[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by Pagal4321

You are making the huge assumption that what a team does in the walkthrough is exactly what they would do in a game situation. I don't think any team has their first 15 plays of a game SET the day before.

I think most coaches script plays. Bill Walsh started this. Here is part of an article from 2002:

"You know what's going to be called and there's no reason to make a mistake," veteran tight end Shannon Sharpe said of the system in Denver, where coach Mike Shanahan scripts the first 15 offensive plays every week. "You already know if (the defense does) this, who we're going to. So that makes your job a lot easier."

Just about every team in the NFL now uses some form of scripting. Walsh used to do 25 plays, but most teams now script about 15 plays.

There are, of course, some misconceptions about scripting. While there might be a long script of plays, they are not called blindly in order.

"Would you run 25 in order? No," Walsh said. "Let's say, of the 25, you'd run 18 or 19 sort of in order. If something really worked or you saw something in the defense, you'd go back to (a play). To me, it was just sort of a safety net because there's so much emotion to start the game, you want to think clearly, and this, in a sense, forces you to stay with a regimen that you clinically planned prior to the game."

"The scripting saved us because I couldn't think," he said. "It was minus-35 wind chill, and there was no way I could look at a game plan or pull something out of my head. All I wanted to do was run for cover, go in where it was warm, for survival. So in that case, the plan was what saved us."

(the article came from an aggregator that says the story comes from, "Excerpts from NFL Insider/NFL.com article from 2002 by Ira Miller.") http://www.squidoo.com/billwalsh