By Wednesday I knew their call sheet. On Friday it didn't matter.

I'm Tyler Sale. I coach high school football in Colorado, and I wrote Scout Prep Win because of one problem I could not get out from under.

The problem

The scout report never left the coaches' office.

My title is Defensive Quality Control and Data Analytics, which mostly means I'm the guy who breaks down the film. By Wednesday of a normal week I could tell you what an opponent liked on second-and-long, which hash pulled which concept, and what showed up nearly every time they put a wing to the field.

Then we got beat by something that had been sitting on the film since Sunday.

Nobody on our staff did anything wrong. The information existed. It just never got from my laptop to the eleven kids who ran onto the field.

That's the gap, and once you see it you can't stop seeing it. A breakdown that ends at the coaches' office is a breakdown the scout team runs from memory, that a coordinator half-remembers under the lights, and that a sophomore corner has never laid eyes on. All the work is done by Wednesday. None of it is installed.

What I did about it

One screened list, and everything downstream reads off it.

I started writing this for our own staff. Take the export we already pull. Screen the tendencies until the only ones left are the ones that survive a sample floor and a significance test. Then — and this is the part that actually mattered — carry that same short list into every place the week really happens.

The call sheet gets the tells. The scout-team script gets rep counts weighted the way the opponent actually lines up, so the look team runs their third formation about as often as they run it. The players get a quiz on their phones with the handful of things each of them needs to recognize.

Same list. One import. Nothing retyped, nothing remembered wrong, nothing lost between Sunday and Friday.

The screening isn't decoration, either. A lot of what a raw breakdown hands you is three snaps and a coin flip wearing a percentage sign, and it looks identical on the page to a number built on forty. I'd rather give my coordinator a short list I can defend than a long one I can't.

Here's the honest math: I'd have paid a hundred bucks for just one of those plays — the stop on third down that flips the sideline, the turnover that changes the whole game, the sack that turns the momentum back our way. On offense it's the checkdown that goes for eighty because we already knew where the safety would be. One edge like that is worth the season. I hope it finds you a few edges of your own.

The Denver Post handed me the Gold Helmet in 2004, my senior year at Arapahoe. It goes to one senior in the state, and it's given for football, school and the way you carry yourself — which is still the reason it's the one I'd keep. I played at Colorado after that. These days I'm on the other side of the headset, and the part of the job I'm best at is the part nobody watches: the film, the numbers, and getting them into somebody's hands before Friday.

Find me

I'd rather hear from a coach than from anybody else.

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