Yesterday at the BAM, I played my first 2 games in the Shootout rules and both were extremely intense resulting in 2 overtimes. Looking back I lost the game I should have won ( I lost to Brian Healy 37 – 31 squandering a 10 point lead in the last 5 minutes) and escaped with a win against Bob Slate AKA Artlax (20 – 17 in OT after Bob hit the left upright on a field goal attempt on the last play of regulation).
Congratulations to both Brian and Bob for the great efforts in making these games so enjoyable.
After playing these 2 games I wanted to post a few early observations for those of you who will be playing in the shootout system for the first time in the future.
1) Know the rules – I have always spent a lot of time studying the rule set that I am going to play in. I thought I had done a pretty good job preparing for the Shootout style. Boy was I wrong. Without getting into details
the rules truly allow you to develop strategies that can be incorporated into this style of play to really open up the offense.
2) Speed of the game – The 35 second offensive set up and 10 second defensive set-up is quick but manageable. The 20 seconds that you get to pass actually goes faster than you would think. By the time the board is stopped, you look at all your receivers, make a decision, grab your TTQB and take aim, the clock is winding down on you pretty quick. I tried to make sure that I had my TTQB in the same spot and loaded to save a second or two
3) Hurry up Offense – In the game with Brian Healy at times each of us went to the hurry up offense setting up in 20 seconds or so. This puts tremendous pressure on the defense to set up. I know that I wasted at least one timeout because I couldn’t get the defense set in time. This definitely adds another element to the game.
4) Organized sideline. It is really important to maintain an organized sideline of your players. The speed of the game really puts pressure on you to get players on and off the field quickly. Sometimes in haste I would take guys off the field quickly and then when I went to put them back on they were all over the place and I wasted precious set-up time.
5) The box – the box truly adds another dimension to the game, but only if you use it. I can’t tell you how many times I should have shaken the box, but for whatever reason simply forgot to (yes I am getting old). In the game against Brian, I rolled snake eyes twice (which is extremely unusual) losing one fumble when I was at his 20 yard line. On another shake of the box Brian had an injury to one of his players causing him to miss a number of plays - so the box definitely came into play. It added another element to the game but in the end was not a deciding factor in either game.
I thoroughly enjoyed the 2 games I played yesterday. I can tell you that by the time the second game was completed I was pretty drained. The impression that I came away with is that this rule set provides you with the ability to be very creative on offense. The more you play in it the more things you will find that it allows you to do to exploit the defense. It’s all there, you just got to find it.