created physics out of nothing. And it was working.
So Jack had something successfully I hadn't. He had beat his "Company" team. I gave my "Company" team (Run by the 19th largest corporation in my state) their best games on their way to their inevitable trophy but "David" was hardly routinely beating Goliath. I won some but not all.
So to see Jack winning with MPP's on
both sides of the ball was an eye opener. My MPP defense was my DC Pro 4-3. And MPP defenses are no easy task. They can be counted on one hand:
1) Cisar's WT6
2) Reed's GAM
3) Jack's 6-3
4) My DC Pro 4-3
5) The 7-1 Diamond
I'm not listing them in order of priority/success. That's a matter of personal judgement. Of the above, I've only played two, losing to one of them once.
But looking at Jack's accomplishments I was inspired to do the same thing, let David kill Goliath. Only I changed the rules of how MPP's win. I put "David" on steroids. I made every player a severe problem for the offense and not just two.
Who knows? Maybe Jack will be running Killer Bee someday but, if he does, he doesn't have to worry about being accused of copying me because I copied him. The two defenses don't come out the same but I got the idea from Jack as much as he got his "6-3" idea from me. I just substituted Tom Landry for J.J. Lawsen.
And it was fun to create.
My knee is not hurting so much now. Maybe I can ease it into bed. Once the pain pills wear off, I'll forget I even posted this. Good luck to all next year no matter what you run.
