Football Strategy's Radical, Tech-Fueled Revolution Has Begun (original) (raw)

Some years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a telling piece on the rise of the explosive, wide open offenses that had come to dominate football. In the article, Ohio State’s head coach pointed out that his team was ripping off plays “every 12 or 13 seconds” while predicting “we’ll hit 100 plays a game soon.” Other coaches bemoaned the challenge these offenses placed on defenses. “Of course, most colleges use their best athletes on offense, as backs and receivers,” said Alabama’s head coach. “When the defense is forced to spread out, it must go to man-to-man coverage. But if the offensive boy—the pass receiver—is a better athlete than the defensive boy, he’ll beat him. So you have to go to double coverage, and that weakens you against the run.” And supercharging it all is the rise of true dual threat quarterbacks who can run and throw. ”The hammer that has broken things down is the option,” said Arkansas’ head coach. “Now you’ve got teams with split receivers, with runners, and with quarterbacks who can run the option as well as throw. This simply generates more offense than any defense can handle.” The article was a fascinating look into state of football tactics.

But here’s a detail I forgot to mention: The article, by Dan Jenkins, was published in 1968. And the coaches he quoted were not Urban Meyer, Nick Saban and Bret Bielema, but instead Woody Hayes, Bear Bryant and Frank Broyles. Yet the article reads like it could have been written this season, given the continued trend at every level of football towards spread offenses, record setting passing numbers, and the ascension of dual-threat quarterbacks like Cam Newton and Russell Wilson, who are neither static passers nor strictly runners who can’t throw or read defenses.

To consider what football strategy might be like in 50 years, it’s useful to look at the last 50 years to identify precisely what’s changed. And what Jenkins’ article points to is the fact that the game’s modern foundation had been laid by 1966: Both the 4-3 defense (by Tom Landry first with the New York Giants and then the Dallas Cowboys) and the predecessor to the 3-4 defense, the Oklahoma 5-2, were in wide use; Baltimore Colts and New York Jets coach Weeb Ewbank had refined the mechanics of the pocket to protect Johnny Unitas and then Joe Namath; Hall of Fame coach Sid Gillman was busy refining the pass plays that still form the basis of today’s passing game; and, in college football, the option was on the rise with Bill Yeoman’s “Houston veer”. And, maybe most importantly, by 1966 use of the single wing formation (which featured unbalanced offensive lines and direct snaps to various offensive players, primarily the halfback), had significantly waned in popularity in favor of the T-formation, which in effect meant that the focuse of the game had gone to football’s most significant figure: the modern quarterback.

So, at least on the surface, football was not so different in 1966 than it is now; indeed, a football game from 1966 looks more or less like a modern game, in contrast with the old timey reels primordial rugby roots. But it’s also changed significantly, though much of that change is just bubbling below the surface of a game far more complex than anything dreamed of in the mid-1960s.

Over the last few months I’ve asked a number of coaches at a variety of levels what they thought football strategy would be like in 50 years. Given that, as a profession, coaches tend to be focused on immediate goals---the next practice, the next game, the next play---the response I received from one small college head coach was typical: “First, hell, I can’t predict how strategy will change next year, let alone in 50 years. Second, it doesn’t matter, because in 50 years I will be dead.” And the coaches who did proffer predictions tended to give ones that might hold true in the next four or five years---like an increased use of power formations and power runs, in the alternative, even further moves by offenses towards the wide open spread attacks---but that would either be long in the past by the time we reached 50 years or that, with such a long time horizon, would be mere blips along the way.

Yet all agreed football strategy and tactics will change over the next fifty years, but the iterative give-and-take of offense versus defense means that predicting specific future strategies is almost impossible. Instead, the key is to look at what trends have and will continue to affect all technical trades, from medicine to engineering, as football coaching will continue to evolve in response to those same trends.

Geometry and Physics

Football is governed as much by arithmetic and geometry as it is by physics: There are only a finite number of ways to arrange twenty-two players on a plane, particularly after factoring in rules that further limit the number of possible tactics. So there is a limited universe of conceivable pass coverages, route combinations, and run blocking schemes; someone somewhere has, more or less, already thought of everything. Indeed, below is an example of a pass play from one of Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers playbooks from the mid-1960s, a play that remains in the playbook of nearly every NFL team, essentially verbatim, right down to the coaching points.

Courtesy of Chris B. Brown