"College and high school have long been the Petri dishes of football innovation," wrote Charles Seibert last week in the Wall Street Journal. I made note of this last December in this post about the innovative nature of the spread offense in college football. Innovation in football is a classic case of constraint-driven innovation. Colleges have smaller budgets than pros and make less money, so there's less to lose and more to gain from doing something radical. High schools have even fewer financial resources and even less to lose.
Besides financial resources, there are two main constraints driving innovation in football. One is talent. High school coaches have the least amount of choice over their players. They don't draft players as the pros do, and they don't generally recruit as colleges do. The play with who they have. And many of the wackiest and most creative offensive schemes in football are designed to level the playing field, so to speak, to make a team that has fewer talented players competitive with teams that do.
The second major constraint driving football innovation is the set of rules that governs the game. If you can come up with something that exploits a loophole, it has the added advantage of initial surprise, until other teams begin to adjust for it. Over the off-season I came across a mention of the A-11 offense being practiced since 2007 in some California high schools. A-11 exploits a couple of loopholes: in scrimmage-kick formation, every player on the offense is eligible to catch the ball. And if you have no offensive players wearing numbers 50 to 79, there can be no ineligible receivers on the offense. After last season, in an effort to take some of the sting out of the A-11, the National Federation of State High School Associations added a rule mandating at least four players on the line of scrimmage wearing numbers 50 to 79.
But the A-11's creators simply tweaked the offense, noted the Oakland Tribune last week: "True innovators don't concede to roadblocks. Not surprisingly, they're still going around, through and over them at Piedmont, executing wacky double-reverse flea-flickers with two quarterbacks in the backfield, three men up front and six players split wide." The A-11's creators suit up those "ineligible" receivers, but just push right out to the edge of what they are elegible to do: they can still carry the ball, throw it, catch screens, and block. They just can't go downfield to catch passes.
In other words, these players can still mess with the minds of the defense, which was a big part of the original point of the A-11 and part of the point of all innovations that push at rules. Noted the Washington Post, "Throughout football's history, offensive innovation has been based on misdirection and deception, from Knute Rockne's box shift at Notre Dame in the 1920s to the spread option of today. But [the A-11] spurred a debate about the sport's tradition and rules of play."
The other main point of A-11 is to add randomness to the offense that results in many more scoring opportunities, as Scientific American pointed out: "In a standard formation with five fixed linemen, a play can unfold with 36 different scenarios for who receives the snap and who ends up with the ball — including a quarterback sneak. In the A-11 offense, because the receivers and linemen (and even quarterbacks) are interchangeable, the number of different possibilities for what can happen on a given play skyrockets to 16,632."
Innovation in the offense hasn't completely sidestepped the pros. Seibert's article discusses the rise of the Wildcat offense in pro football, noting that "Even the biggest and most heavily favored juggernauts can on any given day be suddenly undone by a group of scrappy upstarts with a wealth of passion and a well-wrought stratagem: some riotous, rhythm-ruining array of timely defensive blitzing packages, or a stunningly inventive attack formation such as the new Wildcat offense."
Image from Chicago Sun-Times Sports Pros(e) blog
When Oklahoma and Florida line up against each other in the 
As September wanes and summer fades the Oakland Athletics are once again in position to finish first in the American League West. Despite sporting a perennially low payroll ? this year?s $62 million ranks in the bottom third of the league, less than 1/3 of what George Steinbrenner doles out to his Yankees ? this will most likely be the fifth time in seven seasons that the A?s make the playoffs. This unusual success has been driven by the unconventional and counterintuitive management principles developed by A?s General Manager Billy Beane and chronicled by Michael Lewis in his bestseller, Moneyball. Essentially, Beane has been able to consistently acquire undervalued players that subsequently outperform expectations, leading to winning seasons at a fraction of the price paid by other contending ball clubs. In an article this morning on the resurgence of A?s designated hitter and Most Valuable Player candidate Frank Thomas ? a former superstar widely considered to be washed up last winter when Beane signed him for a measly $500,000 ? the New York Times calls Oakland?s recurrent success ?baseball?s ultimate mystery.? So how do they do it? By executing a management strategy that aligns neatly with certain aspects of Disruptive Innovation theory. As cash-rich big market titans like the Yankees and the Red Sox fight to sign the most expensive players every winter, the A?s find success at radically lower price points by using counterintuitive metrics to evaluate market worth. Adhering to their principles, Oakland disrupts the Major Leagues from the low end year after year. Lewis goes into great detail in his book, but, in brief, the A?s value players according to nontraditional measures of performance that tie closely with the ultimate Job to be Done: plating more runs than your opponent. Traditional baseball talent scouts look for players who excel along accepted dimensions ? great athletes who run, jump, hit and throw with the best ? believing that they will then develop into great baseball players. Unfortunately, baseball is complex and notoriously difficult to predict, and many blue chip, expensive, and ?can?t miss? prospects fail to live up to their potential. Beane, therefore, looks for players who do the specific things that lead to winning ball games: batters who get on base and therefore don?t make outs and pitchers who throw strikes and therefore get batters out. Eschewing conventional wisdom and zeroing in on the Job to be Done has enabled the A?s to uncover a wellspring of hidden talent in players who do not fit the traditional mould of success (and are therefore available at bargain rates). They have signed and developed players who other teams considered too fat or too slow, batters who didn?t hit for enough power to draw attention, and pitchers who do not throw particularly hard. Many have grown into competent ? and even excellent ? ball players (three early stage experiments featured in 2003?s Moneyball, Nick Swisher, Mark Teahan, and Kevin Youkilis, have blossomed into legitimate stars this season), and year after year the A?s field winning teams. In Disruptive Innovation terms, athletic skill is overshot when it comes to talent evaluation. Things like mental makeup and plate discipline are often misunderstood and consequently undervalued. Aggressively pursuing market opportunities ? in this case, signing and developing undervalued players ? produces sustained success. The ultimate lesson here is that the forces underlying Disruptive Innovation are based on common sense and can be readily applied to pursuits beyond the business world (well?fine, baseball is ultimately a business too). Always think carefully about how closely prevailing notions of value track with Jobs to be Done, and be bold about seizing opportunities that are not commonly seen or understood.