What is our perception of good coaching?

As a UCLA alum, I follow the UCLA fan sites. Today, I saw this comment made in regards to the new women’s basketball coach, Nikki Caldwell:

I sat behind the Bruin bench. Was very impressed with the new coach.  She called a time out after Poly scored on a fast break.  Boy, did she give it to the girls. …… “We don’t give up transition baskets, we make transition baskets.”  And she said it with fire and brimstone in her voice and eyes.

I’m not taking issue with Caldwell, just the point that was made. How does yelling at a team make her a good coach? The above comment offered no instruction. She did not explain the mistake. She simply told the team something that one expects she told them at practice over and over, judging by the comment. I don’t see coaching. If the team fails to do something that she believes that she emphasizes – and we believe that coaching is about effect – wouldn’t the comment illustrate a lack of coaching, not great coaching, since she failed to get the desired effect from her team?

This is my problem with the way the public evaluates coaches. We like our coaches to yell and scream at players for mistakes. However, how many people like their bosses hovering over them as they work? How many workers excel when their boss screams over their shoulder at every typo?

If we do not like this behavior in our workplace, and we do not feel it is the most effective way for us to be managed by our superiors, why do we feel it is the best way to coach kids or adults?

I see this all the time when I watch coaches (I’ve never seen Caldwell coach). They don’t know how to make adjustments or fix mistakes, so they just yell loudly and hope it works. Coaches assume that mistakes occur because of lack of effort or desire, so yelling at the players is supposed to motivate the players.

Mistakes occur for three reasons:

1. The player is not yet good enough to do what is asked.
2. The player does not understand how to do what is asked or does not understand the instruction.
3. The player does not care enough to do what is asked.

Coaches quickly assume that players make mistakes because of #3 because #1 and #2 reflect poorly on the coach. Rather than yelling at the players, why not instruct? Why did they give up a transition basket? Did the PG forget to rotate back as a safety? Did a player reach and get beat with the dribble at half court? Did the PG penetrate to the basket and the shooting guard failed to retreat? Did a player gamble for a steal and miss?

If the answer is that all five players were jogging back on defense, then maybe it is #3 (it could be #1 if the coach asks the players to play too many minutes and wears out the players in practice). However, if it is #3, and all five players are unmotivated, is yelling at them going to motivate them to change their behavior? When you have a bad day at work and are doing subpar work, does it motivate you to work harder when your boss comes into your office and yells at you about doing bad work?

Sometimes, a sternly worded pep talk is warranted. I’m not saying that a coach should never yell (at least at the pro or college level). However, my problem is with the public perception of coaching. We believe yelling at players is great coaching, yet we in the stands dislike when our superiors yell at us. I don’t understand the juxtaposition beteween the way we like to be led and managed and the way we believe coaches should lead or manage.

The follow-up to the original post read:

Nikki Caldwell is a Pat Summit disciple. That is where she gets that intenisity.  Your post made me laugh with joy. Trust me… you don’t have a good coach, you have a GREAT coach.

Yes, I always laugh with joy when I picture adults screaming at 19-year-old kids and nothing signifies “greatness” in coaching quite like one’s ability to yell. Why is there such a disconnect between what we perceive as good leadership or management skills and what we want to see from our coaches?

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The Importance of Goals

I found this article about the St. John Bosco football team and their sports psychologist, Dr. Ken Ravizza. I have never met Dr. Ravizzari or taken one of his classes, but I know of him through the Positive Coaching Alliance, as one of the tools that PCA presents (I’m a PCA presenter) in the “Re-defining Winner” section comes from Dr. Ravizzari.

So what’s the first thing Ravizza asks athletes? Why do they do what they do?

If an athlete doesn’t know his goal, he won’t succeed, Ravizza said. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 12-year-old figure skater, a high school quarterback or a pitcher in the major leagues – like the Rays’ Matt Garza, whom Ravizza worked with this season.

“Every athlete will tell you they like doing their sport, but the key is finding out why,” Ravizza said. “You want to get the players to know why they’re enjoying themselves.”

As an individual trainer, I stopped working with players who could not tell me why they wanted to work out. I have new clients write down their goals and I review them. I want to know why they are training so I can help them reach their goal. Without a goal, you’re just exercising.

My 180 Shooter program was another effort to help players set goals and measure their improvement. I can’t believe when players tell me they don’t know their shooting percentage or they don’t know how many shots they took or made in their workout. If you don’t know what you’re doing at practice, how do you know if you’re getting better? What are you accomplishing with your workout if you don’t track makes and misses? Without a goal, what are you really doing?

Characteristics of Successful Athletes

On Cnnsi.com, I read an article about Al Staniewicz, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira’s assistant coach on The Ultimate Fight season 8. “Stankie” reminds me of the basketball coach in Van Wilder; a grandfatherly coach who is often hard to understand and who appears totally out of place with the young MMA fighters.

However, in the article, he says Nogueira is a great fighter because:

he possesses “the five ‘D’s and the two ‘A’s: desire, determination, dedication, drive, and discipline. And the a’s: ability and attitude.”

While most people fixate on size or other physical attributes, it is the psychological characterisitcs which are just as, if not more important than ability and “natural” talent, regardless of sport.

Problems with Talent Identification

Last week, on socalhoops, people argued the merits and disadvantages of age hold backs. Some posters felt that the age hold backs helped the age appropriate kids because the age appropriate kids play against tougher competition.

Theoretically, this is correct. When I was young, my parents lied about my age so I could attend a good basketball camp and play against older players. However, this gave me an advantage only when I returned to play against players my own age. Against the older kids, I did okay, but I certainly did not have an advantage.

This theory breaks down because of the way we evaluate and identify talent. When players try-out for the sponsored AAU team, and 11-year-olds compete against 10-year-olds for a spot on an u-11 AAU team, the 11-year-olds have a huge advantage because of the year of maturity. There is a big differece between a 10 and an 11-year-old in size, strength and maturity. Once a player makes a select team, he gets more practice time, better coaches (theoretically) and more opportunities (private training, better competition, etc.).

This is the subject of Chapter 1 in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. I have written frequently about our inability to evaluate and identify talent and the traits and characteristics which truly determine talent, whether for young players or when hiring coaches.

Gladwell writes about Canadian junior hockey players. He starts by writing:

If you have ability, the vast network of hockey scouts and talent spotters [AAU coaches and grassroots organizers] will find you, and if you are willing to work to develop that ability, the system will reward you.

We believe this to be true. The best and most talented players develop into the elite performers at the next level. We invest in this idea that you can identify superior talents at an early age, which is why we now rate 4th graders. However, Gladwell challenges this belief. A Canadian psychologist discovered that “in any elite group of Canadian hockey players, 40 percent of the players will have been born in January, February and March.” I have seen similar studies on baseball players in the USA. Is it a fluke? No, it’s age and maturity.

The cut-off date for junior hockey leagues in January 1. Therefore, a kid born in early January competes against a kid born in December who is almost one year younger. When I was young, I was one of the youngest players on my soccer teams; I think the cut-off was January 1 and I was a late September birthday. I always played on teams with kids who were a grade ahead of me in school who had birthdays in January and February. I remember playing with two friends in my class with November birthdays. But, in general, I was one of the younger players. However, in baseball, I think the cut-off date was August or September because I was always one of the older players. At younger ages, I performed better in baseball than soccer. I played all-stars in baseball, but I was never a very good soccer player. However, one of my friends in my class with a February birthday played select and competitive soccer. I always thought we were about the same in ability when we played at school. But, he competed against kids in an age group where he was one of the oldest kids, while I was in an age group where I was one of the youngest. Even though we had similar ability, he had that advantage in soccer, while I had a similar advantage in baseball. When coaches choose the select or all-star teams, “they are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players who have the benefit of critical extra months of maturity,” (Gladwell).

The advantage, at the beginning, is small. At younger ages, like I said, we were about the same ability. However, by high school, my friend was clearly a better soccer player than me:

In the beginning, his advantage isn’t so much that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older. But by the age of 13 or 14, with the benefit of better coaching and all the extra practice under his belt, he really is better, so he’s the one more likely to make it.

I wrote about this in regards to player rankings, as it creates the self-fulfilling prophecy, which sociologist Robert Merton defined as a situation where “a false definition, in the beginning…evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” When someone rates 4th graders, he does not identify talent – he identifies the players with early birth dates (or grade hold backs) who are more mature, taller, stronger and more coordinated. I wrote previously in Cross Over about such a player with a January birthday who matured early and made a “sponsored” team as a post player even though his dad was 5′8. In 5th grade, the kid was nearly full grown, so he had a definite advantage. When players get rated and make the “sponsored” teams, they have advantages like personal training and more gym time for practice and money to attend national tournaments. These advantages give the chosen few an advantage as they develop and the small advantage of age expands as the players receive more and better coaching (fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, basketball’s age advantage is less pronounced because of its entrepreneurial nature – there is no guarantee that a “sponsored” team receives better coaching, and often the opposite is true, as the sponsored teams feature shoe reps rather than dedicate coached).

Barnsley [the Canadian psychologist] argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming and differentiated experience. if you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented;” and if you provide the “talented” with  superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to the small group of people born closest to the cut-off date.

In Outliers, Gladwell looks at the Canadian junior hockey team and the Czech soccer team. He writes that at any national team try-out, those born more than six months after the cut-off date should not even bother at the try-outs.

Those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of the sport. The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered.

I wrote about point guards and personality over the summer and hypothesized that potential point guards are overlooked because at young ages, coaches select the more mature, more aggressive players (older players) rather than selecting for the talents and characteristics of good point guard play. While it does not preclude a point guard from being born early in the year (Nash was born in February),  when basketball coaches select for talent, the attributes they choose are not those synonymous with point guard play, even though many of the players chosen at early ages are ones who dribble well. As players develop, the bigger, stronger players dominate the ball, which enhances their development and reduces the development of a potential facilitator.

Gladwell’s study in Chapter 1 illustrates that we have a poor understanding of the road to success or excellence, and without a better understanding, our ability to evaluate and identify talent diminishes. When ranking players, choosing teams or identifying prospects, we need to look deeper than size, speed and strength, as those characteristics tend to balance as players continue to develop and all the players go through puberty. However, other talents do not necessarily balance out as players grow (like the personality of a facilitator), and players’ skills do not develop equally. What we see as success at an early age is often not success, but age. Rather than choose and develop the older players, we need a system by which we identify true talents or we need to wait to identify “talent” and differentiate training until the advantages of maturity disappear.

Maya Moore, Practice and Success

The Sports Illustrated college basketball preview featured an article describing Maya Moore’s work ethic and competitiveness. While a great talent with skills, length and size, her teammates coaches and TV analysts credited her competitiveness and work ethic.

“Maya wants to be the best at everything, and I mean everything,” says junior center Tina Charles.

We spend so much time glorifying shooting ability or defensive quickness, yet, inevitably, the best players are always the most competitive and the hardest workers. Depaul University Head Coach Doug Bruno compares Moore’s competitiveness to Michael Jordan’s, but it’s her effort which draws more attention.

“We talk about shooters being in the zone, but her work ethic is in the zone,” says TV analyst Debbie Antonelli. “I’ve never said that about another player except Tamika Catchings. [About] how many players can you say: They never take a play off?”

UConn assistant coach Shea Ralph assigned each guard a certain number of shot to take in the preseason.

“At the end of the first week she received a text from Moore breaking down her shots taken and percentages made from seven feet, 15-feet and three-point line and off the dribble. ‘It said, my goal, without defense, is this percentage,’ says Ralph. ‘I only asked her to take shots. But that’s the kind of kid she is; she wants to see improvement.’”

I don’t see anything noteworthy here. To me, this is what every player who wants to be great should do. I don’t understand just shooting a certain number of shots. Just shooting does not make you better. And, shooting without tracking results is meaningless – practicing without a goal is just exercising. I designed the 180 Shooter program for players like Moore who want to be great, who keep track of their shots and who want to measure their improvement over time to meet their self-imposed goals.

Unfortunately, as people have emailed since I developed the 180 Shooter program, few players track their practice shots, set goals or measure their improvement. Instead, players want to be great without all the effort involved in getting there. They need a personal shooting coach to motivate them to practice.

The great players are competitive – they want to know their results, they have to know where they stand. And, they work hard. They crave success and enjoy the process of reaching their goals. Consequently, with their competitiveness and work ethic, they improve, develop their skills and become great players who make the game look easy, so those on the outside attribute their success to their natural-born skills and talents. But, that’s almost never the case: successful people outwork the competition to become successful. As Magic Johnson said, “Almost without exception, the best players are the hardest workers.”

Basketball Busts and Breakout Stars

Last week, I took exemption to a post on a UCLA fan site that labeled James Keefe, UCLA’s starting power forward, a bust because he was a McDonald’s All-American, and the poster felt that he has no NBA prospects. Then, Detroit’s Kwame Brown, one of the most infamous “busts” in NBA history played well in Detroit’s win over the Lakers, Brown’s former team.

First, I don’t know how we – the public and the media – can label anyone a “bust” when they play in the NBA or the Final Four or are named McDonald’s All-Americans.

Before we criticize players for reaching some preconceived perceptions of their potential, I think we should look at who (and how) created the expectations. Is Kwame Brown a bust? Or, did Michael Jordan make a bad decision when he chose a 6′10 high school kid with the #1 pick? Is Keefe a bust because he is not an NBA target?

Scouts, General Managers and Recruiters make mistakes all the time. Unfortunately, more often than not, we criticize the player who benefits from their mistake, rather than the individual who makes the poor judgment. Over the weekend, undrafted Anthony Morrow from Georgia Tech dropped 37 points on the Clippers. Undrafted! Every team in the NBA missed on him because which team couldn’t use another shooter with reasonable athleticism (he had 11 rebounds too)? Second round pick Luc Richard Mbah a Moute had a game last week where he scored 19 points and grabbed 17 rebounds. Every team passed on him. It’s not like these players were unknown; both played in BCS conferences against good competition and had good college careers. Nobody thought Morrow was good enough to draft; nobody thought Mbah a Moute was worth a 1st Rounder. Mbah a Moute now starts for Milwaukee even though the Bucks used their first round pick on another player who plays the same position and has similar size (Joe Alexander). While its says something about Morrow and Mbah a Moute’s self-confidence and resiliency, it also shows that NBA General Managers make mistakes.

For every Mbah a Moute and Marrow, there is likely to be a first round pick who does not have a first round pick’s career. For some, it’s their fault – they lack the work ethic or the passion to become a great player. It does not make them a bad person; they just don’t love basketball. I dropped Brook Lopez in my mock draft because I had heard that he had so many different interests that he would never fully dedicate himself to being a great basketball player. In a sense, that probably makes him a more interesting person, but as someone drafting for the future of my franchise, I’d rather have single-minded dedication than a renaissance man.

For others, the high expectations are no fault of their own – Brown did not announce to the world that he was the best player in the draft. He played high school basketball, went through the draft workouts and his name kept soaring up the charts. NBA personnel liked his “upside.” Is it his fault that they misjudged his upside (although, I still think he is a solid player and a very good post defender)? Is it the player’s fault that NBA personnel overvaules pre-draft workouts and undervalues actual game performance?

When Mbah a Moute entered UCLA, fellow Cameroonian Alfred Aboya was the higher rated recruit. While Mbah a Moute starts in the NBA, Aboya battles to maintain his starting job as a senior at UCLA. Does that make Aboya a bust? No. Aboya already has his degree from UCLA and has his eyes fixed on being the President of Cameroon, not an NBA power forward. Aboya personifies the student in student-athlete; unfortunately, even though we use the term student-athlete, we really just want athletes who perform and win games for our favorite team. Does anyone care about their favorite team’s graduation rate if they go to the Final Four?

Fans and the media are sometimes unfair to athletes. Some athletes deserve it if they lack the desire. But, sometimes, the scouts were wrong. Jordan made a mistake drafting Brown #1. I think Brown’s journeyman career says more about Jordan’s ability as a General Manager than Brown’s desire to be a great player. I never watched Keefe play in high school. He played for a great high school program in one of the toughest high school leagues in the country. It’s never a stretch to say that the best player from the league deserves to be considered one of the top high school players in the country. I also don’t think that the McDonald’s AA award is given to players based on their NBA potential. If a player is named a McDonald’s All-American and does not play in the NBA, he is not necessarily a bust. Keefe returned from an injury last season, gave up his redshirt and made big plays in the NCAA Tournament which helped the Bruins reach the Final Four. He performed at a high level in an elite event. I don’t think “busts” do that.

Tips To Make You A Better Player

Jerome Green

To be a better player you don’t have to be the most athletic, the quickest or the tallest. You do have to have basketball IQ and what I call basketball V.E.R.V.E (Vision, Energy, Resiliency, Velocity of learning and Encouragement). All the great players like Jordan, Lisa Leslie, Kobe, and Lebron have it. Without V.E.R.V.E you will always have limitations to your game.

Vision

When you are on the court what do you do? Do you see a play ahead, see the next pass or communicate with your teammates? When you are on the bench what do you do? Do you just sit on the bench sort of day dreaming or do you pay attention to the game by watching the flow of the game, looking for weaknesses in the other team and specifically watching to see what the strengths and weaknesses are of the player(s) you might be guarding. Some of things you should be looking for are:

Are the players left handed or right handed? Can they dribble or shoot with their off hand?

What habits do the players on the other team have? Do they get back quickly on defense or walk back?

What do they like to do the most? Attack the basket or shoot the jumper?

Energy

When you are in the game or on the bench do you supply energy to your team? Are you vocal and encouraging? Can your teammates hear you on the floor or from the bench? Does your coach know you are on the team or are you real quite on and off the floor?

Resiliency

What do you do after a bad play or bad game? Do you sulk, go home and blame someone else, including yourself, or do you actually go back to the drawing board and work on your game? I can recall when Magic Johnson had a horrible NBA final against Boston in 1983. He had a ton of turnovers and just a sub-par playoff series. The fans where also a little down on him because they felt he got Paul Westhead fired. What Magic did was go back to Michigan that summer and work on his game. When he came back the next season, he had a better outside shot, and was a stronger all around player. If a player of Magic’s caliber can do back to the drawing board and do his homework what do you need to do?

Velocity

You have to have powerful spirit to play the game of basketball. It’s not a game for the meek. What you lack in foot speed needs to be made up in learning speed and skill development. The more proficient you can become at managing the ball, the more valuable you become to your team, no matter what your size or athletic ability. Do you play defense and get after it? There is always room for players who play hard and smart.

Encouragement

Encouragement may be one of the most overused words in the English language. Many players are always looking for external encouragement, but very few rarely look inside. Courage is a component to the word encouragement. Life itself requires a great deal of courage and focus to achieve anything you want. Without courage, it’s hard to encourage. You have to have the courage to make mistakes, learn from them and start over again. Luvv is another ingredient to en-courage-ment, without luvv it is very difficult to have the courage to face your next obstacle and you will find yourself becoming discouraged.

“Short memories lead to good defense after mistakes”-.

Mark Adams, an ESPN basketball color man, commenting on a Hawaii player who made an offense turnover and then got in the proper deny defense, got the steal and went down and scored.

To play any game, you have to have a short memory and great bounce back abilities.

Adam Bender’s Story

I saw a story about Adam Bender on ESPN E:60. Bender is an 8-year-old athlete from Lexington, Kentucky who plays soccer, football (quarterback), baseball (catcher) and wrestling on one leg.

In a sports society so focused on developing professional athletes, some stories illustrate the true meaning of sports. Here is a small clip of Bender playing baseball.

And, here is a link to his web site.

Mike Leach and Coaching Hires

I’ve written several times about the way that we hire coaches and the way that we value or evaluate coaches. In Michael Lewis’ article about Mike Leach, “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep,” he mentions former Tennessee Titans’ defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz. When Schwartz interviewed for the San Francisco 49ers vacancy, he slipped when asked who he would hire on his staff. So, he started to evaluate coaches:

The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz’s view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?

The same happens in basketball. We often judge coaches based on the talent that they have. Is Bill Self a better coach now than he was before last season because he won an NCAA National Championship with a loaded team that had five players drafted (Rush, Arthur, Chalmers, Jackson, Kaun)? Would he have won that championship if he had changed personnel with Kansas State? Self is a good coach. I have followed him since he was at Tulsa. But, in most people’s eyes, a National Championship elevates his status. However, his coaching jobs at Tulsa (or even Oral Roberts) were more impressive than his coaching job last season with Kansas. Illinois’ Bruce Weber was on the top of the coaching world when he took Illinois to the NCAA Championship Game with Deron Williams, Dee Brown and Luther Head in the back-court. Now, with less talent, he seems like he is on the hot seat.

Did he forget how to coach? No. Players win games. When evaluating coaches, you cannot ignore talent differences.

Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the “midl-evel schools” in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech’s numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation’s highest scoring offense…Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach’s perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from mid-range schools…Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. “They weren’t scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players,” Schwartz told me recently. “They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work.”

As I wrote on Saturday, many coaches are caught doing things the way they have always been done. I wrote a column for a women’s basketball site about five years based on Lewis’ book Moneyball. I argued that the problem with the WNBA is that all the teams effectively played the same style, which meant that the most talented team was going to win. I wrote that if a coach implemented a different style with the right personnel, they could win the championship. Three years later, Paul Westhead unleashed his fast breaking style on the league and won a WNBA Championship without a great inside presence and behind four guards: Kelly Miller, Diana Taurasi, Cappie Pondexter and Penny Taylor.

When I wrote the column, the old guard criticized me and said I did not understand women’s basketball, even though I had coached professional women’s basketball, while most of the fervent posters were scribes who wrote about basketball, but did not coach. However, just as the media – including ex-players like Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith – love to criticize Mike D’Antoni and say that his style – or an offensive style – cannot win because it goes against conventional wisdom, Westhead and the Mercury proved that if you maximize your players’ talents through your system, you can win a championship with a non-conventional approach or line-up.

The problem – and this happens when A.D.s or G.M.s make hires as well as when coaches develop their philosophies – is that it is hard to explain away perceived failures when you do things differently. D’Antoni ultimately was forced out of Phoenix because he did things differently. Despite averaging 58 wins a season, not winning a championship was deemed a failure. If he had acquiesced and played a slower pace and tried to win in the half-court, he probably would not have won as many games, but he would not be criticized so heavily. Then, the blame would fall on the players who could not get the job done or who did not defend well enough. When an A.D. hires a coach, if he hires the “safe” hire and the coach does not work out, the coach gets fired. However, if the A.D. tries something unconventional, and it does not work, the A.D. gets fired too. So, out of job preservation, we favor the tried and true, not the innovative and unconventional.

An ex-player in the media does not want to see a D’Antoni or Leach succeed because it questions everything they believe, and their status. If an outsider can win, it opens employment to millions of outsiders. No longer do you have to be a part of an exclusive club to get a job. If D’Antoni resurrects the Knicks, after Thomas failed, what does that say about former NBA players as Head Coaches? The current wisdom says that a former player makes a better coach than a non-player. But, if an outsider, someone who is considered a “European-type” coach, wins, General Managers will feel safe hiring coaches from Europe or other non-former players because they would be following a precedent. It would be accepted. So, it’s better for the exclusive club of NBA players and coaches if D’Antoni falls on his face, so Smith and Barkley can chronicle every perceived mistake on national television every week. They are in the club; they don’t want to change the rules. They profit from them.

This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn’t know if Leach’s system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t.