Remember this post on how NFL coaches should consider using Madden more? Wired has a fascinating piece by Chris Suellentrop talking about how many NFL players already use the game. One of the key voices in their piece is Brandon Stokley, known not only for this ridiculous catch but for the stunning knowledge of clock management he displayed at the end of the play;
In the article, Stokley says he's done that kind of move hundreds of times while playing Madden, but never in a game before. It makes sense, though, as it displays the kind of untraditional awareness of how to work the clock that's so important in Madden, but rarely seen in the NFL. Of course, Madden's good for much more than just clock awareness; as pointed out in the article, players are also using the game to gain awareness of different coverages, offensive schemes and formations. Suellentrop actually makes one of the key arguments from my piece; the real importance of Madden is the sheer amount of hours of actual gameplay situations it allows players and coaches to simulate. Here's one of the crucial parts of the article:
“These games nowadays are just so technically sound that they’re a learning tool,” says Tim Grunhard, an All-Pro center for the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1990s who now coaches high school football in the Kansas City area, where he encourages his players to use Madden to improve their knowledge of football strategy and tactics. “Back when I was playing football, we didn’t realize what a near or a far formation was, we didn’t really understand what trips meant, we didn’t understand what cover 2, cover 3, and cover zero meant,” Grunhard says, charging through jargon that’s comprehensible only to Madden players and football obsessives.
These days, Grunhard says, high school players have a much deeper understanding of offensive formations and defensive coverages, a development he attributes to their long hours on videogame consoles. “It just seemed to help out,” he says. “The kids understood where the counterplay or power play was going to open up. Or the middle linebacker lining up for a blitz — where the gaps were going to open up.”
Now, much like with coaches, this isn't to say that Madden players would suddenly be better than traditional athletes if thrown into a football game. Of course, there's plenty of value in traditional training methods, and there's things they teach such as physical fitness that Madden just won't simulate. Suellentrop makes the excellent analogy that Madden may be like weight training; not good enough on its own, and not something that would turn a non-athlete into an outstanding one, but a tremendous tool to help turn a talented athlete into an elite one. Now, if only we could get coaches to follow in the same path...
Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Experiment: Rethinking NFL Coaching
Consider a thought experiment for a moment. Say we've walked into the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and are watching the android Data. As part of his studies of the human psyche, he's examining the world of sports and has taken a particular interest in American football. Specifically, in an attempt to improve his leadership abilities, he's trying to figure out what makes a successful coach. To this end, he's constructed a holodeck program to simulate a NFL game. In order to isolate the variable of coaching, he's programmed both teams with identical players.
The difference between the teams? Team A is run by a typical NFL coaching staff, with a head coach (Coach A), position coaches and offensive, defensive and special-teams coordinators. Team B is run by a 30-year old who doesn't have any actual football experience, but has spent hours on end playing every installment of the Madden franchise since its inception and watching every possible NFL game for decades. To make it possible for him to control the entire team, it's programmed in that he sends in his instructions through Madden's "Coach" mode (playcalls, substitutions and timeouts, but no actual control of players on the field), while Team A handles their gameplan in the traditional model. Now, when these two teams face each other in Data's simulation, which would you bet on?
Every bit of common sense would say to go with Team A. They're run by guys who have been there and done that for years. In fact, because they're involved with an NFL team, these guys have been selected as some of the best coaching talent out there. They work crazy hours and develop elaborate game plans. In short, they're the professionals. Of course most people would take this highly skilled team over a single rank amateur. In fact, most people wouldn't bother running the experiment at all; they'd tell Data it's a foregone conclusion.
One nice thing about computers (and androids), though, is that they evaluate situations based on information and programming instructions, not simple a priori assumptions about common sense. Data would run his program, and I'd bet it would come to a surprising conclusion; namely, Team B winning.
Why would I bet on Team B? I'm not discounting the value of experience; in fact, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers (which I've written about before), and I largely buy his argument that much of the success we typically credit to indviduals' innate qualities is, in fact, largely due to their experience and circumstances. That's actually what I'm building on here. The 30-year-old running Team B has his own experience, and it happens to be in a very different arena than that of the traditional coaches running Team A. My guess is that it would prove superior.
Perhaps the easiest area to explore this idea in depth is the area of clock management. Joe Posnanski wrote a very interesting piece on the subject today, concluding that "Coaches in the NFL have no idea how to use the clock." He makes a compelling argument that fans understand clock management better than coaches, and I think he comes up with part of the reason why; fans spend more time thinking about the clock than coaches. However, that's only part of the explanation, I think. The key factor is experience.
No one coached more NFL games than George Halas, the legendary coach of the Chicago Bears. He finished with 318 wins, 148 losses and 31 ties in 497 regular-season games. Second all-time in games coached is Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins; he finished with 328 wins, 156 losses and six ties in 490 regular-season games. Using Pro Football Reference to rank coaches by NFL games, no active coach comes even close; the highest-ranked is Tennessee's Jeff Fisher, who's 17th with 136 wins and 110 losses in 246 regular-season games.
Now, think about that for a moment. The only area where you really get to work on clock management is in games. Sure, pre-season games help, and you can do a bit during practices, but there are always so many more pressing things teams are doing in practice, and it's never quite the same environment. Moreover, it's only a fraction of those games (the close ones) where you really have to worry about clock management; it's probably the last thing on a coach's mind when he's either winning or losing by a lot. Even in those games where clock management becomes an issue, an NFL coach is worried about lots of other things as well; keeping his players happy, working with his coordinators, thinking about playcalling and motivating his team. Considering all that, I'd guess that NFL head coaches really haven't had that much experience managing the clock.
What about the coach of Team B, though? It actually wouldn't be that hard for him to surpass Team A in clock management experience. For one thing, Madden offers the option to play shorter quarters, which allows you to get many more games in. The shorter quarters don't affect clock management much, because you still go through the same situations at the end of games. Even if you play with full-length quarters, though, Madden is much shorter than a regular NFL game thanks to a lack of commercial breaks and an ability to call plays quickly. Moreover, in Madden, you can play any number of games in a row in a sitting; in real life, you only get 16 per season (plus any playoff games), and you have to wait a week between each game. Thus, serious Madden gamers like our Team B coach spend much more time actually managing their teams in game situations than real NFL coaches.
Don't quite buy it? Well, consider this. If a Madden gamer played 16 full seasons, he'd have coached 256 regular-season games, ten more games than Fisher. In 31 seasons, he'd pass Shula with 496 games. In 32 seasons, he'd pass Halas with 512 games. 32 seasons is hardly an unreasonable figure; I've played through around 10 in the last six months, and I'm anything but a hardcore Madden user (which our Coach B would be). A casual Madden gamer like myself could hit 32 seasons in three to four years of gaming; a hardcore one could do it much faster. Moreover, Madden has far less distractions than an actual game (no motivational speeches required, no assistants to keep happy, no fans going nuts, no way to argue with refs), so Madden coaches probably spend much more time thinking about clock management than real coaches. Thus, Coach B would have far more experience actually managing the clock than Coach A.
Of course, there's much more to successfully coaching a game than clock management. However, many of the other components are similar. Consider the issue of when to use challenges, another area fans and writers often take NFL coaches to task for. Using the same argument seen above, most Madden users probably have more experience with challenges than head coaches. The same applies for offensive and defensive play selection and audibles. These can be worked on more in practice, so NFL coaches have more experience with them than they with challenges, but they're still very different in a game than they are in practice. Even if we counted all the hours Coach A spent running plays on the practice field (not as many as you might think, as practices also involve a lot of individual drills and small-group situations), though, our hardcore Madden user Coach B would likely still have more experience with playcalling than Coach A. He would have spent more time in game situations, and that gives him a better chance for success.
Now, you can make a case for Coach A if you insist that clock management, challenge management and playcalling in Madden can't be applied to actual football. If they're completely separate things, then Coach A has a distinct experiential advantage. I don't think they are, though. Again, the strongest case can be made in the area of clock management; the clock operates under the same rules in Madden and "real" football, and you can take the same measures to either stop it or keep it running. Challenges and playcalling are a little tougher, but keep in mind that Madden is programmed to operate under the same rules as "real" football, bases its plays on real plays and bases its players on real players. The quality of the simulation has improved over the years, and you could argue that the latest versions give reasonably realistic results in terms of playcalling; frequently, the same offensive plays work against certain defensive sets in both reality and the game.
There's something else that would help Coach B: innovation. As I wrote in my piece on the subject at The Good Point, innovation has always faced an uphill battle in the NFL. Few coaches are willing to really innovate for fear of looking silly; however, once an innovation is discovered, it quickly goes from laughingstock to widely-used strategy (see the Wildcat offence). Those innovations generally aren't that far out there, though; for example, the Wildcat was largely based off the old single-wing offence and was run successfully in college before it was brought to the pros.
The reason we never see anything really bizarre in the NFL is thanks to the backgrounds of the people involved. Most coaches in the NFL have gone through a very similar career arc, starting off as players, then becoming low-level assistants, then coordinators and then head coaches. They may have slightly different schools of thought based on their personalities and the coaches they've worked with (hence the concept of coaching trees), but all those ideas are really just branches of the same tree. You see this in many businesses; people from the same backgrounds tend to approach problems the same way. If you come up with a multi-dimensional business problem involving manufacturing a new device and present it to different groups, accountants will tend to look at it in terms of the costs involved, while research scientists will look at it from the perspective of what can be created and engineers will look at it from a perspective of what's feasible to create. None of these approaches is necessarily right or wrong, and you have to incorporate elements of all of them to find success.
The problem is that the NFL's small group of coaches from similar backgrounds means everyone approaches certain issues in similar ways. (Chris Brown had a good piece on this at Smart Football). There's also the risk of looking silly if you try something radical, which motivates many to stick to the tried-and-tested paths even if they do have other ideas. For example, consider the case of fourth downs. Bill Belichick got plenty of criticism for daring to go for it on fourth-and-two in his own territory this year, even though many of the numbers we have on fourth-down conversion percentages support him. That was a highly unconventional call by NFL standards, but it's still well within the bounds of what is sometimes done; that was late in the game with a short distance to go. What you would never see in today's NFL is a coach who consistently goes for it when faced with fourth down and five yards or less, regardless of field position and time left; that's far enough outside the box that no one would dare to try it for fear of looking silly.
The nice thing about Madden, though, is its judgement is based on results, not aesthetics. I've consistently gone for it on fourth and five or less and found lots of success doing so. You can do plenty of other things that you wouldn't likely see in the NFL too, such as running five-receiver sets on every play or prominently featuring flea-flickers and end-arounds. Madden users have a variety of different backgrounds, and ones very different from the typical NFL coach, plus the game design encourages experimentation and innovation. It also leads to a more statistically-based school of thought; if certain ideas work more often than not, a player will keep using them. Naysayers would argue that these ideas wouldn't work in the NFL, but it's impossible to know because no one has tried. The nature of Madden promotes innovative thinking, though, and that would be yet another advantage for Coach B.
I'm sure this idea still seems reasonably silly to many of you. After all, Madden's just a game, and games by nature are designed for entertainment. However, the increasing realism of the game in recent years has brought it closer to the level of a simulator. There are plenty of other fields where simulators are considered to provide valuable training experience, particularly for pilots and astronauts. Do you think it's really tougher to deliver a useful simulation of football than a simulation of landing an F-14 on a carrier?
Now, I'm not saying we could replace NFL head coaches with Madden gamers and instantly see improvements across the board. There are many areas of football where a current NFL coaching staff like Team A's would have an advantage, particularly in developing players from raw draft picks to seasoned veterans, motivating their players to give it all they have and juggling their players' egos. Over a long period of time, such as a complete season, I think those advantages could nullify Team B's greater expertise in playcalling and clock management. However, for the one game considered in Data's experiment, I'm taking Team B.
The broader question, though, is why can't we have the best of both worlds? What if we kept the current backgrounds of our NFL head coaches, but got them to frequently play Madden and encouraged them to try new strategies? I'm quite sure we'd see them get better at clock management, and I think they would improve as playcallers and innovators as well. At the end of the day, this will probably just remain a hypothetical, but it's an interesting one to consider. Is the way we currently develop coaches the best way to do things, or should we encourage them to take a look at the virtual world? After all, football is just a game.
The difference between the teams? Team A is run by a typical NFL coaching staff, with a head coach (Coach A), position coaches and offensive, defensive and special-teams coordinators. Team B is run by a 30-year old who doesn't have any actual football experience, but has spent hours on end playing every installment of the Madden franchise since its inception and watching every possible NFL game for decades. To make it possible for him to control the entire team, it's programmed in that he sends in his instructions through Madden's "Coach" mode (playcalls, substitutions and timeouts, but no actual control of players on the field), while Team A handles their gameplan in the traditional model. Now, when these two teams face each other in Data's simulation, which would you bet on?
Every bit of common sense would say to go with Team A. They're run by guys who have been there and done that for years. In fact, because they're involved with an NFL team, these guys have been selected as some of the best coaching talent out there. They work crazy hours and develop elaborate game plans. In short, they're the professionals. Of course most people would take this highly skilled team over a single rank amateur. In fact, most people wouldn't bother running the experiment at all; they'd tell Data it's a foregone conclusion.
One nice thing about computers (and androids), though, is that they evaluate situations based on information and programming instructions, not simple a priori assumptions about common sense. Data would run his program, and I'd bet it would come to a surprising conclusion; namely, Team B winning.
Why would I bet on Team B? I'm not discounting the value of experience; in fact, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers (which I've written about before), and I largely buy his argument that much of the success we typically credit to indviduals' innate qualities is, in fact, largely due to their experience and circumstances. That's actually what I'm building on here. The 30-year-old running Team B has his own experience, and it happens to be in a very different arena than that of the traditional coaches running Team A. My guess is that it would prove superior.
Perhaps the easiest area to explore this idea in depth is the area of clock management. Joe Posnanski wrote a very interesting piece on the subject today, concluding that "Coaches in the NFL have no idea how to use the clock." He makes a compelling argument that fans understand clock management better than coaches, and I think he comes up with part of the reason why; fans spend more time thinking about the clock than coaches. However, that's only part of the explanation, I think. The key factor is experience.
No one coached more NFL games than George Halas, the legendary coach of the Chicago Bears. He finished with 318 wins, 148 losses and 31 ties in 497 regular-season games. Second all-time in games coached is Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins; he finished with 328 wins, 156 losses and six ties in 490 regular-season games. Using Pro Football Reference to rank coaches by NFL games, no active coach comes even close; the highest-ranked is Tennessee's Jeff Fisher, who's 17th with 136 wins and 110 losses in 246 regular-season games.
Now, think about that for a moment. The only area where you really get to work on clock management is in games. Sure, pre-season games help, and you can do a bit during practices, but there are always so many more pressing things teams are doing in practice, and it's never quite the same environment. Moreover, it's only a fraction of those games (the close ones) where you really have to worry about clock management; it's probably the last thing on a coach's mind when he's either winning or losing by a lot. Even in those games where clock management becomes an issue, an NFL coach is worried about lots of other things as well; keeping his players happy, working with his coordinators, thinking about playcalling and motivating his team. Considering all that, I'd guess that NFL head coaches really haven't had that much experience managing the clock.
What about the coach of Team B, though? It actually wouldn't be that hard for him to surpass Team A in clock management experience. For one thing, Madden offers the option to play shorter quarters, which allows you to get many more games in. The shorter quarters don't affect clock management much, because you still go through the same situations at the end of games. Even if you play with full-length quarters, though, Madden is much shorter than a regular NFL game thanks to a lack of commercial breaks and an ability to call plays quickly. Moreover, in Madden, you can play any number of games in a row in a sitting; in real life, you only get 16 per season (plus any playoff games), and you have to wait a week between each game. Thus, serious Madden gamers like our Team B coach spend much more time actually managing their teams in game situations than real NFL coaches.
Don't quite buy it? Well, consider this. If a Madden gamer played 16 full seasons, he'd have coached 256 regular-season games, ten more games than Fisher. In 31 seasons, he'd pass Shula with 496 games. In 32 seasons, he'd pass Halas with 512 games. 32 seasons is hardly an unreasonable figure; I've played through around 10 in the last six months, and I'm anything but a hardcore Madden user (which our Coach B would be). A casual Madden gamer like myself could hit 32 seasons in three to four years of gaming; a hardcore one could do it much faster. Moreover, Madden has far less distractions than an actual game (no motivational speeches required, no assistants to keep happy, no fans going nuts, no way to argue with refs), so Madden coaches probably spend much more time thinking about clock management than real coaches. Thus, Coach B would have far more experience actually managing the clock than Coach A.
Of course, there's much more to successfully coaching a game than clock management. However, many of the other components are similar. Consider the issue of when to use challenges, another area fans and writers often take NFL coaches to task for. Using the same argument seen above, most Madden users probably have more experience with challenges than head coaches. The same applies for offensive and defensive play selection and audibles. These can be worked on more in practice, so NFL coaches have more experience with them than they with challenges, but they're still very different in a game than they are in practice. Even if we counted all the hours Coach A spent running plays on the practice field (not as many as you might think, as practices also involve a lot of individual drills and small-group situations), though, our hardcore Madden user Coach B would likely still have more experience with playcalling than Coach A. He would have spent more time in game situations, and that gives him a better chance for success.
Now, you can make a case for Coach A if you insist that clock management, challenge management and playcalling in Madden can't be applied to actual football. If they're completely separate things, then Coach A has a distinct experiential advantage. I don't think they are, though. Again, the strongest case can be made in the area of clock management; the clock operates under the same rules in Madden and "real" football, and you can take the same measures to either stop it or keep it running. Challenges and playcalling are a little tougher, but keep in mind that Madden is programmed to operate under the same rules as "real" football, bases its plays on real plays and bases its players on real players. The quality of the simulation has improved over the years, and you could argue that the latest versions give reasonably realistic results in terms of playcalling; frequently, the same offensive plays work against certain defensive sets in both reality and the game.
There's something else that would help Coach B: innovation. As I wrote in my piece on the subject at The Good Point, innovation has always faced an uphill battle in the NFL. Few coaches are willing to really innovate for fear of looking silly; however, once an innovation is discovered, it quickly goes from laughingstock to widely-used strategy (see the Wildcat offence). Those innovations generally aren't that far out there, though; for example, the Wildcat was largely based off the old single-wing offence and was run successfully in college before it was brought to the pros.
The reason we never see anything really bizarre in the NFL is thanks to the backgrounds of the people involved. Most coaches in the NFL have gone through a very similar career arc, starting off as players, then becoming low-level assistants, then coordinators and then head coaches. They may have slightly different schools of thought based on their personalities and the coaches they've worked with (hence the concept of coaching trees), but all those ideas are really just branches of the same tree. You see this in many businesses; people from the same backgrounds tend to approach problems the same way. If you come up with a multi-dimensional business problem involving manufacturing a new device and present it to different groups, accountants will tend to look at it in terms of the costs involved, while research scientists will look at it from the perspective of what can be created and engineers will look at it from a perspective of what's feasible to create. None of these approaches is necessarily right or wrong, and you have to incorporate elements of all of them to find success.
The problem is that the NFL's small group of coaches from similar backgrounds means everyone approaches certain issues in similar ways. (Chris Brown had a good piece on this at Smart Football). There's also the risk of looking silly if you try something radical, which motivates many to stick to the tried-and-tested paths even if they do have other ideas. For example, consider the case of fourth downs. Bill Belichick got plenty of criticism for daring to go for it on fourth-and-two in his own territory this year, even though many of the numbers we have on fourth-down conversion percentages support him. That was a highly unconventional call by NFL standards, but it's still well within the bounds of what is sometimes done; that was late in the game with a short distance to go. What you would never see in today's NFL is a coach who consistently goes for it when faced with fourth down and five yards or less, regardless of field position and time left; that's far enough outside the box that no one would dare to try it for fear of looking silly.
The nice thing about Madden, though, is its judgement is based on results, not aesthetics. I've consistently gone for it on fourth and five or less and found lots of success doing so. You can do plenty of other things that you wouldn't likely see in the NFL too, such as running five-receiver sets on every play or prominently featuring flea-flickers and end-arounds. Madden users have a variety of different backgrounds, and ones very different from the typical NFL coach, plus the game design encourages experimentation and innovation. It also leads to a more statistically-based school of thought; if certain ideas work more often than not, a player will keep using them. Naysayers would argue that these ideas wouldn't work in the NFL, but it's impossible to know because no one has tried. The nature of Madden promotes innovative thinking, though, and that would be yet another advantage for Coach B.
I'm sure this idea still seems reasonably silly to many of you. After all, Madden's just a game, and games by nature are designed for entertainment. However, the increasing realism of the game in recent years has brought it closer to the level of a simulator. There are plenty of other fields where simulators are considered to provide valuable training experience, particularly for pilots and astronauts. Do you think it's really tougher to deliver a useful simulation of football than a simulation of landing an F-14 on a carrier?
Now, I'm not saying we could replace NFL head coaches with Madden gamers and instantly see improvements across the board. There are many areas of football where a current NFL coaching staff like Team A's would have an advantage, particularly in developing players from raw draft picks to seasoned veterans, motivating their players to give it all they have and juggling their players' egos. Over a long period of time, such as a complete season, I think those advantages could nullify Team B's greater expertise in playcalling and clock management. However, for the one game considered in Data's experiment, I'm taking Team B.
The broader question, though, is why can't we have the best of both worlds? What if we kept the current backgrounds of our NFL head coaches, but got them to frequently play Madden and encouraged them to try new strategies? I'm quite sure we'd see them get better at clock management, and I think they would improve as playcallers and innovators as well. At the end of the day, this will probably just remain a hypothetical, but it's an interesting one to consider. Is the way we currently develop coaches the best way to do things, or should we encourage them to take a look at the virtual world? After all, football is just a game.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
On The Ground: Steve Sheiner on the Dolphins and the Wildcat
In the next instalment in my extended interview series for this piece on innovation in the NFL for The Good Point, I present Steve Sheiner of the Miami Dolphins site Blog With A Porpoise. Steve is also a senior editor at Fanball.com, the network I run Canuck Puck for. He had a lot of interesting comments on the Dolphins, the Wildcat offence, former B.C. Lion Cameron Wake and innovation in the NFL in general. Read on for the full interview!
Andrew Bucholtz: The Dolphins obviously made a huge turnaround last year, going from the league's worst record to AFC East champions. How much of that success do you attribute to their implementation of the Wildcat offence?
Steve Sheiner: I certainly think that played a role in their success as they caught a lot of teams off-guard that were ill-prepared to defend against such an unfamiliar attack. But more realistically, the Dolphins had one of the cushiest schedules in 2008 and the loss of Tom Brady in the division certainly didn’t hurt matters either. But the Dolphins have the players to utilize the Wildcat effectively, and with the addition of QB/WR Pat White, you can expect to see plenty more where that came from in 2009.
A.B.: Many teams have since tried to copy the Wildcat, and several more are talking about using at least some form of it next season. Do you think other teams can be successful with it, or was it a unique coaching/personnel mix in Miami that resulted in the Dolphins' success?
S.S.: It’s become fairly common knowledge that the NFL is a copy-cat league. When something works, other teams will adopt it. But the right personnel is crucial in implementing any new offensive scheme, particularly the Wildcat. Ronnie Brown was exceptional spearheading it last season, and you can bet there will be other teams looking to add it to their arsenal in the coming year. It takes the right players to make it work and an offensive mind to creatively design a new mix of formations and plays.
A.B.: With the Wildcat, it seemed teams had a tough time adjusting to it at first. Will it still be effective for the Dolphins this year now that everyone has seen it, or will they have to come up with something else?
S.S.: You will still see the Dolphins run the Wildcat in 2009. What you won’t see is the same plays and formations that you saw last season. Defenses prepare for what they’ve seen before, and certainly for what they’ve been beaten by previously. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. The Dolphins will have some new tricks up their sleeves this year and more often than not, the opposing defense won’t be ready for it.
A.B.: What will the acquisition of Pat White in the draft mean for the Dolphins' Wildcat formation? Also, is he a player that can only be effective in a system like the Wildcat, or can he be a regular quarterback in the future?
S.S.: To quote the NFL Network’s Mike Mayock, "Pat White is the next level of the Wildcat. You take a guy who can throw the football like an NFL quarterback and who can also run the option. That means the safety is in the box and your cornerbacks are one-on-one with no deep help." That spells trouble for opposing defenses. Local media have already dubbed the attack "The WildPat" as they anticipate seeing plenty of the dynamic White spearheading the offense. White will create passing lanes with his quick feet and is accurate on the move. White will offer a number of different options as a quarterback, running back or slot receiver, and he’ll make defenders pick their poison.
At just 6’ tall and 206 lbs., White doesn’t have the prototypical size to be an NFL quarterback. We’ve seen other smaller QBs succeed, but it’s not easy when you can’t see over the offensive line in front of you. While he’s expected to compete with Chad Henne for the backup role behind Chad Pennington, most local reporters believe Henne is the heir apparent and White won’t see much opportunity for a long while at QB. But he did throw for 6,049 yards and run for 4,480 more while at West Virginia, setting the NCAA record for career rushing yards by a quarterback; so you never know.
A.B.: The Dolphins have made some other unconventional player moves this offseason, including signing CFL star Cameron Wake in the hopes of converting him from defensive end to outside linebacker. Do you think Wake will be successful in the NFL? If so, could this lead to more intensive scouting of the CFL by NFL teams?
S.S.: Presently, Wake is pretty low on the depth chart. He’ll be counted on more as a special teamer than for linebacker duties. He’s a reserve outside linebacker, basically the third-string nickel rusher. He’s primarily expected to be a key contributor on special teams this season and not much more. If he fails to impress there during training camp and the preseason, he might find it tough to retain a roster spot. But if he makes the team and continues to impress coaches, more teams will have their scouts keeping a closer eye on both the CFL and the new upstart league, the UFL.
A.B.: How important do you think it is for NFL teams to try unconventional strategies, whether in player acquisition or in play design and selection?
S.S.: In this era of the NFL, it’s vital for teams to constantly develop new and innovative ways to not only get the ball into the hands of their playmakers, but to catch opposing defenses off guard. The Wildcat did just that last year and you’ll see more of the same (though not quite the same) this year. The acquisition of Pat White is a perfect example of a team taking a player that fits their scheme. Receiver Percy Harvin is another example in Minnesota. Expect the Vikings to implement some Wildcat formations in their offensive game-plans this season, with our without Brett Favre at quarterback. Harvin is another dynamic playmaker that will allow Minnesota to get creative with their play-calling and find ways to get him the ball.
Andrew Bucholtz: The Dolphins obviously made a huge turnaround last year, going from the league's worst record to AFC East champions. How much of that success do you attribute to their implementation of the Wildcat offence?
Steve Sheiner: I certainly think that played a role in their success as they caught a lot of teams off-guard that were ill-prepared to defend against such an unfamiliar attack. But more realistically, the Dolphins had one of the cushiest schedules in 2008 and the loss of Tom Brady in the division certainly didn’t hurt matters either. But the Dolphins have the players to utilize the Wildcat effectively, and with the addition of QB/WR Pat White, you can expect to see plenty more where that came from in 2009.
A.B.: Many teams have since tried to copy the Wildcat, and several more are talking about using at least some form of it next season. Do you think other teams can be successful with it, or was it a unique coaching/personnel mix in Miami that resulted in the Dolphins' success?
S.S.: It’s become fairly common knowledge that the NFL is a copy-cat league. When something works, other teams will adopt it. But the right personnel is crucial in implementing any new offensive scheme, particularly the Wildcat. Ronnie Brown was exceptional spearheading it last season, and you can bet there will be other teams looking to add it to their arsenal in the coming year. It takes the right players to make it work and an offensive mind to creatively design a new mix of formations and plays.
A.B.: With the Wildcat, it seemed teams had a tough time adjusting to it at first. Will it still be effective for the Dolphins this year now that everyone has seen it, or will they have to come up with something else?
S.S.: You will still see the Dolphins run the Wildcat in 2009. What you won’t see is the same plays and formations that you saw last season. Defenses prepare for what they’ve seen before, and certainly for what they’ve been beaten by previously. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. The Dolphins will have some new tricks up their sleeves this year and more often than not, the opposing defense won’t be ready for it.
A.B.: What will the acquisition of Pat White in the draft mean for the Dolphins' Wildcat formation? Also, is he a player that can only be effective in a system like the Wildcat, or can he be a regular quarterback in the future?
S.S.: To quote the NFL Network’s Mike Mayock, "Pat White is the next level of the Wildcat. You take a guy who can throw the football like an NFL quarterback and who can also run the option. That means the safety is in the box and your cornerbacks are one-on-one with no deep help." That spells trouble for opposing defenses. Local media have already dubbed the attack "The WildPat" as they anticipate seeing plenty of the dynamic White spearheading the offense. White will create passing lanes with his quick feet and is accurate on the move. White will offer a number of different options as a quarterback, running back or slot receiver, and he’ll make defenders pick their poison.
At just 6’ tall and 206 lbs., White doesn’t have the prototypical size to be an NFL quarterback. We’ve seen other smaller QBs succeed, but it’s not easy when you can’t see over the offensive line in front of you. While he’s expected to compete with Chad Henne for the backup role behind Chad Pennington, most local reporters believe Henne is the heir apparent and White won’t see much opportunity for a long while at QB. But he did throw for 6,049 yards and run for 4,480 more while at West Virginia, setting the NCAA record for career rushing yards by a quarterback; so you never know.
A.B.: The Dolphins have made some other unconventional player moves this offseason, including signing CFL star Cameron Wake in the hopes of converting him from defensive end to outside linebacker. Do you think Wake will be successful in the NFL? If so, could this lead to more intensive scouting of the CFL by NFL teams?
S.S.: Presently, Wake is pretty low on the depth chart. He’ll be counted on more as a special teamer than for linebacker duties. He’s a reserve outside linebacker, basically the third-string nickel rusher. He’s primarily expected to be a key contributor on special teams this season and not much more. If he fails to impress there during training camp and the preseason, he might find it tough to retain a roster spot. But if he makes the team and continues to impress coaches, more teams will have their scouts keeping a closer eye on both the CFL and the new upstart league, the UFL.
A.B.: How important do you think it is for NFL teams to try unconventional strategies, whether in player acquisition or in play design and selection?
S.S.: In this era of the NFL, it’s vital for teams to constantly develop new and innovative ways to not only get the ball into the hands of their playmakers, but to catch opposing defenses off guard. The Wildcat did just that last year and you’ll see more of the same (though not quite the same) this year. The acquisition of Pat White is a perfect example of a team taking a player that fits their scheme. Receiver Percy Harvin is another example in Minnesota. Expect the Vikings to implement some Wildcat formations in their offensive game-plans this season, with our without Brett Favre at quarterback. Harvin is another dynamic playmaker that will allow Minnesota to get creative with their play-calling and find ways to get him the ball.
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