For the fans–If you’re watching THE football, you’re doing it wrong: Even though it’s a game called football, if you’re watching the actual football, you’re lost. Try it sometime. Focus your eyes on match-ups along the lines or out on the perimeter and nearly every-time the ball will come to you or pass through your line of sight. Let the quarterback and the coaching staffs worry about the physical whereabouts of the pigskin. It’s a concept that will completely reinvent your perspective on this beautiful game.

Regardless of the level of ball (HSFB, CFB, NFL) it’s still about all three phases of the game: it’s not just coach-speak…Offense, Defense and Special Teams must execute at a level that at least allows the staffs to continue moving forward with their preparations for the upcoming season. If things breakdown in any one of these phases like an old Yugo, coaches will have to di-gress instead of pro-gress and that’s not how any of this is supposed to work at this time of year.

Clock Management: Aside from actually controlling the ball on offense and dictating the tempo, is the communication from the sideline to the huddle where it’s supposed to be at this time of the season? Are the substitution groups getting in-and-out of the huddle with time to make adjustments pre-snap? If things are rushed, mistakes happen. If things are too slow, penalties happen. Either way, know what time it is.

Substitutions: Make sure you know what your personnel group is. This may seem like it falls under the umbrella of the “mental phase”, but it could easily stand alone. One of the most crucial elements of the game is literally having the correct foundation for the play call. If you don’t have the right players on the field, then you can’t run the play. If you’re not ready to run the play and still have to sub guys in-and-out, the slippery slope of sloppiness will be traveled.

Hustle: It’s not a cliche. You want to see maximum effort even if you’re not getting premium execution. You can fix execution, but you can’t fix effort.

Reduction of mental errors: Dumb penalties such as false starts, offsides, blocking assignments. Obviously, you want to see you players dialed-in mentally. This isn’t breaking news or reinventing the wheel. The execution and the performance will directly correlate with the mental preparation regardless of the final score. Although the name of the game is to win, these preseason games can have just as much of a positive effect from a loss if it’s a wake-up call. Although coaches want to avoid having to take said wake-up call, we believe that taking a loss in week zero can be just effective as raking up a ‘W’ in some cases.

Last but not least: You simply want to see kids make plays and see how they respond to adversity–Everyone thinks they’re the Green Bay Packers on offense or the Baltimore Ravens when it comes to defense. The minute a team marches down the field on a team in the preseason or even in the regular season you immediately check the body language. If helmets with heads in them are already pointed downward and the hands and arms motioning are accompanied by yelling and screaming and placement of blame, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands. At this point, going winless might be a bigger concern than winning a district title.