Football Hudl Opponent Scouting

3 Custom Columns That Get You Quick Answers in Hudl Beta

Oct 28, 2021

2 Min Read

By Brandon Evans

Defensive Coordinator, Brooks County High School (Ga.) @_coachevans

Time is of the essence at this point in the season. Brooks County High School (Ga.) defensive coordinator Brandon Evans shows you some quick wins for finding hidden tendencies on your opponent in the Hudl Beta.

Ready to dig into these features with your own video and data?

At Brooks County we favor a simple, fast-paced defense. We try to carry no more than three coverages, and make our living with defensive line movement and stunts. If your defensive package doesn’t vary much from week to week, it is vital to know as much about the opposing play caller as you can.

The way we work to find hidden tendencies is to use custom columns in Hudl Beta. Beta makes accessing and using this information easy and quick. You can insert a custom column by clicking:

Team → Team Settings → Add new breakdown data

From this screen, you can add any data point that you want to report on. These custom columns will typically show up under ungrouped stats in your Hudl Beta interface. To get the most accurate data possible, we like to take each opponent's film and create one large playlist of the opposing offense. We remove all dead plays including pre-snap penalties, quarter change, and timeouts.

With Hudl Beta, you can watch this playlist with real-time data up on the screen. I believe at the high school level, play callers are limited by practice time and are going to call what best outfits their players. It is our job as coaches to find those habits and attack them.

We find three custom columns in particular to be most effective for us:

1. Play Strength

This charts simply whether the play went to the side that we declared to be the offense's strength. Doing this over the course of three to four scout tapes will tell you if the play caller wants to put the ball (both run and pass) to the side of the strength. This information tells us where to stunt and where to play coverage.

We also run this report in Beta based on formation and personnel, and it’s often revealing. For example, you might find that in 20 personnel sets the offense runs opposite of the H-back, but in 11 sets they favor the tight end side. That makes a huge difference in what we call.

2. Ball

This is simply a custom column that allows us to chart who gets the ball. Using Beta, it is easy to cross-reference formation by Ball, and Ball by down and distance. With a few clicks you can find who they want to get the ball to in certain situations and sets. This ensures we’re aware of our matchups.

For example, with this opponent, we knew that 80 percent of the targets went to these three players in a trips set.

3. Hash

In this column, we’ll chart whether a play is called to the home side or the away side of the opposing offense. We’ve found this to be a valuable data set when playing Wing-T, Single Wing, and option-style teams. Using this information we’ll sometimes play our better players (especially overhangs) to the opposing sideline instead of a strong or weak side.

Ready to dig into these features with your own video and data?

Brandon Evans has been coaching in Georgia for nearly a decade, getting his start at Brunswick High in 2013. In his six years with the Brooks County program, the Trojans have played for two state titles and won two region titles. Over the last 15 games, Evans’ defense has allowed just 12 points per game. You can follow him on Twitter at @_CoachEvans.