How to Script the First 15 Plays of a Football Game

Scripting opening plays has a reputation problem. Coaches hear it and picture Bill Walsh with a laminated sheet, then decide it's a college thing and go back to calling it live. That's a shame, because the actual benefit has almost nothing to do with the plays themselves.

A script is a set of questions, not a set of calls

The reason to script isn't to remove judgment. It's to make sure that before you're behind two scores and thinking in a straight line, you have already asked the questions you need answered:

• Are they playing single-high or two-high against our base look?
• Do their linebackers chase motion, or pass it off?
• Can we block their three-technique with one guy or not?
• What does their corner do when we release inside?

Every scripted play should be there because it makes a defense show you something. If a call doesn't answer a question, it's not an opener — it's just a play you like.

Build it around situations, not sequence

The mistake most first-time scripters make is writing fifteen plays in a row and then discovering the game doesn't cooperate. You script 1-through-15 and go three-and-out on the first drive.

Tie calls to situations instead: what you want on 1st and 10, what you want on 3rd and short, what you want backed up, what you want in the red zone. Then the script survives contact with an actual game. Attaching formation, hash, down, and distance to each call keeps you honest about when it's supposed to show up.

Let the first draft write itself

If you've already got your plays in a system with formation and personnel attached, generating a first-draft call sheet from them is faster than building one by hand — describe your plan for the week in plain language ("establish the run early, attack cover 2 vertically, use motion to stress their linebackers"), and let it assemble a situational sheet you then argue with.

You will change it. That's the point. Editing a coordinator's draft with your staff on Wednesday is a better meeting than staring at an empty page on Thursday.

Get it onto something you can read at 7:30

A script that lives on a laptop in the coaches' office is a planning exercise. A script that gets called is one that's printed, or on a wristband, in a size you can read under stadium lights with adrenaline going.

This is where a call sheet and a wristband card do different jobs: the sheet is for you, organized by situation; the wristband is for the players, organized by number. Same plays, two formats, because the person reading them needs different things.

What a script won't do

It won't tell you when to abandon it. Scripts are information-gathering tools, and the moment you learn something that invalidates the plan, the plan should go. The staffs that get burned by scripting are the ones that keep running calls 9 through 15 after the first eight already answered every question they had.

Ready to script next week's opener? Start free — no card required — and build your first call sheet from plays you already have.