Leachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space)

"How does a coach who never played a down of football have the best offense in the game?"

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, has a fantastic piece in the New York Times about another innovator in sports who is rapidly overturning conventional wisdom, this time in football. Mike Leach, head coach at Texas Tech, has assembled the most devastating offence in the NCAA by rethinking the basic structures of the game. A fantastic read, and I wanted to highlight a few samples (boldface emphasis mine):

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 midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) 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."

But when Schwartz studied videotape of the Texas Tech offense, what he saw unsettled him. 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 offensive line splits - you look at them, and you're just shocked," Schwartz said. "It scares people to see splits that are that wide."

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. The look was more flag than tackle football: 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.

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.

Once again, Lewis chronicles what is basically a challenge to the Foucauldian (constructed) authority figure of the athletic talent scout.

The first play Leach called against Texas A.&M. was the first play on Cody Hodges's wrist. That wrist held a mere 23 ordinary plays, 9 red-zone plays (for situations inside an opponent's 20-yard line), 6 goal-line plays, 2 2-point-conversion plays and 5 trick plays. "There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," Leach says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations." Leach prefers new formations. "That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do," he says. "You just have to teach him new places to stand." Texas Tech's offense has no playbook; Cody Hodges's wrist and Mike Leach's back pocket hold the only formal written records of what is widely regarded as one of the most intricate offenses ever to take a football field. The plays change too often, in response to the defense and the talents of the players on hand, to bother recording them.

My basketball coach at Acadia was clever enough to do something similar — a couple of different offensive formations, and then a number of set plays out of those formations that were essentially the same, except that the different original formation gave slightly different looks to the defence and thus opened up slightly different possibilities for scoring.

Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's a ton of touchdowns to be had." All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, "Line up in Ace, see how they line up against it and call a good play."

Unfortunately, he wasn't as good at giving authority to the players and making them thinking subjects out on the floor. As good as he was at understanding the spatiotemporal element of the game, he missed out at times on the humanistic element that can make players and teams so dangerous.

Finally, A.&M. brought a few more players to the line of scrimmage. Hodges looked over and noted Jarrett Hicks all alone with a cornerback and threw Tech's first touchdown pass to him. The entire Texas Tech possession lasted just 2 minutes 42 seconds. Two minutes later, Tech got the ball back, and this time it was only four plays and 47 seconds before the tailback, Taurean Henderson ran, barely touched, for 18 yards into the end zone. An idea about the use of football time was being challenged. The typical football offense seeks to eat up as much of it as it can. The Texas Tech offense, which at that point in the season had passed for more touchdowns than any team in the country, uses just a shade over two minutes on each drive. But speeding everything up has a curious effect on game time. A typical college football team runs 65 to 75 offensive plays a game. Texas Tech tries to run 90 - and sometimes does. A college team with a robust passing game might throw the football 35 times a game; at this point, 8 games into an 11-game regular season, the Red Raiders were averaging 53 passes a game. And because the clock stops after first downs, touchdowns and incompletions, Texas Tech's games are among the longest in college football. Less than six minutes into game time but nearly 30 into real time, Tech led, 14-0.

I think this is fascinating. The way that time is constructed and experienced is rapidly changing — not least of all by increasing speed — and needs to be examined in greater depth.

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 antipass 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.

Leach and his offense are approaching the natural end of a path football strategy has been taking for 50 years. They are testing a limit. Synergy, in Leach's view, doesn't come from mixing runs with passes but from throwing the ball everywhere on the field, to every possible person allowed to catch a ball. "Our notion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season." (The Indianapolis Colts last season became only the fourth team in N.F.L. history to have three receivers gain more than 1,000 yards in a single season.) The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is that they clump players together on the field - by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot with the ball. "I've thought about going a whole season without calling a single running play," Leach says, only half-joking. To a team that gains as many yards as Texas Tech, the usual boring, penny-ante yard-eating tactics - punts, penalties - are trivial. Field position is simply a thing to improve. Cody Hodges, who has spent the last four years marveling at Leach's in-game refusal to accept that his offense might have to be so conservative as to punt, says, "There's been lots of times I'm on the sidelines, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, we're going for it!' We went for it on fourth and 5 on our own 23 - in the first quarter. We went for it once on fourth and 18 - and we were ahead." E. J. Whitley, an offensive lineman, says: "If you're on this offense, you expect to score. Most offenses on fourth down are coming off the field. On fourth down we expect a play to be called. Because we haven't scored yet."

Can we describe this as radical decentralization in football — at least insofar as the nature of the game allows it? Lewis probably asks more questions with this article than he answers, but it is a great read, and credit him with seeking out the stories of innovation in a field as entrenched with tradition as modern sport.

"They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things because that's the way they've always been done. It's like he's been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he's trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!"