What goes for football, goes for....

Just about everything in business.

Chris Brown, who writes for Smart Football, has a great piece up at the EDSBS blog about what makes a college football offense bad. I believe this article could easily be tailored to be about bad businesses and companies.

Some excerpts from Brown's piece:

Grab-bag offense: Far and away, the number one problem from a strategic view is a disorganized, “grab-bag” offense that lacks a definable identity. This isn’t to say that you can only do one or two things, but the bad teams almost universally do not know who they are. Say what you will about Tony Franklin at Auburn, but that whole thing was a mess last year because, among other reasons, they had an identity crisis. But this problem is not just germane to coaching changes or new offensive coordinators. Often, teams that have been fine try to “update” their offenses with the new-new thing, and more often than not they regress. There’s a completely true old coaching adage that it is less important what system you run than it is the fact that you have a system, preferably one that you know well and can coach. Hence an offense like Urban Meyer's works for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that the entire team is completely committed to it. The same is true for Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech, or Nebraska’s great I-option teams, or really any other good team you can think of. They might appear “multiple,” but there’s an identity there. Again, it’s hard to underemphasize this because not only does it make planning coherent, it has its biggest gains probably for practice time: when Meyer or Johnson or Osborne or any of the other committed coaches practice their offenses, they focus exactly on what they will actually do in games, and their stuff all fits together. A grab-bag team might be adding or subtracting stuff week by week, and they never get good at anything.

Bad practice habits. One thing USC does as well as anyone is that their practices are very fast, and very efficient. Similarly Mike Leach's Texas Tech Practices are famous for their complete focus on throwing the ball and working on all the skills necessary to do it well. One thing many fans might not realize is that “team periods” — i.e. scrimmages, 11 on 11, etc — are, in most coaches’ minds, negatively correlated with being good at fundamentals. In other words, practices are about focusing on individual players, individual and position drills. When you do 11 on 11, the coaching tends to be more diffuse, and more difficult, and guys tend to regress or not get better at the little skills. This is the hardest one for fans to see, but if your team cannot play well or is undisciplined in missing blocks, running routes, and the like, then their practice habits might be poor.