How to Drill the 1-on-1 Game

Are your Linebackers Playing Too Slow? Get the Quick Fix Now!

Subject: How to Drill the 1-on-1 Game
Date: September 8, 2026

Football coaches love drills. The right drills are critical for developing the skills your players need to win games.

Back in the misty dawns of coaching history before YouTube and Twitter, we used to buy these drill manuals. They all had names like “101 Wide Receiver Drills.”

Seriously. Over a hundred drills for receivers.

They had those manuals for every position. Except kickers. No one knows what kickers do.

No one needs that many drills for any position.

This season on The Football Coaching Podcast, we’re teaching the best drills for each position group. We’ve looked at Quarterbacks and Defensive Line already. And this week we broke down the Offensive Line Drills:

Listen or Watch the Offensive Line Drills podcast >>

Finding the right drills - or creating them yourself - is not that hard. Once you understand WHY you run drills, picking the best drills is much easier.

Individual Drills focus on the 1-on-1 game. Follow that rule, and you cannot go wrong. So what are the rules of the 1-on-1 game?

Here’s 3 rules to follow:

Drill only what you want to see on film. What does the perfect play look like? Take that perfect play, and break it into pieces. There are usually 3 or 4 pieces. Run a drill for each piece.

All drills relate directly to a play call or situation. You should be able to tell your athletes exactly when they will execute this drill. If you’re drilling a down block with your Offensive Line, tell them the play call(s) and situation(s) when they’ll down block. If you can’t do that, why are you running the drill?

Drills need progression. Progression means adding more noise around the 1-on-1 Game, like going from Indy Drills to a small group drill. It also may mean chaining multiple 1-on-1 games together. But the 1-on-1 game never changes. It’s still there.

If you want to get buy-in from your players, teach them the WHY behind every drill. Teach them the ASKA for their position. Teach them how every drill you run directly supports their ASKA and translates to the field on game day.

Then show them. Get the film out, and show them how those 1-on-1 games add up over 100 snaps.

And if you want really go deep on football drills, check out my new coaching manual. In Coach Simple, Volume 1: The Lost Letters I compiled 11 exclusive newsletters previously mailed exclusively to JDFB members.

One of those newsletters is a 4,500 word masterclass on choosing the right football drills and making sure those drills translate to the field on Game Day.

Get the Coach Simple manual + audiobook >>

~ Joe Daniel

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