Coach McFarland's combo progression

ast week Coach McFarland, an old friend of mine from my BC Lions days, reached out via Twitter. After some catching up, he shared a combo drill progression he's been using with his d-tackles at Stephen F. Austin that has yielded some great results with defeating combo.

Thankfully, Coach McFarland has been kind enough to share each step of his progression with the D-Line Examples community so that's exactly what I'll be breaking down today. Enjoy!

Hit your primary target

To defeat a double team you have to strike the blocker you're lined up on so you can get the primary and adjacent blocker on different levels.

That's why Coach McFarland uses the banded goal post strikes to teach his D-Line to strike their primary target with explosive hips, efficient hands (from ground to pad) and thumbs at 12 o'clock.​

Survive the collision

The adjacent blocker's job is to knock you out of your gap. So, for you to defeat the combo, you need to survive the collision.

To do this, Coach McFarland uses hip presses to practice keeping a shoulder width base and pushing through the inside foot.

Transition to the crease

Once you've survived the collision phase of the combo, you'll need to transition back to the crease so the RB doesn't have a lane to run through.

To do this use hip swivels to practice pushing off your inside foot, pressing with your gap hand, and quick swimming.

Put it all together

Finally, once you've practiced each piece of defeating combo separately, put it all together with combo collisions.​

​A final word

Using drill progressions are essential to making small steps to combo breaking technique, but to make incremental progress you have to consistently practice these techniques over long periods of time.

As the famous salesman Zig Ziglar said,

Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.

That's all for this week. Thanks for the continued support!

And whenever you are ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Learn how to turn your D-Line into a block destruction machine here (1,100+ students)
2. Learn how to develop top tier pass rushers and a lethal pass rush attack here (1,000+ students)