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{ 2005 12 22 }

Deep thinking on strategy and talent on the football fields of Texas Tech

[Cross posted at Future Tense]

Dave Winer may work best with a river of news approach to RSS feeds, but I seem to fall more into the “compost heap of knowledge” school. I finally got around to an item from Tom Peters’ blog from earlier this month, which pointed at a Sunday New York Times article that never reached the top of my stack that particular weekend. Peters declares that it “may be the best article on business strategy I’ve ever read.” Granted that Peters does have a predisposition for hyperbole, I think he’s on to something this time and I would second his advice to “read every damn word in the article.” You should also make the effort to read Tom’s take on the article as well, which begins:
You must read …

The New York Times Magazine, December 4, “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep.” By Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, etc.).

You simply don’t beat NEBRASKA 70-10. And a lightly regarded QB doesn’t pass for 643 yards against Kansas State—before being pulled early in the 4th quarter. And you sure as hell don’t do all this in Division 1-A with a coach who topped out as a bench-rider during his junior year in high school in Cody, WY. [tompeters! ]

The article is a feature piece on the unorthodox coaching strategies and success of Mike Leach, head football coach at Texas Tech. It’s a very different riff on the relationship between strategy, leadership, and talent than you usually find. Leach and Texas Tech don’t get first or second crack at the best talent. Not when you you’ve got UT and Texas A&M to compete with for starters. Here’s how one NFL Coach summed it up:

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.”
I’m a huge advocate of getting the best possible talent as a starting point, but Leach offers a pointed reminder that what you do with talent is more important. And it’s much more than simply cheering them on to do better than they think they are able. It’s also about digging deep into the real depths of strategy. Go read the article. For extra credit, go read what Peters has to say. Then put both of them down and think about it.
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Posted by Jim on Thursday, December 22, 2005, at 7:56 pm. Filed under Strategy. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

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