As clinic season begins and new ideas poor into your meeting room from the coaching staff, it’s important to remember every system must be able to be practiced in an efficient and effective manner. This means understanding how much you can legitimately fit into a given game plan and how this becomes part of offensive system planning and play volume.

Coaches should have enough offense to cover all of the situations that will come up during the course of a season. A number can be attached to this by going back through the breakdown system and seeing how many plays are utilized in any given situation.

In general, a break down by the following situations will serve you well:

First and second down in the open field (minus-20 to plus-20)

Third and extra-long (plus-10 to go)

Third and long (7-9)

Third and medium (3-6)

Third and short (1-2)

Fourth down

Red zone (this can be broken down into segments as well if desired)

Goal line

Backed up (inside your own 5)

Coming out (own 5 to own 19)

This gives you a general idea of game planning needs as well as an amount of offense that you can carry and practice. Thinking about this upfront allows the staff to make intelligent decisions about how much offense to put into the 2016 playbook.

Thinking ahead, the amount that is carried really is defined by what you can legitimately practice and rep each week. It is part of the game planning process but understanding the factors that go into it allows a staff to make key decisions about the ideas being brought back from clinics.

The process we use developed out of studying Super Bowl winning coaches Brian Billick and Bill Walsh, specifically three factors:

Length of practice

How practices are divided between periods – individual, group and team

What aspect of offense is practiced in each period

We added a fourth factor:

Tempo, specifically how many reps are expected in a given period

Our process forces the coaching staff to be disciplined up front while planning for all contingencies. Done correctly, this means having enough tools in our game plan while balancing with giving our players a proper amount of reps in practice so they have confidence in executing the plays and the coach has confidence in calling the play.

This requires detailed planning which done manually takes a lot of time. We utilize technology to automate this process which saves at least 8 hours per week while giving the coaching staff the peace of mind that detail has gone into the script.

While now is not the time to put together game plans, realizing the factors that limit the amount of offense that can be carried is an important part of planning for 2016.

Keith Grabowski has been a football coach for 26 years, currently serving as an offensive assistant and technology coordinator at Oberlin College in Ohio. He previously was a head coach at the high school level for eight years and the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Baldwin Wallace University. Grabowski serves as an advisor for several sports technology companies. He is a columnist for American Football Monthly and writes his own blog at thecoachesedge.com/blog. He’s the author of “101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays” and five other books available on thecoachesedge.com and operates Coaches Edge Technologies. Follow him on Twitter @CoachKGrabowski.