We’d be remiss if we didn’t try to tie the game of football into our post today. After all, the Super Bowl is only days away and after Sunday we’re going to have to bench our football analogies until next season. So we might as well get them all out of the way today as we discuss coming to terms with what your thermometer will and will not do.

Rarely will you ever hear a coach call into question the performance of his players after a loss. All the great ones know the buck stops with them, and that better preparation, play calling and player selection (all decisions that have to be made by the guy in charge) could have changed the outcome.

Backyard BBq-ing is really no different. If your main course doesn’t turn out the way you planned, you have no one to blame but yourself. You could try to blame the weather, the grill or your tools, but everyone at the party knows that the one wearing the apron screwed up.

A big part of whether or not you’re going to be successful in the backyard is how well you understand the limitations of your tools. In the case of a football coach, it’s understanding what his players are and are not capable of. You’ll never see Tom Brady starting at right guard, nor will Eli Manning ever kick the game winning field goal. The same can be said for your temperature tools. You can’t expect them to do things they’re not designed to do.

This may seem like an obvious point, but a thermometer is just a tool that measures temperature. You’re the one who has to make the decision when to increase or decrease heat. A thermometer won’t tell you when food is ready – you make that call.

What a thermometer will do, is give you highly accurate information about the food you are preparing. Think of a thermometer like a scoreboard that displays the play clock, timeouts, downs – the score. Those numbers are a reflection of how the game is going. The coach makes decisions based on those numbers (run, pass, punt, etc.); a pitmaster needs to make decisions based on the temperature reading (flip, season, wrap, remove, etc.).

A thermometer – a good thermometer – will never lock in on a temperature. The digital display on an instant-read thermometer like the Super-Fast Thermapen will never settle because the temperature at the tip is constantly changing. Like your assistant coaching staff perched high above the field in the booth, it will be able to tell you things that you might not otherwise see at field level. As the meat continues to cook and the tip of the probe moves through the meat, your Thermapen will continue to detect variations in temperature allowing you to make those important “game time” decisions.

While temperature is the most effective gauge of the doneness of food while it is cooking, cooked food will eventually cool. Your thermometer will not test doneness after it’s been cooked. This is the equivalent of deciding the outcome of a game in the locker room after it’s been played rather than on the field.

For example, although you might be tempted to try, it wouldn’t do you much good to take your Thermapen to a restaurant to test your steak as it arrives at your table. Your Thermapen would only tell you the temperature of the steak at the table, not the highest temperature the steak reached in the kitchen – which would be the temperature that determined its doneness.

Along with knowing what their teams can’t do, every coach is more than aware of what they can. Entire offenses are built around the strength of the players. Your approach to backyard BBQ should change with each new attempt, and will require a new game plan depending on what you’re cooking. Just like a coach will change their game plan depending on who you’re playing.

When you’re considering your next cook, build it on the back of your strengths. Know what your tools are capable of and then push them to their limits.