Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur has taught me some interesting things about football.
On Texas Tech coach Mike Leach:
The Red Raiders play football the way eleven-year-old boys play Xbox: They throw on almost every down, they only punt when the situation is desparate, and they’ll call the same play over and over and over again.
…What’s the secret to his brilliance? [According to Leach,] “There’s two ways to make it more complex for the defense…One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that’s no good because the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays run out of lots of different formations. That way, you don’t have to teach a guy a new thing to do. You just have to teach him a new place to stand.”
On coach Bill Walsh:
Bill Walsh, the architect of the San Francisco 49ers dynasty…built the West Coast offense on an interesting combination of mathematics and psychology: He realized that any time a team rushed for four yards on the ground, the play was viewed as a success. However, any time a team completed a pass that gained four yards, the defense assumed they had made a successful stop. Walsh understood that the two situations were identical. By viewing the passing game as a variant of the running game, he changed everything about how football is played.
I really enjoyed reading about the evolution of football both as a game and as an organization. I love how individual games can be overwhelmingly affected—if not controlled—by a visionary coach (in baseball, seems as though the most any manager is responsible for is calling for steals and sacrifice bunts). I love that the meta game follows its visionaries and evolves over time, resulting in a game today that utilizes the read option (wildcat!) on offense and zone blitz on defense from a game that originally didn’t even have a forward pass. I loved learning that the West Coast offense has a sound psychological foundation (my old take on it: “That’s stupid. How can that work?4 yard passes aren’t effective.”) And I look forward to the day when the NFL adopts the strategy of largely abandoning the punt.
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Most of the rest of the book is decidedly not about sports (topics range from laughing Germans to Garth Brooks). It’s weird, and random, and I’m not totally sure any of it is connected or even makes sense. I’d recommend borrowing it from the library. Or reading the football chapter while sitting in the lobby of a Barnes & Noble.