One of the things coaches worry way too much about is tendencies. Every year somebody walks into the office with a self-scout report and starts acting like the season is over because we ran a play too many times from a formation. I think a lot of coaches are solving the wrong problem. A tendency by itself is not a problem. An exploitable tendency is a problem. Those are two completely different things. If I line up in the I formation and run bootleg for two straight weeks, that doesn't automatically mean I've made a mistake. It just means I've established something that people are going to see on film.
The mistake is thinking you have to break the tendency immediately. In fact, I think a lot of coaches get ahead of themselves here. They become so worried about being unpredictable that they never establish anything in the first place. They're trying to balance a range before they've created one. Sometimes I want you to see the tendency. Sometimes I want the defensive coordinator to spend an entire week talking about bootleg. The reason is simple: once I know what you're preparing for, I can start building answers around it.
Let's use the I formation as an example. If I run bootleg from it one week and then add wedge the next week, I've started building a range. If I add quarterback sneak the week after that, I've expanded the range even further. By the time I get to the fourth or fifth opponent, the formation no longer means bootleg. It means bootleg, wedge, sneak, and whatever else I've attached to it. The defensive coordinator can still have a tendency report, but now he has a much harder time exploiting what he's seeing because the formation has become balanced over time.
One of the best examples I have comes from the Flexbone. We spent a season playing games with Belly G and quads formations. One week we'd line up in quads and run Belly G right at the overload. The next week we'd break the huddle looking like we were headed to quads, shift into a wing flank set, and run Belly the opposite direction. Later we'd line up in the wing flank and trade into quads. Then after defensive staffs had spent all week coaching the trade, we'd line up in quads, fake the trade, and run the play right where we started. None of these adjustments were difficult for us. We weren't learning a new offense. We weren't reinventing the wheel. We were making small adjustments that forced the defense to spend an enormous amount of time preparing for possibilities.
That's really the heart of game theory in football. The best ideas are usually cheap for you and expensive for the other guy. We were spending very little practice time on those adjustments while forcing the defense to spend meeting time, film study, and practice periods preparing for them. Every adjustment they made created another thing they had to coach. Every possibility they had to prepare for consumed resources. The offense was operating efficiently while the defense was becoming overloaded.
The same thing happens on defense. Let's say you're playing a three technique in an even front. Most of the game he may line up and play his base technique. Eventually the guard gets comfortable. He thinks he knows where the defender is going to end up. Now you slant him inside. Later you two-gap slant him. Suddenly the guard isn't sure what he's seeing and the center starts paying attention as well. The important thing is that you don't have to do it every play. In fact, doing it every play would defeat the purpose. You only need to do it enough that the offense has to account for the possibility.
Pressure packages work the same way. If I establish a strong safety blitz early in the season, every offensive coordinator after that has to account for it. Maybe I only bring it ten percent of the time. It doesn't matter. The quarterback has been coached on it. The protection has been coached on it. The offensive line has spent practice time discussing it. The possibility itself has value. Even when I don't call the blitz, the offense still has to respect it.
That's why I think football is a game of ranges. I'm not trying to fool you on one play. I'm not trying to be random. Random football is usually bad football. What I'm trying to do is create enough balance that you cannot confidently attack me. If you know exactly what's coming, you've got the advantage. If you have to defend multiple possibilities, now the advantage starts shifting. The goal is not eliminating tendencies. The goal is building ranges that make those tendencies difficult to exploit.
