“Ultimately, team-building is not about some four-year plan that you perfectly execute, because every year is going to throw wrenches into that plan. To me, team-building is adaptability. It is adjusting to new information, and being able to find that surplus value in situations, even if they were unexpected situations.” - former NFL scout Dan Hatman
Football decision-makers must thread a tricky needle: they must create and adhere to a vision, as stated above, or they risk building incoherent teams, less than the sum of their parts. On the other hand, inflexibility poses just as large a risk. The league is changing all the time, as new rules, new players, new schemes, and new information enters the NFL. Some teams may choose to follow new trends; others may choose to buck them and find weaknesses to exploit. But each team must have a conscious approach to dealing with change, lest they go the way of the dinosaur. “What worked yesterday may not work anymore, and you have to be open-minded enough to understand that,” says legendary GM Ron Wolf.
“That’s the way our world works. It adjusts, it adapts. Nothing on the field or in the way you build a team or roster is static. The moment it becomes that way is the moment you become outdated.” - Kevin Demoff, Rams Chief Operating Officer
First, teams must have a process for evaluating change and setting a conscious direction. Bill Polian describes his process in Indianapolis: “Every year after the draft in Indianapolis, we would get the personnel people together—Dom Anile, Tommy Telesco, David Caldwell, and Chis—and we would talk about trends in the game and whether we would have to change the way we evaluated players.” This kind of regular touchpoint ensures that necessary adjustments take place in a shifting landscape.
Rule changes are one example of shifts that can impact player evaluation. The 2011 CBA reduced the cost of top draft picks, affecting how teams value those picks and making rookie quarterbacks a much better bargain than before. That CBA also resulted in less practice time and fewer padded practices, which can impact player development, especially at contact-heavy positions like offensive and defensive line. Emphasis on holding and illegal contact penalties in the defensive secondary make things easier for passing offenses and harder for coverage players. Teams must decide how these sorts of changes impact their player evaluation models.
Schemes change and go through cycles independent of external factors. The outside zone run scheme came to prominence in recent years, driven in part by young head coaches Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay and those who coached with or under them. Defenses adjusted, placing a premium on strategies to combat the outside zone, such as when the Patriots used six-man defensive lines against McVay’s Rams in Super Bowl LIII. In turn, offenses have adapted, mixing in more wrinkles to keep defenses honest. Shanahan explains:
We mix in a lot more stuff and we do our outside zone differently. It’s evolved and changed. But the thing that’s similar is we’re always going to make people stop our outside zone. That’s where everything starts. It makes a lot of other plays better. It makes your power game, your gap schemes better and your toss schemes and man blocking better.
This quote is a nice summary of striking the balance between the overarching vision and the adjustments teams need to make to ensure their philosophies remain relevant. Shanahan still leans on the outside zone as the foundation of the offense, but added more clubs to his bag in response to schematic shifts across the league.
The rise of spread personnel and formations is another shift teams are adjusting to. With three receivers on the field a majority of the team, slot receivers and slot cornerbacks have increased in importance—and in price. Classic in-line tight ends have become hard to find. Different teams have adjusted differently to this reality. Some have embraced spread trends, mixing Run-Pass Options (RPOs) into the offense, playing primarily out of the shotgun, and deploying dizzying arrays of run-after-catch receivers. Others, such as the Baltimore Ravens and Shanahan’s 49ers, have employed more heavy (two tight end or two running back) groupings, enjoying mismatches against defenses that are no longer used to combating these once-standard looks.
Teams must also be conscious of the players they are getting from college. Traditional defenses boasted hulking 250-pound (or more) linebackers, but they’re hard to find in the college game that seeks 220-pounders to play in space. Teams must adapt, either by embracing the new linebacker paradigm, or by taking unconventional approaches, like converting a defensive end to linebacker.
External circumstances, such as opponents, also impact a team’s approach. NFC West teams must have answers for those Shanahan and McVay outside zone schemes; they’ll see them in four games every year. Teams that play in the same division as Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen must have a solution to account for the unique run / pass dual threat those quarterbacks present.
Doug Farrar’s terrific book The Genius of Desperation walks through the history of the NFL, painting a picture of a league constantly evolving by action and reaction. Offenses change in response to defenses, defenses change in response to offenses, offenses respond again, and the cycle continues. As the examples above suggest, this continues to happen, arguably at a more rapid pace than ever.
But in this modern, economics-driven NFL, with teams constrained by limited resources in both salary and the draft, shifting markets change team-building just as on-field schematic shifts do. Trends towards more spread, more passing, lighter players, etc., prompt not just responses from defenses but also from the player markets. Slot receivers and slot cornerbacks are now starters for most teams, and command more money and draft capital. Teams can no longer acquire those players dirt cheap; now they must have a more robust strategy for acquiring receivers and corners that might have been late-round picks or bargain signings just a decade ago.
Market trends create opportunities, too. Old school thumpers at linebacker and defensive line have seen their markets collapse. That might mean savvy teams have the opportunity to acquire intriguing skill sets inexpensively. The Philadelphia Eagles, perhaps the most analytics-forward organization in the league, raised some eyebrows by drafting 330-pound defensive tackle Jordan Davis with the 13th pick in the 2022 NFL Draft. Perhaps general manager Howie Roseman sees Davis as an asset that has become undervalued by market overcorrection.
The landscape of technology and information changes all the time in the NFL—as it does in every industry. Sports science innovations give teams tons more data on their players, information they can use to design custom workout regimens, nutrition plans, and recovery programs for injured players. GPS tracking data provides new avenues for tracking player performance and for devising strategies. Every team has at least one analytics staffer, using data to solve all sorts of problems. These analytics are used in a variety of decisions to differing degrees depending on the organization. As Ron Wolf said :
I would always advocate aggressive experimentation with … innovations in lieu of adopting a wait-and-see attitude. To hang back until these innovations are tested thoroughly always guarantees you won’t be in the forefront of your industry.
The teams that compete year after year seem to find a way to be ahead of the curve. The Eagles have been one of the most analytics-forward franchises and used data to help drive higher fourth-down aggressiveness, a strategy that helped win Super Bowl LII. “You have to keep learning and you have to keep evolving,” explained Roseman. “If you think, ‘I’ve got this secret sauce and I’m just gonna sprinkle it on and I’m gonna be great again,’ you’re gonna get your butt kicked.”
The Los Angeles Rams, another forward-thinking organization, leverage tracking chips to help monitor player exertion in practice and games, so they can manage their workload to reduce injury. They won it all two years after Philadelphia.
Even smart teams and decision-makers can get stuck in ruts, trapped by ego and past success. Legendary head coach and team builder Bill Walsh wrote:
For men and women who are extremely good at what they do, nothing is more discouraging than discovering that the thing they do so well isn’t what’s needed to get the job done. When a successful manager confronts a situation in which a philosophy that has always worked—and he has every reason to believe is fundamentally sound—fails, he may have to face the hard fact that the ground rules have changed and that he and his way of doing things may be a problem.
Change is inevitable. The best organizations will see an opportunity, whether to counter the change strategically or stay ahead of the curve with innovation. This mentality is the quality that separates franchises with enduring greatness from those whose success is more short-lived.