Game-Changer

What college football can teach us about innovation

You’ll be reading this just after the Super Bowl, when America’s gridiron heroes have hung up their cleats for another season, but I’m writing in December, and the college football national championship game has yet to be played. 

You don’t have to be an ardent fan to find inspiration in this year’s big story: Upstart University of Oregon tapped for the big game against one of college football’s legendary competitors, Auburn, from Alabama.  Top-seeded Auburn is a perennial powerhouse. Oregon, not so much.

Yet Oregon finished the year seeded second, after winning some games by almost inconceivable numbers.  They did it by introducing an innovation so audacious that college football is still rattling from the impact and professional football coaches are taking note.

Oregon is my home state, but that’s not why I love the story of what Coach Chip Kelly and his team has been up to in Eugene this year. What Kelly is doing, as he reinvents football for the coming decades, makes a recent New York Times story ripe with observations for executives seeking to come up with a game changer or implement a winning strategy of their own.

The skill that lies at the core of Oregon’s game is swiftness, fitting for a college famous for its runners and sharing its hometown with Nike. The team plays fast and essentially without breaks, running play after play until the other team practically topples over from exhaustion – making it a whole lot easier for Oregon to move the ball.

Kelly isn’t the first to offer innovation into football, of course. Johnny Unitas introduced the 2-minute offense and left opposing teams scurrying to respond.  Kelly himself employs a “spread” offense that avoids the huddle and opens up several avenues of play for the quarterback, a 20^th century introduction still evolving.

Offensive Strategies
Imagining football as a speed game changes the very nature of play and the players. The opposing defense can’t just be brawny – they need a new level of fitness to withstand bursts of activity over and over, back to back. For opposing players, facing the Ducks is a head-spinning exercise in frustration and exhaustion. The relentless attacks from Kelly’s offense leaves the other team with no time to consider what strategy is coming – or to get a breather.

And that’s perhaps the place to start with business lessons from Oregon football: 

Be fit. You need a sound, well-conditioned operation to execute your goals successfully, whatever your line of business.  At the end of the day, the only “trick” the Ducks have up their sleeves is their amazing endurance – they are so well conditioned to work aerobically, repetitively, that they can do it all day.

Eliminate nonessentials. To imagine football as fast and without all the grinding stops meant stripping the game to its essentials. Get back to core questions that define your business and consider if you can refine functions to run faster and better. All those huddles and conversations that consumed time were ancillary to the game of football, not key to it. Kelly was just the first guy to see that.

Develop strong players. Give yourself options. Oregon employs a spread offense with very deep levels of skill and speed.  The quarterback can choose his target from among many alternatives, making it harder to anticipate. A savvy manager can assess the situation quickly and choose an immediate response from the reality on the ground.

Plan ahead. Be prepared to adjust quickly to change. If a play ends with a lineman on the opposite side of the field from his starting position, he stays there for the next play – which has been planned with his new location in mind. By not caring about getting back to just the same spot, Kelly has been able to slash the time between plays to as little as 5 seconds.

Communicate efficiently. Key team members need to understand what is expected of them and keep in constant communication.  Oregon can run plays so quickly because it telegraphs them from a distance. Oregon coaches communicate with the quarterback through a series of hand gestures and encrypted flip cards.  Today’s technologies make it easier for your team to communicate closely and share knowledge even from remote locations.

Live your core values. The player tapped to be the Ducks’ starting quarterback, Jeremiah Masoli, was dropped from the team after he pled guilty to burglary.  University of Mississippi picked him up.  Oregon still won, but with a team where the institutional values – both of the team and the university – stayed intact.

Remember the long view. Gaining feet or even inches on each play is a critical issue for most football teams.  Not for the Ducks.  They know that the aggregate of their efforts will get the pigskin where it needs to go before the whistle blows. Similarly, winning in business is the result of what occurs each time you put your best effort forward – added together over time.  No single win means you rest on your laurels, and no setback should bog you down.

Tend to the basics. And finally, in spite of their rapid-fire offense, without a solid defensive strategy to respond when the ball changes hands, the Ducks would lose. Don’t fail on the follow-through – delivery, service, customer support.  Scoring a sale is just the first step.

Innovation Bowl
The game of football has seen plenty innovations since Walter Camp introduced the “line of scrimmage” and “down and distance” to differentiate it from early rugby.  The young Yale student now called “the father of American football” helped codify the rules among America’s first competing college teams – the Ivy League – in a series of meetings from 1873 to 1880. The last change to the official rules, legalizing the forward pass, was in 1906.

But as the University of Oregon’s team proved this year, if you can’t change the rules, you can nonetheless change the game. And whatever the outcome of the game yet to be played on January 10^th, I’m confident the Auburn team took note. 

I imagine the brawny defenders from Alabama spent their holidays spurning the holiday turkey and embracing aerobic conditioning in preparation for the fast and fearsome new innovators from Oregon – their proud and always dominant team temporarily humbled by a Duck.

View this article online at SmartCEO.