Building a new high school football program in Texas: Part I

How do districts build championship programs in football-crazy and rapidly growing Texas?

One of the famed advantages of Nebraska football in the Tom Osborne era was the way in which the entire state oriented itself around producing future Cornhuskers. Osborne’s playbook and offense was practiced by high schools across the state as everyone worked to produce young Nebraskan athletes that could one day be of service to Husker football. Many of them grey-shirted after high school (took a year off to grow bigger, stronger, older, and wiser before starting college) and then walked-on where they’d be redshirted for an additional year and introduced to the famed Husker strength program.

Osborne’s I-option offense was somewhat elaborate and benefitted richly from having kids maxed out to the gills on the specific techniques, skills, strengths, and schematic understanding necessary to execute that offense. As I’ve long noted, Nebraska’s dominance was occurring in spite of their recruiting and any contemporary achievements of comparable scale for modern day Husker football would need to answer account for this considerable advantage which was lost when the greater state of Nebraska football no longer oriented itself around producing blockers for the I-option.

Texas high school football works similarly except everything stops at the level before college. There aren’t exactly schools oriented around producing players for the Longhorn or Aggie football programs, not in terms of tactics or techniques at least. There are coaches and programs notorious for being more friendly to one Texas collegiate power or another but you’re talking about funneling elite athletes one way or another, not mining and polishing the community’s athletes for potential contributors within a particular style.

But at the high school level, the athletic director/head coaches at serious suburban programs will distribute the playbooks and techniques they want kids to master on the varsity team down to the lower levels, all the way down to the Pop Warner teams comprised of elementary students. That way, the kids get immersed in one particular style and system and can be maximized to execute at the highest possible level by the time they’re in high school. The high school coaches will go to the middle schools and work specifically with the kids who profile to quarterbacks or other key positions.

I recently got ahold of the playbook the new high school in my area (Legacy Ranch in Liberty Hill) distributes down to the local Pop Warner teams and have a lot of thoughts on how strategy works at this level of the game. Today we’re going to talk about more general themes to Texas high school ball before I get into the details of what I found in the playbook for this specific new fledgling program.