Do you know how an American football offense is implemented?

I’m going to have to hope that you, the reader, have at least played Madden or something of that ilk. If you have no familiarity with an American football offense at all, I’ll try to drive forward the relevant points I’m thrusting at here. Everything is scripted. There is a playbook, and in that playbook, every play is diagrammed out to the most minute elements. Everything that happens on the field can be called back to the images within there.

It’s the most regimented, systematic strategising you’ll find in any major sport. Yet, one of the very first things you will ever learn in football is that you shouldn’t, you can’t, learn the playbook from within the playbook. You cannot be cerebral on the field. As fancy as a scheme can be, every single play, for you as the player, boils down to this: where should I step on this play?

Don’t think about the play. Don’t think about what’s happening on the other side of the field, don’t think about what’s happening behind you. Just get your move right. As you keep playing, you’ll be able to do that like clockwork, and your understanding will grow. You’ll start figuring out that the guy next to you always gets dragged across on this play, so you need to adjust your starting stance and zone slightly. You’ll start seeing that against this defensive formation, you need to do something differently. Maybe your teammate needs to do something differently.

As time goes on, you build and build what you understand, what you can influence, what you can tell your coaches, what you can call on the line yourself. But the entire learning process builds up from you making the right steps within a set system; more than that, your entire understanding of how you can tweak and improve comes from your own experience and your own position within that system.