Blitzkreig to American Football Teaching Players How to Blitz Via Blitz Circuit

Clayt Birmingham Defensive Coordinator, Emporia State University World War I (1914-18) was a long static trench war in which artillery and machine guns made mobile ground warfare almost impossible, suicidal, for both infantry and cavalry. Thus came the development of Blitzkrieg by the Germans. During the war, two new revolutionary weapon systems were invented and saw initial combat use, the armored tank, and the combat aircraft. Relative to the infantry and cavalry, both were almost invulnerable to machine gun and artillery fire. In German, Blitzkrieg means lightning war (blitz-krieg). Blitzkrieg was named so because it included surprise attacks, "lighting fast" rapid advances into enemy territory, with coordinated massive air attacks, which struck and shocked the enemy as if it was struck by lightning. After the war, various military establishments gave various levels of attention to further study and developing these new powerful tactics. Later it gave way to the American term Blitz and was adopted into the best team sport of American Football. EMPHASIZING THE BLITZ One area we at Emporia State University feel many teams lack in, is teaching a player how to blitz. Although you do not want to make robots of them, I believe there are great coaching points to make them more effective and efficient blitzers. When teaching our blitz game to our athletes we emphasize four main points: Two Second Blitz, Point A to B, Gap Integrity, and Reading the Quarterback. First and foremost, each player must realize the purpose and the aggressive mentality that goes along with the blitz scheme. We teach this by using a buzz phrase of Two Second Blitz. Meaning that in every blitz we need to get to the quarterback in two or less seconds. Our blitzers and defensive linemen have to realize that we are in man coverage with our secondary and we can not expect them to cover for long periods of time. As a defense, we will never fault our coverage in the blitz game, but rather take a closer look at our blitz scheme and aggressiveness. Secondly, we preach Point A to B. This simply means that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The first thing we talk about when teaching this is alignment. Many times you will find that the blitzer will round his path because he is misaligned for the proper blitz angle. We want our players to be able to get the target in sight (running back or quarterback set up point) through the gap that they are blitzing. Next, we teach our players the importance of Gap Integrity. When running sound blitzes we will have every gap covered with a blitzer or a stunter. Each player must understand his responsibility of controlling and going through his gap so he does not get in the path of and knock off one of his blitzing teammates. Lastly, we teach our blitzers how to Read the Quarterback during their approach on a dropback pass. Many think this should not have to be taught but we have all seen and thrown our hat down to the matador quarterback who Olays a blitzer. We teach our players three basic reads because we do not want to take away their aggressiveness: 1. The quarterback has his back to you. Continue full stride while hitting him high and raking down on his throwing arm. 2. The quarterback has two hands on the ball and is looking directly at you. The quarterback is now more of a run threat, therefore the you need to breakdown your stride and get ready to make a play side-to-side. 3. The quarterback is releasing his front arm and is beginning the throwing motion. Continue full stride and hit him through his numbers. At Emporia State University we teach these concepts through the use of a Blitz Circuit. For the circuit, the coaches divide the players into 3 groups, with each group consisting of around 4 D-linemen, 4 safeties, and 3 linebackers. These groupings will be done in the staff room by the coaches before practice. The circuit takes 20 minutes, 6 minutes at each of the 3 drills, with 1 minute for travel and organization time between drills. During this circuit the corners will not be involved, and will be working on man technique in a different area. Group sizes will fluctuate depending on number of players at each position. BLITZ CIRCUIT Gap Integrity. Coaching Points: - Make the players understand that when blitzing, their gap is going to move. They must change their direction and still hit THEIR gap. - Half-line drill. Have offensive players run Zone Strong, Zone Weak, or Pass to start. - On runs away from blitz, the defender must flatten at the O-Linemans heals and