This year with my JV team on Clarkston I was blessed to have one of the best QBs I have ever had the privilege of coaching at any level including back when I was a varsity OC. We also had a pretty good receiving corps. It became evident during 7 on 7 over the summer that unlike the 2015 season where we ran nothing but zone and screen RPOs that we were going to be able to put the ball in the air. Through 7 starts (QB was injured for 2 games) we passed for 1,021 yards, which isn’t bad for a JV team.
The corps of our dropback passing game was built around 2 concepts: 4 verts, and Smash. We did run some other concepts (mesh, dagger, drive, flood, NCAA) but those were gameplanned on a week to week basis and we spent far less time on them than we did in our 4 verts game with tags.
In the video below I will walk you through how we teach our QB to go through his progression on the two different vertical concepts that we ran the most, and what was going through my QB’s mind as he was going through his progressions.
I am naturally an offensive line coach. It is what I played, what I have spent most of my career coaching, and what I love the most about the game of football. This year I was presented with an opportunity to coach QBs for the first time, and I just couldn’t pass it up. It was the only offensive position that I had never coached. Knowing virtually nothing about coaching quarterbacks I set out on a search to become the best QB coach that I could be. After searching and previewing a lot of materials I settled on the R4 materials by Darin Slack and Dub Maddox (much of the terminology I am going to use here is theirs, so I wanted to credit them) as well as Coach Slack’s self correct system which is some of the best stuff on QB mechanics that I have seen. You can scour YouTube and find drills and things for days, but Coach Slack has everything in one spot which makes life easier. I don’t always have time to scour the Internet, so it was worth the investment.
Disclaimer: I am not fully invested in R4 as much of our drop back game did not feature a Rush Route.
Ryan Smith Football 