Every Sunday there's a play that gets shown forty times by Tuesday. A quarterback steps up in a collapsing pocket, finds his third read, and puts the ball where only his guy can get it. The clip goes everywhere. The player's name trends.
Somewhere in a building that same week, a position coach watched it once and went back to work.
That throw started in a meeting room in July, when someone figured out this particular quarterback doesn't learn much from the install sheet. He learns by walking it. So they walked it. Fifty times, maybe more, until the read belonged to him.
Good coaches do this constantly, and almost nobody writes about it. One receiver needs the concept broken into pieces, another wants the whole thing at once. A rookie corner gets overloaded when there's too much on the screen, so his coach cleans up the screen. They adjust the teaching to the person in front of them. That's a real skill, and a rare one.
We spend a lot of time at AIQ looking at how athletes take in information and learn. One thing keeps showing up: the staff who get the most out of a roster usually already know, from years of feel, how each player learns. Our data mostly puts language to what the best coaches figured out on their own.
So for the next few weeks, The Read is turning to the other side of the whiteboard. The front office who teach the game as well as call it.
— Scott
Scott Goldman, Ph.D., is a clinical and performance psychologist and the creator of AIQ. He consults for the Golden State Warriors and has worked with NFL and NBA teams for over two decades.