The language of a bird’s eye

Looking at a place from an aerial perspective gives you a general idea of ​​how things work. The ability to see all the objects that influence an event or situation is very useful. Most offensive coordinators are generally located in a booth well above the action on the field. They typically analyze digital or analog images of the field and share them with soccer personnel on the field. This Birdseye view is very powerful and helps tremendously in the decision-making process. Can you imagine playing a chess game at the piece level? It could be done, but it would be extremely difficult to decipher the relative positions of the pieces and the general strategic options. A quarterback plays at the player or ground level. This vantage point limits a quarterback’s ability to see the entire field. Usually the mechanical ability to throw the proper pass is present, but lack of vision sometimes hampers the decision-making process. To a rookie quarterback, the playing field at ground level looks like a mess and he can’t tell where the guy who wants to deliver so much pain is coming from.

When you learn a new language in school, it is a disaster at first. A good instructor makes sense of everything by explaining and translating new words into familiar words. She explains how foreign words are used grammatically in this new language and how this use is different from a similar word spoken in her mother tongue. After hard work and good instruction, you will soon become fluent in this new language and begin to converse in both it and your mother tongue.

A good quarterback can speak Birdseye. It is an easy language to master due to the general perspective that this language implies. On the other hand, great or legendary quarterbacks know how to speak at ground level. Although this language allows for very limited views of the field, great quarterbacks can translate various visual cues into Birdseye. The greats are so good at this translation skill that they can see the field as if they were in both. They can see the hidden blitzes; they can see the broken cover and they can see all the weak points of the defense almost immediately.

A quarterback should spend time in the filming room studying aerial signals and translating them into ground-level signals. In the game, at ground level, you must learn to trust these signals as gospel even if you cannot physically see the part of the field that you plan to attack by air or on the ground. Once this language is learned, confidence in its ability increases tremendously. He becomes almost invincible because he seems to be reading the collective mind of the defense. If the quarterback is like Tom Brady, and the defense tries to show their best poker face, he may still outsmart them, because his hours of translation study have revealed that the defenses “say” too.

So get busy and live in the movie theater. It will pay big dividends to learn the Birdseye language.