Halftime football speeches just words

You've seen it in the movies a hundred times.

The downtrodden, dead-in-the-water, underdog football team lumbers into the locker room trailing at halftime. The players are dirty, tired and, most of all, they know they have no shot.

Suddenly, a coach or player springs to his feet and, with a profound revelation or a few inspirational words of wisdom, wills the team to victory.

But does that really happen? Can the outcome of a game really be altered just by one coach or player inspiring his team before the third quarter?

"Most of that stuff is just for television," said George Washington football coach Ron Cohen. "You can make all the speeches in the world, but words aren't just going to make people start blocking better or start running the ball better."

In 25 years of coaching at Washington, Cohen has seen just about everything high school football has to offer. But he's never seen one speech or one "halftime adjustment" turn out to be the difference in any game.

In fact, when it comes to those halftime adjustments, Cohen thinks they're better left to the pros.

"You can make some adjustments," Cohen said. "We have coaches who are knowledgeable, but we're not in there drawing up new plays or anything like that. Really, by the time you get off the field and back into the locker room, there's just not that much time."

In the 15 minutes that halftime lasts, many coaches say, there's often not much time to do anything more than relax, regroup and stay focused.

"If you have a veteran team, you can improvise a little bit more and maybe make an adjustment," said Joe Frappolli, the 38-year coach at Florence High in Burlington County. "But if it's a younger team and you're trying to make an adjustment that they're not familiar with, it could end up being catastrophic."

Durwin Pearson, the coach at Camden High, shares that view.

Pearson said that rather than trying to fire up a team at halftime, it's better to keep the players calm. And he credits his team's huge upset over Camden Catholic on Sept. 12 more to its ability to stick to the game plan rather than altering it at halftime.

"I'm big on wanting to know how many penalties we had in the first half and things like that," he said. "It's just the little things that you need to worry about at halftime."

So while Hollywood may continue churning out story lines involving tide-turning, melodramatic halftime speeches, real coaches will continue holding fast to what they've learned from real situations and other real coaches - in Frappolli's case, from legendary former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne. Frappolli once attended an Osborne seminar and has read the college coach's books.

Osborne "would say that the game is about intensity, it's about emotion, it's about passion, but that emotion only takes you so far," Frappolli said. "When push comes to shove, yes, you can rev up to go out for the second half and maybe you might create something initially.

"But the bottom line is you have to play. You just have to play."