Was it 8-man FB on the Navajo res?
We had 11-on-11 on the Rez. Real, live high school football.
The HS team usually went 1-9, 2-8 or so, but one of the years I was DC, we made the playoffs.
We had a badass kid who basically carried the ball 35 times a game and that was enough.
Now it's just 8-on-8 flag football with middle schoolers. 3-man lines.
I wanted to either have few plays with many formations or one formation and a bunch of plays, with alternate plays off those.
Wound up having one formation and 4 plays for half the season.
There's 2 problems
1 - these kids don't grow up watching football, it's either basketball or nothing (like the Rez, actually)
2 - Hand out 20 playbooks and maybe 2 of them look at it
They just want to run around and have fun. Nothing wrong with that, it's a low-stakes entity, of course. But you can't expect to win any games like that.
*We also only had 3 1-hour practices before our first game. The other schools have had teams all along, and ours didn't have one for a few years. So it'll get better, but it's mystifying that they don't learn the plays to help them be more successful. That's why my 8th-grade teaching was a 1-year and done.....I cared much more about their futures that they did. Weird feeling.
