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 usually located in a booth high above the action on the field. They typically analyze digital or analog images of the field and share them with soccer staff on the field. This Birdseye view is very powerful and greatly helps in the decision making process. Can you imagine playing a game of chess at the level of pieces? 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 view limits a quarterback’s ability to see the entire field. The mechanical ability to throw the correct pass is usually present, but the 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 cause a lot of pain is coming from.

When you take a new language at school, it’s 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 usage is different from a similar word spoken in her native language. After hard work and good instruction, she soon becomes fluent in this new language and begins to converse in it and her native language.

A good quarterback knows how to 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 talk level. Although this language allows for very limited views of the field, great quarterbacks can translate various visual cues to Birdseye. The greats are so good at this translation skill that they can see the field as if they were in both. He can see the hidden bombardments; they can see broken cover and they can see every weak spot in the defense almost immediately.

A quarterback must spend time in the film room studying aerial signals and translating them to ground level signals. In the game, at ground level, he must learn to trust these signals as gospel even though he cannot physically see the part of the field he plans to attack by air or ground. Once this language is learned, the confidence in the ability of it increases considerably. He becomes almost invincible because he seems like he’s reading the collective mind of the defense. If the quarterback is like Tom Brady, and the defense tries to put on his best poker face, he can still outwit them, because hours of translation study on him have revealed that defenses “tell” too.

So get to work and live in the movie theater. It will pay big dividends towards learning the Birdseye language.