Theory of Soccer: Mike Leach & the Air Raid

Toward a "Part 4"

Theory of Soccer: Part 4 is a mess. I can’t publish it yet. Instead I’m going to try to maybe do some world building - lay the groundwork with a few posts - so by the time I force myself to publish the “official version” of “Part 4” I will have become fully pot-committed and can at least lean on (and link back to) these couple of other posts as well as the material in the Post Script Podcast when I inevitably fail to find the right words to discuss my greatest nemesis: Soccer Tactics.

Football Tactics

Funny enough, I came to read famed author Michael Lewis, not through Moneyball the famous baseball book that launched a thousand analytics ships, but instead through a 2005 New York Times profile he had written about a college football coach at Texas Tech University named Mike Leach. Leach had been an offensive coordinator previously at Oklahoma, and Kentucky, and Valdosta State under Hal Mumme where together they basically invented or nearly perfected what is known today as the “Air Raid” offense, a high speed (no huddle), pass heavy attack that racked up obscene points totals everywhere it was implemented. Leach did not play professional football, or college football. He road the bench in high school. He had a law degree. He died in December 2022 after a career of changing the way football teams think about the game.

In fact, to my eye Mike Leach’s time at Texas Tech and other college football institutions is the single greatest collection of evidence for the otherwise fragile assertion that a coach alone can make meaningful contributions to the outcomes of sporting events and to such a degree that these contributions can overshadow the otherwise consensus most critical factor: which team have the best players (and by how much)? Unlike other legendary coaches (of various sports), who often seem to find themselves on teams with some of the greatest players of their eras (Phil Jackson coached Jordan’s Bulls and Shaq’s Lakers and Bill Belichick is forever tied to Tom Brady), Leach consistently achieved success with rosters of college football players who other teams didn’t want. Playing against some of the best teams in the nation, his team’s offenses, led by walk-ons and other cast-outs, consistently broke NCAA passing records and with surprising frequency they defeated the giants of the game. Leach never won the national championship — having better players than the other team is ultimately what matter most — but he kept a lot of more prominent football programs awake at night, and may have cost some opposing coaches their jobs.

How did he do it?

“Half of the Time They Screw it up”

Following Leach’s death, Jayson Jenks at The Athletic collected and then published observations from former players and staff describing what the coach’s film sessions and practices were like:

“Isaac Dotson, 2013: I was playing QB at the time, and we had our first position meeting, and 90 percent of the meeting had nothing to do with football. Maybe five plays into watching film, something happened that sparked a classic Mike Leach tangent. For at least an hour, he sat there rewinding and playing the same play over and over while he talked about everything from growing up in Wyoming to having a pet raccoon, getting paddled by the principal at his junior high, the origins of football and eventually just a full-blown Native American history lesson. The one-hour meeting lasted probably three hours. I remember looking at the veteran QBs in the room with a ‘what is happening right now?’ look on my face, but I could tell by their reactions that this was just a normal thing.”

To be totally honest, I can’t recommend highly enough that you stopping reading this post right now and check out all of the stuff The Athletic published after Leach’s death. That’s what I’m going to do at least. For the rest of this post, when I quote players or coaches talking about Leach, I’m doing so by liberally stealing from Jenks’ work which you can find at these links:

• Inside Mike Leach's QB Meetings

• Stories from Coaches & Friends

• Best Football stories

• Best Non-football Stories

For good measure, this from Dave Wilson at ESPN is also lovely:

• Untold Stories of Football's Air Raid Revolution

The image of Mike Leach leading a film session among his quarterbacks, absent-mindedly playing and then rewinding the same game clip over and over again for hours at a time, while telling stories not about the film itself or even about football but about economics, history, animals, pirates, pizza, the mafia, dipping tobacco etc, haunts me. I have an incredibly clear picture in my head of a film clip of a quarterback throwing a ball to a receiver (or failing to) — the grainy film rolling forward, then pausing, rolling backwards, now forward again, pausing while the coach holds court about the fall of the Roman Empire. If what Mike Leach did at Texas Tech, Washington State, Mississippi State (Kentucky and others) is the best evidence we have for a coach mattering (relative to the talent level of the players), it’s interesting that according to these anecdotes it doesn’t look like what you might expect it to look like. It looks like a guy using a film session as an excuse to shoot the shit for hours.

And that’s jarring because if there was a sport, where you could make the case for a sort of “chess match” duel between two coaches who are calling plays from the sideline and moving their pieces around in clever ways to outsmart one another, it would be American football (sitting atop the usual most important question of “who has the better players”). Chess matches between footballing minds that just so happen to include real human beings executing orders might just be a sport where the coaches really matter (and they probably do). You can squint and see it at least. But if that’s the case here, it’s not how Leach appears to have made his impact:

Halliday: His coaching philosophy is, you’re out there on the field, you can see the way the defense is lined up better than I can. So it’s my job to get you to the best point of believing in yourself and believing in your ability to call the plays. That’s the way he coaches. He does it in a roundabout way sometimes, but it’s his philosophy to get the quarterback to run the entire show.

OK, so in a sport where the supposed reason that coaches are able to have persistent impacts on results is the pervasive hands-on nature of their interaction with the game in real time, perhaps the only coach that ever mattered to any of this was just like “fuck it, the players need to figure this out.”

Now, here’s Pep Guardiola:

The manager just [chooses] the way we want to live on and off the pitch. The caddie for Tiger Woods can be important but Tiger Woods is more important. So the most important thing is the quality of the talent of the players. Without that, you can have good ideas, but you cannot compete or win titles against the best teams in the world. It’s impossible. Of course I am the manager, of course I am the boss, but at 3 o’clock, my influence on the game is nothing.

Some of my favorite stories about Mike Leach are of him appearing to be completely unhelpful to his players in the moments that matter the most in the game. Try reading these without grinning ear to ear.

Rogers: We’re trying to put the game away. We get down to the red zone and we were on the sideline. … I was 19 or 20 years old at the time, playing the 15th-ranked team in the country. … He gives me a play and is like, “Do you want to run this?” I was like, “No, I want Blue 92 Post Wheel.” You could tell he just didn’t want to run that play at that time. … He was like, “Just call a play that scores a touchdown” and turned and walked away.

Isaac Dotson, Washington State safety: We were in crunch time. (Defensive coordinator Alex) Grinch called a timeout so we could strategize and game plan, so the whole defense is huddled up right off the sideline. We’re trying to hear what Coach Grinch has to say. He’s in there with a whiteboard, trying to tell us what we’re going to run. Then here comes Coach Leach.

Taylor: He barges through, and it’s taking him forever.

Dotson: We’re really pressed for time, and it takes him like 20 seconds to get all the way to the middle. He goes: “All right, listen, listen. Everybody listen up.”

Taylor: We were expecting him to say something big.

Dotson: He goes, “Don’t let them get a first down.” And then he walks away.

At 3 o’clock on a Saturday in the 4th quarter of a game, perhaps Mike Leach understood the limits of the real-time tactical interventions at his disposal. Of course, he did in fact have strong thoughts on the way he wanted his college football teams to live on the pitch. Here are some passages where Michael Lewis describes some of the unique ways Mike Leach’s teams played:

The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart -- on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots.

The big gaps between the linemen made the quarterback seem more vulnerable -- some defenders could seemingly run right between the blockers -- but he wasn't. Stretching out the offensive line stretched out the defensive line too, forcing the most ferocious pass rushers several yards farther from the quarterback. It also opened up wide passing lanes through which even a short quarterback could see the whole field clearly. Leach spread out his receivers and backs too…. A truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them….

He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle.

The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it's a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening.

He had been harping on tempo all week: he thinks the team that wins is the team that moves fastest, and the team that moves fastest is the team that wants to. He believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down.

And quickly on the origins of the Air Raid offense and what this thing is, because I can’t credit it entirely to Mike Leach. It began with his first boss, Hal Mumme. Dave Wilson at ESPN writes:

This was Texas, and most coaches still romanticized the notion that football had to be torture for it to be worthwhile. There was a machismo to the running game, ramming head-on into each other and surviving battles of attrition, with defenses built around big, physical players meant to win those battles.

"My generation's football coaches fought World War II," Mumme said, "and they were pretty damn determined to make us relive it every day in practice."

“…looking to reboot his career after the whole staff had been fired, and he had a wild idea. What if he made football fun? What if he actually used the entire field?

And so the beginnings of the Air Raid were born, 67 miles from Austin, where just 10 years before, Texas coach Darrell Royal was running the wishbone and repeating his maxim: "Three things can happen to you whenever you throw the football, and two of 'em are bad." But Mumme, who idolized Royal, realized that the same thing that made the wishbone work, spreading the ball in space to skilled athletes, might work even better as a passing offense. So he went all-in.

So basically, the Air Raid is an offense where the quarterback receives the ball “in shotgun” a few yards back from the line of scrimmage (with the 5 offensive linemen spread out unusually far apart in front of him), and then some combination of 4 receivers and a running back (who starts alongside the quarterback) all running coordinated passing routes (most of them short) trying to find spaces where the defenders aren’t, so the quarterback will have just enough time to find an open receiver and pass the ball to him to progress it upfield before the defensive line is able to break through (or race around) the offensive line and get to him.

Late edit: Here’s @smartfootball with a deleted blog post that’s a full on encyclopedia on the Air Raid offense if you’re interested (thanks wayback machine).

I’ve been joking amongst close friends that there’s no way to solve soccer without thinking about Mike Leach. At the very least, any study of tactics or tactics writing would be incomplete without addressing this guy. In a moment of weakness I asked ChatGPT to describe how Mike Leach might analogize his “Air Raid offense” over to soccer. It was interesting:

1. Passing and Movement: Similar to the emphasis on passing in the air raid offense, Leach might stress the importance of quick, precise passing and player movement in soccer to create space and opportunities.

2. Spacing and Stretching the Defense: Just as the air raid offense aims to spread out defenses horizontally and vertically, Leach might advocate for soccer teams to stretch the opposition by maintaining width and depth on the field, opening up gaps for penetrating passes.

3. Tempo and Rhythm: Leach could discuss the importance of controlling the pace of the game and dictating tempo, similar to how the air raid offense aims to keep defenses off balance with its fast-paced, rhythmic passing attack.

4. Exploiting Mismatches: In soccer, as in football, Leach might encourage teams to identify and exploit mismatches in personnel or positioning to create scoring opportunities.

5. Adaptability and Innovation: Like in his coaching philosophy, Leach might stress the need for soccer teams to be adaptable and innovative, willing to adjust tactics on the fly and incorporate new ideas to stay ahead of the competition.

It’s striking to me how the AI is half prescient in curiously surgical ways (it gets a bunch of “air raid” and soccer tactics details right), and then it’s half just kinda vague platitudes about winning and what successful soccer looks like, [*Bene Gesserit sign for “prepare for violence”*] because that’s pretty often what tactics writing ends up being, and language learning models easily capture that.

Anyhow the point of the post is not to capture all the ways that the Air Raid offense might resemble soccer tactics — let’s say “positional play” or something like that, although these cross-sport spatial/temporal analogies are interesting. It’s more about interrogating why it’s rare for a manager to have a repeatable significant impact on the results of matches that overcomes the baseline factor of player talent, and then when the occasional elite manager is able to achieve this (in any sport), can we locate its origins as tactical(?) or something else entirely.

Jeff Tuel, 2012: We’d watch a play and he’d go, “Good.” Next play. “Good ball.” Next play. “What did you see here?” “I saw leverage on outside ‘backer.” He’d take the laser pointer and circle an empty plot of green grass. “Throw it over here next time.” Next play. It was always just like, “Wherever people aren’t, throw it there.” Or, “He’s open. You should have thrown it over there.”

Neville: It was fall camp my second year and someone threw a pick. He was like, “Don’t throw the ball to the other team. That’s the last thing you want to do is throw the ball to the other team.”

Jorgensen: We didn’t really have playbooks.

Brink: Any high school, any junior college, no matter where you were, your playbook gets simpler when you get to Washington State. [where Leach was coaching at the time]

Tuel: Literally as simple as humanly possible.

Apodaca: I remember I threw a pick or something, and I remember asking him what coverage that play is good against. And he goes, “Well, you should have just thrown it to this fucking guy because he’s standing there wide-ass open.”

Halliday: I said to Leach, “What do I need to do to get the ball there on time?” He was like, “Well, just throw it to the guy who’s fucking open.” I was like, “Yeah, no, I get that dude, but what do you want me to do to get there quicker?” And he was like, “I don’t give a shit what you do. Just throw it to the guy who’s fucking open.”

Tuel: You expect someone with that reputation, with that many successful quarterbacks under his umbrella, to have some secret sauce or special way of calling plays or reading defenses or just some scheme that’s better than everyone’s…He just found a way to make it as simple as he can.

OK, so we have a coach here, one of the few who’s proven he can get superior results out of inferior talent (in relative terms, no disrespect meant of course). And the way he does it is by making things so simple— analyzing film in the simplest way possible (if you’d even call it that) —that his players are able to play fast and confident, and maybe even believe in themselves enough to take over the play-calling duties entirely.

Halliday: It was the first week of spring practice. Leach was yelling at me for a bad check or something. I finally got so pissed off that I basically said “f— it” and called all my own plays. I didn’t even look to the sideline to let him even signal a play in, thinking I’m being demonstrative. That next day, we watched the film. I’m thinking I’m going to get my ass chewed out. Was it really worth it? We sat down and he said: “Connor, that’s all I’ve wanted you to do since I got here. This is what I want. You run the f—— show. This was the best practice you’ve ever had. I’m so proud of you.”

Halliday: By the end of my junior year and all through my senior year, I was probably calling 70 percent of the plays. He would give me a formation and then I would call the play.

The magic trick perhaps is that Mike Leach makes himself disappear. Managers don’t matter. Just players. Right? Of course I am the manager, of course I am the boss, but at 3 o’clock, my influence on the game is nothing.

I keep thinking about these film sessions though.

Jorgensen: We would go into the meeting, he would push pause and continue talking about a play or concept, and then he would pull out his can [of dipping tobacco]. He’d snap it a few times and pack his lower lip and he would get more muffled. You’re still trying to follow what he’s saying, but it’s a little more difficult to understand him. And then he would pack in another pinch into his top lip. They call it the upper-decker or double-decker or something. So he’d have two going at once, and he’d be really muffled so you’re trying to understand what he’s saying and you have to pay extra close attention.

Brink: Every time he would start telling a story, he wouldn’t pause the film and set down the remote in order to tell the story. He’d be talking, telling the story, and he’d let whatever play is on run until it’s about to finish and then he’d rewind it to the start. Then let it run and rewind it to the start.

His players mention this time and time again. This image of Leach playing, then rewinding the film over and over again for long stretches while he gives lectures about non-football stuff:

Apodaca: We’re literally watching film like you would watch a YouTube video. We’re watching through it and if there’s something that pops out, he’ll go back. I kid you not, sometimes he would be pressing the rewind button for freaking 14 minutes talking about the Cody, Wyoming rodeo or some shit like that and you’re just like, “What is going on in here?” The same thing would be playing back and forth because he would just rewind, let it play, rewind, let it play. We wouldn’t even be watching it. We’d just be talking about Native Americans or his surfing lessons in California.

I’ve thought about this a lot. Confession: I’ve lost entire workdays, laughing my ass off while reading these stories about Mike Leach. But I keep thinking about the backwards and forwards repetitive motions of these film clips.

Neville: Oh. My. God.

Brown: He would tell a story and just rewind it just for something to do in the middle of the story.

So here’s a coach that wants to make everything as simple as possible for his players (and as complex as possible for the other team). And so he’s basically lulling his quarterbacks into a trance every week in these meetings, telling them bedtime stories about history and science and whatever else, while the same wide-angled tactical cam video clips of the offense (and the opposition defense) cycle on the screen, over and over… and over again, without overcomplicating it. If he talks about the clips at all, it’s brief: “throw it here where there’s no defense.”

Brink: There would be times one of our guys threw a pick or a bad ball, like it was one of his only bad plays in practice. And now he’s got to sit there and watch it for 20 minutes while he’s sitting there listening to one of these stories.

When we read all these player anecdotes - example after example - of Leach going on tangents during film sessions (or taking phone calls during film sessions and then talking on the phone for an hour in the middle of the session), it’s easy to imagine that these are just quirks of a mad scientist who has so much going on in his brain, he can’t focus on basic tasks. This image of the eccentric genius coach comes up a lot especially with Leach. But it strikes me that all of this might have all been purposeful? He wants these film clips to sink into the players subconsciously lest he overcomplicate what they’re thinking about out there. He doesn’t want to have a long complex discussion about football tactics because he doesn’t want to overwhelm these 19 year old kids. He wants them to absorb very simple concepts and rules, and maybe he’s just trying to achieve this by telling them stories about other stuff to distract them while they slowly accrue their 10k hours of watching air rid offense film clips.

Appreciating Randomness

Perhaps one reason Mike Leach didn’t want to overcomplicate things is because he recognized just how random sports can be.

Leach via Lewis:

“There's no such thing as a perfect game in football," Leach says. "I don't even think there's such a thing as the perfect play. You have 11 guys between the ages of 18 and 22 trying to do something violent and fast together, usually in pain. Someone is going to blow an assignment or do something that's not quite right."

Bob Stoops, Oklahoma coach: He’d tell the quarterback: “Here are your reads. One, two, three, four.” He didn’t care what the defense did or whether the coverage dictated that this guy shouldn’t be open. He’d go, “Listen, half the time they screw it up. If he’s open, throw it to him.”

On randomness, Lewis tells us that Leach also thought of his receivers as lottery tickets. Conventional wisdom was to establish the running game and win the battle at the line of scrimmage. This is a more deterministic metaphysics to address play calling where you start by saying there’s this difficult-to-crack wall of defenders in front of you, and so you strategize a way where your blockers will match up against your opponents’ defenders in such a way as to unlock the puzzle and or/break through the wall, and if you can accomplish all these micro-tasks it can result in a path (physical path) to victory, which you’re able to repeat over and over again. This was the traditional purpose and aesthetics of “football tactics” — detailed diagrams to unlock a defense in a way that best makes use of your players’ talents (and covers their weaknesses).

Leach preferred instead to choose optimism. There is no wall in front of us. There’s a ton of space in front of us. And so long as we keep our quarterback safe for just long enough, they can’t possibly cover all that space for long enough to stop us (uh, if we split our linemen real wide and run short passing routes and there are too many of them for the defense to track). It has to be this inverted, more probabilistic perspective (someone will be open) because if you can’t recruit better players then the other guy, the pessimistic framing of “there’s an obstacle in front of us” is self-defeating. But if you start with “there’s all this space in front of us and the math is our friend” well then hell, we may not even need better players. Just look at all that space! The defense can’t cover everyone every time. They’re going to have to make some tough choices, and the quarterback’s job is to probe these choices and just find the open man. My job as coach is to empower him to do that and to make sure all the options are there for him. If the laws of the game favor the offense enough or in a certain way, then you can score without having the better players and then manage your risk up and down in other places to try to get wins.

I wonder if this overall idea of “half the time they screw it up” is something we should focus on when we re-map whatever lessons are to be learned from Leach over to soccer. When you’re dealing with young people (athletes), competing in a game that’s at least partially one of chance (to begin with, you can’t control what your opponent does, and further in soccer, there’s all this extra randomness baked in by design from the beginning), one big mistake you can make is to get so up your own ass related to specific tactics and their implied direct deterministic causality, that you forget that the players are what matters (and then there’s randomness). And if the players are what matters you should really want to make everything simple for them, in part because half the time, it’s total chaos anyway, and so if they can hang their hat on simple instructions and a clear image of the game, they can move faster, or they can move first (think faster while moving equally fast, so as to arrive faster all-in), which is at least something. Move faster and let the dice fall where they may.

Football and Soccer

Whenever sports tactics focuses away from discrete causal encounter and instead on randomness and probability, it gets my attention. So this idea of the Air Raid as a kind of lottery, and as a more optimistic probabilistic approach to play-calling, contrasted with the contracted, deterministic trench warfare model of traditional play-calling (and a tactical aesthetic that I think permeates across all sports) stays with me. As you know, I identify randomness as a defining characteristic of soccer (it’s a defining characteristic of any ball sport, but it’s decidedly so for soccer more than any other sport). In the last couple of posts, I laid out an argument for why soccer tactics must consider randomness (this does not come natural to tacticians for some reason). I suggested heretically that maybe the only soccer tactics that really matter to results are those that directly dial the randomness up and down based on a team’s talent advantage or disadvantage, holding everything else constant. But it would be a mistake not to contrast the characteristics of football that the Air Raid successfully exploits and the characteristics of soccer that similar ideas might not.

There’s something alluring to the idea that how Leach proposes to progress the ball towards the other team’s goal is to place a bunch of bets in the form of runners into space with the hunch that the defense can’t guard all the space, and the ball will safely arrive to one of the runners. First, he’s maximizing the space in relation to the defenders, and second, he’s eliminating all the complexity that might get in the way of all that space he’s maximized.

Of course, the trouble with soccer is that the space isn’t just in front of you, it’s behind you as well. An incomplete pass means relatively immediate access to this behind-you space for your opponent. Said another way, the stakes imbedded in this Air Raid sentiment of maximizing the possibility of something good happening rather than minimizing the possibility of something bad happening are painfully high in soccer. Every lottery ticket you buy in soccer hands your opponent an equal (or greater) lottery ticket, the two of them bound together in continuous time in a way that American football’s line of scrimmage and down and distance rules otherwise keep apart. And then there’s soccer’s added mis-control.

If you want to see a more soccer-like Air Raid offense at work, try this weird trick: cover the football in grease, then ask the quarterback to catch the snap using gloves coated in butter, ask him to make an accurate read while the defense blitzes and then deliver the greased up ball to the open lottery tickets, and see just how over-powered that offense really is (or isn’t). Tell him that if the pass is not completed, the defense can treat it like a fumble (assuming they can control the slippery thing) and then run it right back the other direction for a score. After you’ve had this conversation, watch him decide after a moment of contemplation that this is a bad deal and to punt the ball as far as he can on first down so as to avoid all this mis-control, to hand it back to the other team. Football meet soccer (Charles Reep rolling in grave).

But, if we break soccer up into its “phases,” (something we forget to do all too often) it gets interesting. In buildup, where both sides have lots of players around the ball and both sides can feel the heat of the space behind them, it’s not enough to run all your guys into the various pockets of space, discrete play after discreet play (snap after snap, down after down), knowing with relative certainty an accurate read will safely move the ball forward for a new down and distance. In buildup, you can’t just simplify everything for your players and give them reads 1-2-3-4 and say “I don’t care what the defense is doing, half the time they screw it up.” In buildup (if you want to exist in this phase of the game), you need your players constantly reading and re-reading the defense, locating space and then relocating to new space as the defense responds, all in an orchestrated pattern such that their teammates can anticipate what they’re doing, but always ever improvising in relation to the unique situations they’re encountering. Mike Leach’s approach to offense would not solve buildup properly (although empowering the players to make better decisions for themselves would).

But, the other important phase in soccer is transition. Once you’ve successfully defended, and you’ve won the ball off your opponent and you’re trying to immediately access the space that was behind them — say you’re in a 3v2 break or a 3v3 break, you might say a path to goal is now formed or forming. This is where I think Mike Leach would do well. With the important space all in front, and enough players to pop up in or run into that space in threatening ways, Leach’s ideas of “keep it simple, practice to perfection, find space, go fast, be optimistic, and pass the ball to the open player you idiot” would really work well. I’ve said before that the buildup phase has all these tactical tradeoffs, but once a transition attack is properly on the move, it’s not about tactics and tradeoffs anymore but player ability and decision making. It strikes me that there are right ways and wrong ways to finish these transitions (as opposed to the tradeoffs that face teams in buildup). On the break, you want to simplify things and empower your players to express themselves and make good decisions. In the same way that chess endgames have been solved up to 8-9 pieces, I suspect soccer transitions are solved as well.

Toward a Theory of Soccer

I’ve said it before, but any theory of soccer has to address the age old players vs manager problem I write about in every post. The statistics show that the vast majority of variation in league standings can be attributed to player ability. In general, this isn’t hard to arrive at logically either. Advantages and disadvantages can crop up from a number of sources, but the constant washing away of temporary advantages via the inherent chance in the sport, means that over time only the strongest of advantages persist in meaningful ways (e.g. having better players) to overcome randomness.

And while other sports are more susceptible to managerial impact, as we’ve discussed one of the finest examples of a manager over-achieving results with limited player talent is Mike Leach, and yet when we try to uncover the secret sauce of how he moved nudged these results upwards, we find (and I think this is a big deal) that mostly what he did was:

• Kept things maddeningly simple for his players with the intent that they might be first/fast

• Drilled his players on a limited number of specific plays to perfection

• Empowered his players to coach themselves and make decisions on their own

• Didn’t get too hung up on what the opposition was doing

• Didn’t get caught up in the idea that there’s a perfect play, or that the action on the field ever even corresponds to the way a play is drawn up by either side.

Whalen: One day after practice we went in and we watched the film. We sit down in the meeting room. He has the first play and he goes probably two or three seconds and then he backs it up.

Hal Mumme, Kentucky coach: James is sitting there trying to take notes and write down everything he says.

Whalen: He starts talking about a movie. It was with Nick Nolte when he says, “There’s a new sheriff in town” — “48 Hours.” So he goes, “You know, I watched a movie last night.” He let the play go and then he backed it up and he kept talking about the movie. He’d let the play go and then he’d back it up. We soon realized after an hour we never made it through the first play.

Appendix: On the Origins of Football (Soccer)

While I was revisiting the Michael Lewis profile on Leach, I was struck by a snippet of background where as a way of putting Leach’s tactics into broader historical context he touches on the history of American football and it’s relationship with the “forward pass.” It reminded me of the first few pages of Jonathan Wilson’s history of soccer tactics “Inverting the Pyramid,” and I thought it might be appropriate to touch on some of this shared history, given the origins of football was apparently one of Leach’s favorite tangent topics (broadly defined I’m sure).

To start, here’s Michael Lewis on American Football:

From the beginning of football time, when there was no such thing as a forward pass and an offense did nothing but run, innovation has come from the passing attack. The last great shift was the so-called West Coast offense, developed by Bill Walsh during his time as a coach for Stanford University and then the San Francisco 49ers. Now widely imitated, it emphasizes controlling the game with lots of short passes. Still, football's mixed feelings toward passing are ingrained. Bob Carroll, a leading football historian, summarizes the attitude of the game's rule makers to the forward pass: "We're going to allow it because we know it makes the game safer. But we're going to make it difficult for you, because we don't approve of it." A whisper of the old anti-pass bigotry can be heard in football's conventional wisdom: that a balanced offense means running as often as you pass; that you can't pass all that effectively unless you first establish a running game; that a running game is necessary to "control the clock"; that passing is inherently riskier than running because a pass might be intercepted and give the other team good field position.

Dave Wilson writing for ESPN about the early days of the Air Raid offense under Hal Mumme says about the politics of the pass as late of the 90’s:

This was Texas, and most coaches still romanticized the notion that football had to be torture for it to be worthwhile. There was a machismo to the running game, ramming head-on into each other and surviving battles of attrition, with defenses built around big, physical players meant to win those battles.

So now, I have to remind everyone that American football’s lineage can be directly traced back to origins of soccer/football and specifically to a great schism at the Freemason’s Tavern in London in 1863 whereby the various schools practicing early forms of football met together as the Football Association (“FA”) to hash out where they were in conflict with respect to the laws of the game. After furious debate, the FA outlawed carrying the ball with your hands, which was favored by players at certain schools, specifically the Rugby school at the time. They also outlawed “hacking” (kicking opposing players in the shins) which was similarly variously legal across several schools at the time. As I understand it, clubs and players who felt aggrieved by these new rules essentially left to go play by their own rules and this eventually formed Rugby Union.

American universities at the time played variations of these early versions of association football in England, which were categorized as “running games” and “kicking games.” In Canada in 1868, a “running game” resembling rugby football was played in Montreal. Canada’s McGill University played Harvard University in 1874 swapping rules back and forth between the “Boston Rules” which had been a combination of running and kicking varieties and the McGill rules, which were more like straight up rugby. I should note that Mike Leach couldn’t play football in college, so he played rugby instead. Anyhow, American football and Canadian football is pretty similar to rugby until 1880 when Yale replaces the rugby scrum with the “line of scrimmage” (think of a hard offside law governing the starting points of both teams before a play starts) and they further establish down and distance rules (I’m relying heavily on Wikipedia at this point). A rugby style game with lines of scrimmage and “1st and 10” type organization of play starts to resemble our modern American football quite closely. Then, the forward pass that Lewis describes above shows up in 1906.

But back to soccer (which by this point in the story is mostly a “kicking game”). Here’s Wilson speaking of the origins of soccer/football in the 1860s-70s:

“The dribbling game prevailed, largely because of Law 6, the forerunner of the offside law: “When a player has kicked the ball, anyone of the same side who is nearer to the opponent’s goal-line is out of play, and may not touch the ball himself, nor in any way whatever prevent any other player from doing so, until he is in play.” In other words, passes had to be either lateral or backward; for Englishmen convinced that anything other than charging directly at a target was suspiciously subtle and unmanly, that would clearly never do….

Teams simply chased the ball.

Even when Law 6 was changed in 1866, following Eton’s convention and permitting a forward pass provided there were at least three members of the defensive team between the player and the opponent’s goal when the ball was played (i.e. one more than the modern offside law), it seems to have made little difference to those brought up on the dribbling game. As late as the 1870s, Charles W. Alcock, a leading early player and administrator (and the first man to be caught offside after the 1866 law change), was writing evangelically of “the grand and essential principle of backing up. By ‘backing up,’ of course, I shall be understood to mean the following closely on a fellow-player to assist him, if required, or to take on the ball in the case of his being attacked, or otherwise prevented from continuing his onward course.’ In other words, even a decade after the establishment of the FA, one of the founding fathers of the game considered it necessary to explain to others that if one of their teammates were charging head down at goal, it might be an idea to go and help him— although expecting to receive the ball form him volitionally seems to have been a step too far….

So soccer starts in this space of prohibiting the forward pass and American football mirrors it. In general these sports which both began in the contracted, immanent confines of Muscular Christianity and rugby-like zero sum encounters had to evolve and embrace abstraction in its various forms. Soccer eventually acquiesces and changes offside laws to allow the pass (a coordination across two teammates at a distance), and then American football follows suit 40 years after. That said, both sports are fairly suspicious of passing for uh… quite some time afterward.

As far as I can tell, the shared history and lineage of these sports is not trivial. They are more than contrasting opposites.