Scrimmages in Texas: Don’t panic just yet!

Photo by Rodney Ayers The 2016 Texas High School Football season is ramping up in earnest, and another sign that our lonely Friday nights are soon to be ending was the beginning of scrimmages across the state on Friday. Not everyone could participate in a scrimmage this week as teams who participated in spring football have to wait until this Friday to finally hit someone in a different colored uniform. However, for schools who didn’t participate in spring football it was finally time for some semblance of game action. Fans – and often times members of the media – analyze the “results” of scrimmage a bit too closely, and when I put results in quotes, it’s for a reason. Remember: NO ONE WINS A SCRIMMAGE, but more on that point later. High school scrimmages are probably most closely compared to pre-season NFL games from my standpoint. Fans tend to get amped up to out-of-whack levels for any sort of football action and then when the results go good, we put a bit too much stock into it. When things don’t go well, we tend to have a bit of doom-and-gloom outlook. To that, I advise everyone to pump the brakes just a bit, in fact even more so for high school football. High school scrimmages, unlike NFL pre-season, are nothing close to game-simulated action. In most high school scrimmages the majority of the time is spent in a “controlled” setting. What that entails is coaches on the field about fifteen yards behind the ball, calling the offensive plays in the huddle and/or calling out the defensive signals. The offense will run a set number of plays (usually between twelve and fifteen) starting from their own 30-yard line and then switch to defense. So if an offense goes three plays and gains 5 yards, in a real game setting they’d likely punt the ball back to the defense, but in scrimmages they go back to the 30 and start over on first and ten. Inevitably, what happens is a defense will dominate the first eight or nine plays and then start to tire out and give up yards. Happens all the time for most teams who are in any way, shape or form remotely on a comparable level.