This ensures that the contact the player is making during the drill is with something that is soft and will cushion him when he falls to the ground. Coaches can easily teach the same skills by using bags that they hold up. There is no reason why this drill needs to be run by pitting one player against another. If you take away the intimidation factor from the Oklahoma Drill - and the celebration of the winner and jeering of the loser - the drill does seek to teach some solid, fundamental football skills.Īt its core, the Oklahoma Drill is trying to teach leverage, pad level, using your hands, shedding blocks, and preventing others from shedding blocks.įundamentally, these are all great skills for youth football players to learn - essential ones, in fact.īut there are much less barbaric ways of doing so that don't threaten a kid's psyche and his health at the same time. Youth football is about teaching the skills needed to play an excellent sport and to come together with friends and teammates to have fun. Youth football isn't about whipping anybody, or trying to prove that you're more of a man than anyone else - whether that person be on your team, the other team, or just someone else in general. "It's man-on-man, and lining up and whipping somebody's a**. "It's a drill that teaches offensively to finish a block, to get your hands inside, to play with pad level, to do all the basic fundamentals you do on every single snap in a football game … The basic fundamentals of what you would say happens on every single football play goes into that drill."ĭespite that quite convincing comment, though, Muschamp followed it up with another statement that shows there is a sense of barbarity mixed in with the logic: One of those people is University of South Carolina head football coach Will Muschamp.Īt a Southeastern Conference coaches meeting in July 2019 - after the NFL announced it was banning the Oklahoma Drill - Muschamp said: Some of these coaches try to defend the drill as something that can teach players skills that are relevant to the game. While most of that view about football is gone today, some of that sentiment is still unfortunately present in around the game. There once was a time when football coaches drilled home these barbaric thoughts of players being better men if they hit harder, worked harder, and - scary enough - even caused another player to get hurt. Today's game is much more about skill and the appreciation of playing the game without having to prove you're a tough guy. It probably should have never applied to the game of football, but the fact remains that it did at one point. The Oklahoma Drill is one of those outdated things that doesn't apply to today's game of football anymore. Head-on collisions that often result in violent contact to each player's head.Īt a time when the entire football world is working to make the game safer, why would coaches still want to run the Oklahoma Drill with their team? While this may sound extreme, it's exactly what the Oklahoma Drill promotes: It's a serious disease that can cause headaches, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, and/or memory loss. Repeated concussions can lead to what's known as CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a disease that has been linked to many former players' deaths in recent years. It is now scientifically proven that direct blows to the head can cause a concussion, which is defined as a head injury that temporarily affects brain functioning. The Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina released a report in 2003 that found a connection between numerous concussions and depression among former professional football players.Ī 2004 doctoral dissertation by Don Brady expanded on that, and he eventually filed objections to a settlement offer the NFL made to former players who suffered concussions. Head injuries in all sports, but football especially, have garnered a lot of attention in the medical field over the last 20 years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |