Mazzone does a three-day install rotation before a fourth situational practice that emphasizes something he feels they need to focus on at that point in camp (i.e., short yardage, third and long, red zone, goal line, etc.). The fifth practice reverts back to Install 1 again. Each time the team goes over Install 1 again, all the same concepts are still ran, but the presentation (formations, motions, tags, etc.) are new.  Mazzone’s goal is to go over all three installs three times during camp.

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The key to Noel Mazzone’s install is not having too many plays and emphasizing what he wants to be great at as an offense throughout install days. To decide on the order of plays installed, he looks at last year’s self-scout and sees what he calls most in games. Then, he starts building his install from there with plays that complement the base concepts. Examples could be play-action, tags, screens, reverses, trick plays and RPOs off of a specific base run scheme like Tite Zone.

Mazzone begins breaking down his install into situational plays he likes from the first practice on. He has a call sheet for each practice and makes note of which plays he likes in specific situations.

To balance making sure the entire offense gets installed while also emphasizing fundamentals/technique, Mazzone focuses on teaching the concept of plays and what the offense is trying to accomplish when they are ran. The point of not having a ton of plays is to get really good at running the ones they focus on. As the staff teaches the details of each of the concepts, Mazzone hopes that over time the players will catch onto why they are running the concepts.

Rather than building a playbook, Mazzone builds cutups to teach his players the offense. He gives players a blank spiral notebook before the first meeting and mandates that they write down everything that is taught. As they write down the plays with the fine details of each concept, they end up building their own playbook. 

When thinking of plays that take more time to learn and deciding whether to make plays into single-word calls, Mazzone says that when calls become wordy (four or more words) or need splits adjusted, those plays become more of a challenge to become good at. Single-word calls are decided before camp and are installed on day one, so the players are used to hearing the calls and get good at running them throughout camp.

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Mazzone’s install days have reverses and trick plays installed on each day. The reverses and trick plays should be counters off the base concepts that are installed on that given day. He does not believe in putting them in later because to get good at them, the players need to get reps running them early on in camp.

Mazzone calls plays in team periods rather than scripting them. He says the ball should move around between the hashes and he likes going tempo on the next play after a first down.

Mazzone prefers team run as opposed to a 9-on-7 period because it simulates real football games. So much of his offense is built on reading conflict players ,so a 9-on-7 drill where the QB is simply handing the ball off hurts the QB more than helps him.

Mazzone believes in having a day in the weekly schedule where the offense goes lighter and focuses on the fine details to make sure everyone is on the same page.  This day should fall two days before game day. The day before games should be a day where players ramp back up and go as fast as possible for 45 minutes to an hour.