Bronco Mendenhall And His “Game Plan”

I feel like this topic has been misconstrued from day one and my hope is that this will help everyone understand what BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall means when he says, “we don’t focus on the other team, we focus on ourselves.”

I wrote an entire post dedicated to the players preparation last season and I will not repeat it, but I do want to offer a few tid-bits from the coaches point-of-view.

It is impossible to approach a football game without having first scouted out your opponent to find out three very important things: what they like to do, what they are good at doing, and what they are not good at doing. It then becomes the job of the coaching staff to take that information and devise a GAME PLAN that will address those areas.

The problem for the fan is that there are two meanings for the term game plan. The first definition is, "Creating new plays or schemes designed specifically for one opponent and to be used exclusively in that game alone."

Examples of this type of game planning are when teams (BYU included in ‘04 and ‘05) will only put two defensive linemen in the game thinking “We can’t sack the QB so let’s play a ton of pass coverage so there is no where to throw the ball.

Another example is Tulsa’s game plan against BYU in ‘07. All the trick plays and shenanigans were designed specifically for us. They could not run their normal stuff against us and expect to win the game.

This kind of game planning is the kind that coach Mendenhall is not going to partake in. His stance is that he will not ruin the integrity of what we do by changing everything week to week to out smart the opponent.

The second kind of game planning is what our coaches preach to us as players and that is, "Take what you do best and adapt it to the opponent in order to neutralize their strengths and attack their weaknesses." Basically, find the plays within our system that will work best against what the other team does, and then spend the week of practice perfecting the execution of those plays.

Every week we tweak our alignments, coverage, routes, and blocking just a little in order to gain a competitive advantage over our opponent and to tighten up any perceived weaknesses.

To sum it up, our coaches get to the office around 6:00am each morning and are game planning until meetings start at 2:10pm. Then it is on the players to EXECUTE the game plan.