When we talk about speed development, most of the conversation revolves around how fast athletes can accelerate and sprint. But as Isaac Franco (University of Arizona Football) explained during his live presentation at CSCCa, getting faster is only half the equation.
🎥 Watch the full presentation here
Because football is such a dynamic sport with a high demand on multi-directional speed, athletes also need to be able to put on the brakes. And like anything else in training, this is a quality that can be systematically developed.
Why Deceleration Matters
Football is ultimately a game of creating and closing space. Linear speed matters, but the ability to control momentum, change direction, and reaccelerate is often what separates good athletes from the elite.
Isaac pointed out that the most intense decelerations in games were substantially greater than the peak accelerations, as measured by GPS. That gap was one of the main reasons they began treating deceleration as just an important quality as linear speed.
This is not only to improve performance, but also keep athletes safe. As athletes get faster, they create more momentum; more momentum means greater braking demands. Training speed without training deceleration is a little like building a faster car without upgrading the brakes.
The 1080 Sprint 2 as a Horizontal Strength Tool
Isaac described loading from the 1080 Sprint 2 as a form of “special strength.” Instead of only developing braking ability vertically in the weight room, the machine allows coaches to overload deceleration and braking horizontally.
That distinction matters because then training starts to look much more like what athletes actually experience on the field: it's fast, it's unilateral, and requires total body coordination. Although these drills are predictive and constrained, while sport is chaotic, the simplicity allows for greater intensity to challenge positioning, timing, and exposure to higher forces.
Although there's a time and place for both, the closer to the actual sport training resembles, the more we can expect it to transfer.
A Slow-to-Fast, Short-to-Long Progression
The overall model followed familiar principles: start simple, build capacity, and gradually increase complexity and speed.
In early off-season, building capacity and movement quality, athletes learned the mechanics of braking through:
-Band-assisted drills
-Unassisted deceleration work
-Weight room exercises such as snap downs, altitude drops, and tempo eccentrics
Once that foundation was in place, the 1080's were introduced. Athletes progressed distance over time from 5 to 15 yards while keeping assistance relatively light. As distance increased, entry speed and braking demands increased.
Four Deceleration Archetypes
One of the more interesting parts of the presentation was how Isaac, in collaboration with our own Jesse Green, categorized athletes into four groups:
-Slammers: high entry speed, fast braking
-Strikers: low entry speed, fast braking
-Gliders: high entry speed, slow braking
-Coasters: low entry speed, slow braking
These categories gave the staff a practical way to individualize training while still managing large groups. Rather than creating entirely separate programs, athletes could be placed into different buckets based on loads or distances to drive development based on their braking strategy.
Time to Decelerate Was the Key Metric
After reviewing the data, the strongest predictor of performance was not peak speed or force alone. It was time to decelerate.
Although this might sound simple and intuitive, the athletes who could reduce velocity the fastest tended to perform best on both linear and change-of-direction tasks.
Understanding a huge piece of changing direction is the ability to decelerate, both on-field and weight room training reflected that. The ability to create high eccentric forces fast and redirect momentum.
From Capacity to Chaos
As training camp approached, the emphasis shifted away from constrained 1080 drills and toward more reactive, football-specific drills.
That progression captures one of the bigger themes: use precise tools to build braking capacity (the 1080 Sprint 2), then remove the constraints to drive transfer and express those ability in more game-like situations.
Key Takeaways
Most coaches already understand the importance of speed, strength, and change of direction. But what stood out in this presentation was how systematically deceleration can be tested, trained, and developed.
By treating braking as a trainable quality, using the 1080 Sprint 2 as a horizontal overload tool, and letting data guide progression, the staff built a practical model that moved from simple drills to game-like environments.
Isaac and the University of Arizona Football staff didn't lose one day of training due to a "testing day" as they intentionally used the training itself and the data it provided to guide the process along the way.
🎥 Watch the full presentation here
Published: May 11, 2026