How to Scout Your Opponent by Mike Schreiner, XFL Dallas

This article is to show you how to scout your opponent in a simple way! There are more in depth ways of scouting but this is for the coach that is always on the move and needs to scout his opponent quickly!

After you down load the game film scout your opponent's offense first, don't even watch his defense yet! Take a piece of paper and make it look like a football field by drawing hash marks and 30 yards worth of yard lines! This will be for marking where he throws his passes! Lets say he throws a out pattern 10 yards down the field, 7 yards from the sideline to the left; then you would start on the piece of paper from the first yard line you made and go to the left side 10 yards from the LOS 7 yards off the sideline. Now continue this with all of his passes, when you are done you will have a good idea of where he likes to go most often and you can adjust your Defense to those hot areas!

Now with running plays simply mark down where he runs to and how many times; say he runs up the middle then you would mark down run middle on a piece of paper. If the next one is run middle then you would put a mark next to run middle on your paper so that it indicates 2 run middles so far! This will give you an Idea of where he likes to run most often. Make sure you pay attention to exactly where the RB goes on a sweep or middle run to adjust your Defense properly as some sweeps are wide by some teams and others are quick hitting sweeps!

That concludes scouting the opponent's offense! So now to scout his defense! This is very simple, watch for the soft areas in his defense! Lets say the film you are watching and the team has a running play off of the left tackle that is hitting for 8-10 yards a pop! Then I would adjust a couple of my running plays to hit like that one to try and get the same results when you play! For passing plays it is basically the same, just look for areas where the most passes are being completed and try to hit them! Scouting an opponents defense can get a lot more complex as you can look at what kind of coverage he is in or if he plays a lot of bump and run! This will be explained in a later article when I break down all the areas in single articles!