Offensive Line Skills and Fundamentals

You need to emphasize proper offensive line skills and fundamentals on every play. Focus on this area with your line every day.

The stances and offensive line blocking types you use will be determined by your offensive theory. If you employ a lot of quick-attack plays, you'll probably teach the four-point stance and scramble blocking. If you pass often, you may use the two or three-point stances.

Football coaching is all about how well you can individually teach each football position and offensive line skills are key to making your offense efficient and effective.

Offensive Line Skills

The next aspect of this football technique is to teach your offensive line players to bend at the knees, dropping the right hand as they squat. The hand should be about a foot and a half ahead of the inside edge of the toes with the outside of the hand just inside the line of the right foot.

Balance part of the body weight on the second knuckles of the fingers or open the hand and place the weight on the finger pads. Also keep the weight balanced between the legs and feet. The head should be up, eyes looking forward (see your target), hips a bit higher than the shoulders and the back horizontal with the field.

Possible Adjustments - When your linemen pull, run traps or pass protect, you may want to teach them to balance more weight on the legs and feet and less on the hand. When they need to "fire" straight out on power blocking football plays, you may want them to put more weight on the hand. Be sure they do this without making it visible or they may tip off the defense.

As for adjustments to the feet, if your offensive line pulls quite often to the same side, you may want to teach your pulling guards to not stagger their feet. Keep both feet an equal distance from the line instead. However, it'll be easier to pull in the direction of the back foot. For instance, if a player has their left foot staggered back, it'll be easier to pull left than right. Make these adjustments when teaching offensive line skills according to your specific offense.

If the majority of your playbook requires your offensive line blocking schemes to be straight ahead explosions into the defenders, you may want to use the four-point stance. This football stance has the lineman placing both hands on the ground and is actually used quite often in youth football offenses. This allows more weight to be positioned on the hands and enables a quick and explosive forward move into the defender.

A key part of teaching this offensive line skill is that your players will get out quicker the further forward they place their shoulders over their hands. This causes more weight to be distributed on the hands and enables your linemen to come off the ball faster. Remember, though, that this will be a disadvantage in pass protection or pulling. Again, your offensive theory will play a big part in which football stance you teach.

Some offensive coaches teach the two-point stance for pass protection. The theory for this offensive line skill is that the player is already up in a ready position to retreat and get the hands up to block the defender. More often, however, the two-point football stance will probably be more often employed by the running backs, wingbacks and, in some instances, tight ends.

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