By the end of a season there is a lot of football to digest. The good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between.
So for coaches, the process of making sense of it all beyond the final record is a key aspect to any successful offseason. There is a lot to learn, what went well, what could go better, and what should never happen again.
It’s an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the season at large and all of the details that went into it.
For James Franklin, and many coaches like him, there is a challenge that lies in this process. To draw that line between what worked, what could have gone better and what simply needs to be executed properly in order to succeed. There’s a need to eacting without overreacting.
Because of this, Franklin relies on data and the eyes of others to evaluate what happened.
“I think a lot of things, I think that the data is very important,” Franklin said earlier this week. “The data doesn’t lie. A perfect example of that is the wildcat (formation). The wildcat was one of our most efficient formations and one of our most efficient plays. You go back and study the data because we all have emotional bias, and being able to study the data takes that part out of it.
“I also think studying your roster and understanding it better and being able to look back on it and understand what your strengths and what your weaknesses are and what you would have done differently looking back at it and some areas that we need to build on.”
“It’s having outside people come in and study the film and grade the film and ask the tough questions. It’s having the offensive staff watch the defensive tape and the defensive staff watch the offensive tape and grading each other and critiquing those things.”
For offensive coordinator John Donovan, the past season has been an interesting test. On the one hand he has had talent to work with and has managed average results. On the other hand, he has been severely handicapped and has effectively been forced to create a successful offensive game plan with a hand tied behind his back.
So for him, there is always constant evaluation going on, but his confidence is what gets him through to what should be brighter days ahead.
“Our offensive staff has been together four years, and we’ve had a pretty good run,” Donovan said during a stop on the Coaches Caravan. “Maybe we were a little ahead of ourselves trying to do things that everybody else was doing for the first time around, even though we’ve been doing it for four years together now.”
“You kind of take a lot of that and just take a step back, and you’re always looking at trying to get better. Obviously we have a lot of things that we can get better at. There’s some things we did well, but I think that was one thing, looking back at it possibly, that you just, all right, we’ve been together four years, but everybody’s just been here for a year, so what can we learn from what we did this past year and get better going forward.”
How much the team improves remains to be seen, but it stands to reason that as the players and coaches spend more time in the current system it will yield positive results for Penn State.
And at the end of the day, James Franklin will look at the data, and feel better about how things are going after 24 months on the job.
That’s at least his hope.
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