Some considerations in changing or evolving your scheme.

Coaches often ask each other, "why do you use the scheme you use?" Many coaches say "I teach what I know," and then recite their won/loss records, or how many years they have been doing it. Other coaches, typically ones who lack success, talk about their reasons for overhauling everything and making some big switch to the spread/option/wing-t/wishbone/power-I/etc.

In my mind, both fail to properly understand all the relevant considerations. There are two sad facts to football:

One is that what worked yesterday may not--and probably won't--work tomorrow. None of us should be surprised if what we thought was genius suddenly looks pedestrian. If the other guy is using laptops and you're on legal pads, or they are smarter than you, it won't work anymore. The success of any "scheme," in the abstract, is ephemeral.

Good coaches do not forget. There is a kind of brooding omnipresence of football knowledge--now more readily accessible with the internet--where once a scheme has been analyzed coaches do not forget. You might get them for a game or two or a half, but it will be figured out. The most genius play design--the kind that only comes around once in a generation like a Sid Gillman, Bill Walsh, Mouse Davis, etc--is stupid, analyzed, broken down, countered, and copied within weeks.

The second sad fact is there is not a good way to know what will work in the future, along with the corrollary that it takes a long time to learn how to teach any given system or set of techniques to go with that, even if we did know what would work in the future.

The moral here is that must evolve and change and adapt, but if you stray too far to what you can effectively teach, then you will do more harm than good, even if your new scheme is better. But if you stay married to ideas simply because that is how Woody Hayes did it then your success--and your career--may quickly dissipate.

To borrow from the Holmes quote I had up, the guy who knows all the rules and the old schemes may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics: he can predict, adapt, grow, and is looking at the real consequences. He knows that just because it worked last year or for the last ten years does not mean it will continue to work.


A Model for Success

One way to go about this is to look at it like a kind of calculation. Let's say your offensive or defensive effectiveness is something like

SCHEME x EXECUTION,

where Execution is a function of TEACHING x TALENT.

A "novel" or unknown scheme can outweigh less talent, as well as weak teaching. For example, if you convert next year to the spread option and you've never coached it, clearly someone who has 10 years in it will be better than you at teaching it. Yet if no one knows how to defend it, you still may have great success even if you're a relative novice at teaching it.

So holding talent fixed--most coaches don't get to choose their talent--the basic trade/off is between scheme and teaching/execution. At some point it is not worth trying to outscheme everyone in every situation because you can't teach it everything, whether because it is a new offense or defense and you don't have all the fundamentals and coaching points down, or because you don't have time evenough time.

To sum up: The newest and often best scheme is a trade-off with how good you are at teaching it. There are some teams that use neanderthal-era schemes that are successful because those coaches have talent to work with and they are good teachers. This does not mean their scheme is great, or even good at all, it simply means they are good at teaching it. There are coaches who could and try to outscheme everyone, but at some point you have to do what you can teach effectively given the time constraints and your own inadequacies.

And, possibly unfortunately, talent lords over all.