Coaching Networks in College Football
Sometimes the most innovative ideas come from the most novel of places, and this is often true in college football. Teams in the highest divisions (think University of Alabama, Ohio State, or Florida State, to name a few) usually have superior talent on their teams than the teams they play. Thus, they are able to run traditional offenses and traditional defenses and beat teams just based on a superior level of talent. However, some other colleges do not have such luxuries, either because they are small schools, have high academic standards, or a mixture of both. These schools are forced to come up with creative game plans in order to beat the teams they face, since they cannot beat them on talent alone. One coach who has managed to perfect the art of creating a great game plan is Bob Stitt, the former coach of Colorado School of Mines and the current coach at the University of Montana.
At Colorado School of Mines, Stitt was faced with a team entirely composed of engineers who had to reach high academic standards in order to be admitted. As such, he had a team that often was smaller and slower than other schools he coached against. He therefore needed to come up with new strategies that could give his team the edge they needed to beat teams with superior talent. Some of his ideas include playing at a speed faster than any other team in college football, installing the fly sweep out of a shotgun formation, and keeping the offense in on a screen. Of interest to this course, however, is the way that these innovations disseminate throughout the coaching ranks of college (and even professional) football.
One day after instituting the shotgun fly sweep in his own offense, Stitt stopped by a Houston Cougars practice and helped give a pointer to the Houston offensive coordinator about how to implement the fly sweep. Houston then ran the fly sweep successfully in a game, and the Texas A&M coach saw it and decided to implement it in his own offense. After seeing it run in college, the Minnesota Vikings’ (an NFL team) offensive coordinator decided to implement some shotgun fly sweep concepts in his own offense. Thus demonstrates the permeability of ideas in a network. Even though Stitt was only connected by a weak tie to the Houston offensive coordinator, his idea still permeated via those weak ties. This exemplifies how the dissemination of information in a network is often via weak ties, since people who are only weakly connected often have very different ideas. In addition, this example shows how easily information can spread in a network as connected as college football coaching, as an NFL team is now using the ideas that were originally started by one solitary coach at a tiny school in Colorado.
Relevant Article:
http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/13529396/montana-grizzlies-coach-bob-stitt-cult-favorite-coaches