Football practice can be grueling and difficult when a head coach asks his players to hit hard and go at full speed. It can also be quite technical when the coach is installing a new gameplan and wants his players to learn new schemes. Finally, it can go at a rather slow place in the final day before a game when the coach wants to make sure everyone knows their assignments, but doesn't want players to hit each other.
Full-Speed Scrimmage
Football practice can resemble a game when a coach wants to see how his team will perform the gameplan. By having the first-team offense line up against the first-team defense, a coach should get a pretty good idea about the quality, toughness and ability of his team. This is as close as a coach can come to seeing how his team will perform in an upcoming game. At many high-level high school, college and professional programs, full-speed scrimmages are only used in the preseason, or just occasionally during the season, because of the likely possibility of players getting injured. However, there's no real way of knowing how your team will perform unless you have them go all out.
Demonstration Speed
Most coaches will introduce new plays from time to time. The idea is for your players to learn how to execute those plays. After presenting videos of the plays and giving a written explanation, a team will try to execute these plays by going at half-speed in practice. The coach will then critique the performance every step of the way. It has to be done at half-speed so the coach can step in and tell an offensive lineman that his block was not done correctly and that he needs to get lower, or the running back has to cut the ball upfield two steps sooner.
Walk-Through Speed
Have a walk-through practice the day before a team plays a game. This is exactly what it sounds like. Players don't run or hit--they just go through the paces of the key plays that the offense and defense will run the next day in the game. This is done to insure that no major mistakes will be made. The coach needs to be sure that when the wide receiver is supposed to run a double-move, that he does just and that he doesn't break off the route too soon.
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