What a Quarterback Sees in 2.5 Seconds: The Real OODA Loop | Dub Maddox

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A quarterback gets about two and a half seconds to read a picture that eleven people spent all week building to deceive him, and the picture usually changes anyway. No Way Out host "Ponch" Rivera calls that an orientation problem, and it is the subject of this conversation with Dub Maddox, creator of the R4 Football System.

It started with a pick six. Twenty years ago Maddox's high school quarterback came to the sideline and said he had no idea what he was seeing. Maddox went looking for a way to train a young brain to process under pressure, and the search took him to John Boyd. R4 stands for rhythm, read, rush, release: four separate decision phases inside one play, each one its own orientation problem.

They get into hip angle and what a defender's hips tell you, route timing and why a quarterback locked on a dig has already missed the throw that was there, and what Maddox found inside SEC and NFL quarterback rooms. He also tells the story of asking one of the most respected quarterback coaches in the country how you teach a kid to recognize open, and being told the quarterback just knows.

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Insta: @dubmaddox

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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