Innovative Sports Strategies

Podcast Transcript

All sports are governed by a body of rules. Within those rules, there is usually a set of norms for how the game should be played. Most coaches will instruct their players to use similar techniques.

However, every so often, someone comes along who totally rethinks how a game can be played. Using the same set of rules, they come up with a totally different approach to the game, which sometimes can be revolutionary.

Other times, it’s simply evolutionary.

Learn more about innovative sports strategies and how taking a different approach to a game can lead to positive results on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In previous episodes, I covered several innovations in individual sports.

These included the Fosbury Flop developed by Dick Fosbury. Fosbury developed a new technique that revolutionized the high jump. His new technique won him the gold medal in the high jump at the 1968 Olympics, and eventually every high jumper adopted the Fosbury Flop.

Some techniques were effective, but perhaps a bit too effective.

New Zealand long jumper Tuariki Delamere realized the biomechanics of the long jump would work better if you did a front flip in mid-air to preserve your forward momentum. He used it at the 1974 Pac-8 championship and did a jump that would have been a world record if it had been for Bob Beamon’s insane jump at the 1968 Olympics.

The powers that be banned this technique, citing it as being too dangerous, even though gymnasts seem to have no problem doing flips in midair.

Likewise, Spanish javelin throwers found that they could crush the world record by throwing the javelin like a discus. This, too, was banned, although this had more to do with the danger of impaling spectators.

In this episode, I want to examine similar innovations that have developed in team sports. These usually aren’t as dramatic as a single technique, but the results can often be the same.

I want to start with one of the most innovative, but not necessarily successful approaches to playing association football, aka soccer: Total Football.

Total Football is one of the most influential and revolutionary tactical philosophies in the history of soccer. It was developed in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s, reaching its peak with Amsterdam Ajax and the Dutch national team during the 1974 World Cup.

Its key premise is that any player, other than the goalie, can take over the role of any other player, creating a highly dynamic and fluid system where positions and responsibilities are interchangeable.

The philosophy of Total Football took shape under the visionary leadership of Rinus Michels, who began his managerial career at Ajax in the mid-1960s. Michels emphasized tactical intelligence, fitness, and positional flexibility.

He built a team where defenders could surge forward into attack, forwards could drop into defense, and midfielders covered all spaces as needed. Players were expected to read the game intuitively and constantly adapt.

This system relied on a highly technical and disciplined squad, most notably exemplified by Johan Cruyff, who became its on-field orchestrator.

Cruyff’s exceptional footballing intelligence allowed him to influence the game from virtually any position, making him the epitome of a Total Football player.

Total Football was not easy to pull off, which is why so few teams bothered to try it.

It required Fluidity in positioning where players switch roles seamlessly.

High fitness levels are required because of the continuous movement required during a game.

…and positional awareness, such that every player understands the entire team’s shape and tactical plan.

Ajax had an academy where they taught Total Football to young players so they could be accustomed to it if they should ever make the top team.

Total Football did see limited success.

Ajax won three consecutive European Cups from 1971 to 1973, playing a Total Football style.

In the 1974 World Cup, the Dutch national team, with most of its core drawn from Ajax, led by Cruyff, found success. Despite losing to West Germany in the final, they introduced a thrilling fast paced style that forever changed the tactics of soccer.

Given the Netherlands’ size compared to other countries, it performed well. However, despite their success, Total Football never quite gained widespread adoption.

That being said, many of its core concepts, pressing as a unit, positional play, and encouraging technical skill in all players, are standard at the highest level of soccer today.

The chief insight of Total Football was that players and positions weren’t set in stone.

Another sport adopted a similar strategy with the repositioning of players: baseball.

While baseball has set positions, there was nothing in the rulebooks that explicitly said where a given player had to play. It was just natural that the first baseman covered first base, etc.

Normally, there is no reason to radically move players around on the field. However, in the 1940s, one manager realized that moving players out of position might be a way to neutralize one of the game’s best hitters.

Lou Boudreau was the player/manager of the Cleveland Indians from 1942 to 1950.

One of the biggest threats the team faced was the Boston Red Sox and the great Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters in history. Williams was a devastating hitter, but he had one thing that was highly predictable. He was a dead pull hitter.

Williams, as a left-handed hitter, almost always hit the ball to the right side of the field.

On July 14, 1946, the Indians and the Red Sox were playing a Sunday doubleheader. In the first game, Williams hit three home runs and a single, driving in eight runs.

In between games, Boudreau, frustrated with Williams’ performance, finally decided to do something he had been thinking about doing for weeks.

In Williams’s first at-bat in the second game, he hit a double.

In his second at-bat, Boudreau yelled “Yo,” and all of the players moved to the right side of the field, save for the left fielder, who was playing a deep shortstop.

Boudreau later said, “My plan was predicated on the belief that Williams, who made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be known as the greatest hitter of all time—which I think he was—would be too proud to adjust his style to counteract my strategy, that it would be beneath his dignity to change…”

Known as the Boudreau shift, it became a historical curiosity.

However, in the early 2000s, baseball became awash with advanced statistics, including spray charts which told defenses exactly where a hitter was most likely to hit a ball.

The data told a very simple story: put your players where the ball was likely to be hit.

The Tampa Bay Rays and Houston Astros pioneered the widespread use of the shift.

Later, data-driven front offices like those of the Dodgers and Yankees adopted it, leading to an MLB-wide boom. By 2019, most teams shifted in some capacity on nearly a third of all plate appearances.

By the early 2020s, widespread shifting resulted in lower batting averages, especially for left-handed power hitters, more strikeouts, and fewer balls in play, making games feel less dynamic.

In response, Major League Baseball introduced new shift restrictions starting with the 2023 season.

Two infielders must be positioned on either side of second base at pitch release, and all infielders must have both feet on the infield dirt before the pitch.

Like the forward summersault long jump, the infield shift simply proved to be too good.

American football has seen its share of innovative strategies. Perhaps the best known and most successful has been dubbed the West Coast Offense.

The West Coast Offense was developed and refined by Bill Walsh in the 1970s and 1980s, fundamentally changing the way teams thought about passing and offensive strategy in football.

Its origins trace back to Walsh’s time as an assistant coach with the Cincinnati Bengals under Paul Brown. Walsh was looking for a way to work around an offensive line that couldn’t hold blocks for long and a quarterback who didn’t have a strong arm.

To do this, he constructed an offense built around short, quick passes that would serve as an extension of the running game. Instead of relying on long throws, Walsh designed timing routes that allowed the quarterback to take three- and five-step drops, get the ball out quickly, and hit receivers in stride. The idea was to control the ball, stretch the defense horizontally, and force them to defend every blade of grass.

When Walsh became head coach of the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, he had the perfect quarterback to execute this vision in Joe Montana.

The 49ers’ offense relied on precision and ball control, utilizing short passes to backs, tight ends, and a new breed of athletic receivers who could gain yards after the catch.

It was an offensive philosophy that de-emphasized verticality in favor of rhythm, spacing, and consistency. The West Coast Offense quickly proved successful; the 49ers won four Super Bowls under Walsh and his successor, George Seifert, and the concepts they perfected reshaped modern offensive football.

The philosophy has been adopted and adapted by almost every team and coach across the NFL ever since. Even today, elements of the West Coast Offense are still evident, as teams continue to emphasize completion percentage, quick decision-making, creating yards after the catch, and spreading the ball to multiple targets, making Walsh’s revolutionary concepts an enduring part of football strategy.

The last innovative strategy I want to cover comes from basketball. Unlike the previous strategies I’ve mentioned, which were created within the rules of the game, this strategy was a reaction to a rules change. The three-point field goal.

The three-point field goal was introduced into the NBA at the beginning of the 1979–1980 season, a direct import from the American Basketball Association, which had adopted the shot in 1967 to add excitement and spacing to the game.

At the time, most NBA coaches and players weren’t sure what to do with this new scoring option. Early on, three-pointers were considered a novelty — a long-distance, low-percentage shot that most teams rarely attempted.

In the first season of the three-pointer, teams averaged fewer than three attempts per game, often relegating the shot to end-of-quarter heaves or situations of desperation.

For the next two decades, the three-pointer remained a secondary weapon. Teams built their offenses around post play, mid-range jumpers, and driving to the rim. Players who specialized in long-distance shooting, like Larry Bird and Reggie Miller, were respected for their accuracy. However, most coaches still believed the most efficient scoring happened closer to the basket.

What the coaches failed to realize was that the three-point shot wasn’t just an extra point. It was 50% more points. Taking a step back to the three-point line for some shots might decrease your shooting percentage, but the increase in points would more than compensate for it.

The real revolution happened in the 2010s with the emergence of Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. Curry’s shooting range was essentially unlimited.

The Warriors built their entire offensive system around ball movement and an avalanche of three-point attempts. Other teams took note, and the entire league followed suit — by 2020, most teams were taking 30 to 40 threes per game.

The average number of three-point attempts per game in the most recent NBA season was a record 37.6. In the 1980-81 season, the number was….two.

The three-point shooting percentage has also gone up, and the team that attempts the most three-pointers, on average, has a 55% chance of winning.

The increased importance of the three-point shot in the NBA wasn’t a single ah-ha moment by a single coach. Rather, it was an evolutionary change in strategy as teams recognized the simple fact that it worked.

These examples are far from the only ones that exist in the world of sports. If I know my audience, I’m sure many of you will notify me of other examples I didn’t cover.

Sports, like war, are a constant battle of adaptation and innovation, which means that for every innovation in strategy, eventually something else will come along to counter it.