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Fans often want to see their favorite team mimic the paths that successful teams follow. What are we to make, then, of the two teams who faced off in Super Bowl LVII, just one year after the Rams and Bengals? The prolific rushing attack of the Philadelphia Eagles—third in rush attempts, first in rushing touchdowns—squared off against the high-flying Kansas City Chiefs, who finished 25th in rushes but first in net yards per pass attempt. The Chiefs had experience on their side, with 65-year-old Andy Reid, coaching in his fourth Super Bowl, while the Eagles boasted youth in the person of 41-year-old, second-year coach Nick Sirianni.

Beyond these on-field and coaching differences, the two teams also had shown differences in their team-building philosophies. The Eagles made a big splash on draft day 2022, dealing a first-round pick to the Tennessee Titans for star wideout A.J. Brown. Brown caught 88 passes for nearly 1,500 yards and 11 touchdowns. Brown was flanked by DeVonta Smith, the tenth overall pick in the 2021 draft, who added nearly 1,200 yards himself.

In contrast, the Chiefs’ big offseason move was to trade away a star wide receiver, as they sent Tyreek Hill to the Miami Dolphins for a first-round pick. Their explosive passing attack barely missed a beat, as they relied heavily on All Pro tight end Travis Kelce and built a complementary group of pass-catchers in veterans JuJu Smith-Schuster, Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Justin Watson, and Jerick McKinnon to go with youngsters Noah Gray, Kadarius Toney, and Skyy Moore. The offseason prior, they had invested heavily in the offensive line, completely remaking the unit after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers held them to nine points in Super Bowl LV (see Chapter 7).

Team-building differences show up throughout the rosters of the two squads. The Eagles relied on veteran defensive backs James Bradberry, Darius Slay, and C.J. Gardner-Johnson. The Chiefs, on the other hand, gave major snaps to four rookie defensive backs: first-rounder Trent McDuffie, second-rounder Bryan Cook, fourth-rounder Joshua Williams, and seventh-rounder Jaylen Watson.

This kind of contrast isn’t that unusual. Big playoff matchups often seem to be as much a clash of philosophies as a contest between the players and coaches and teams involved. The 80’s featured the swarming New York Giants defense keyed by explosive linebacker Lawrence Taylor, dueling the ahead-of-its-time Bill Walsh San Francisco 49ers and their prolific passing attack. Peyton Manning’s high flying Indianapolis Colts matched up against Bill Belichick’s old-school New England Patriots defenses throughout the early part of the 2000’s. These big contests seem like not just games but referendums on whether time-honored wisdom (“defense wins championships!”) will prevail over shifting trends (the passing game is king!”).

As we see with the Eagles and Chiefs, the same goes for team-building philosophies. The Rams aggressively traded for top players, signed them to huge deals, and weathered massive dead cap hits. The Bengals, on the other hand, rarely overextend in free agency or the draft, playing things conservatively. Three years earlier, the star-studded Rams had met their match in the Super Bowl with the Patriots, famous for jettisoning star players and building depth throughout the roster. Those Patriots, with expensive defensive backs Stephon Gilmore and Devin McCourty, had lost in the Super Bowl the prior year to the Eagles, who preferred investing their resources in the pass rush.

General managers and head coaches build successful teams by many different paths. The aggressive, the conservative, the tight-fisted, the spendthrift, offense-heavy, defense-heavy, veteran, homegrown, those that prize depth, those that prize stars—the list could go on and on—all have their moments in the sun.

One of the wonderful things about football is that such different paths can lead to similar triumphs. There’s no cookie cutter solution, and “the styles make fights” uncertainty means that we never know how any given matchup will play out. But the breadth of solutions to different problems makes analyzing team building decisions a challenge. Given the diversity of successful approaches, what can we learn from individual examples?

When we take a closer look, we can see that certain core principles guide these wildly different approaches. In fact, being unique is one of the key characteristics of great teams. The great ones are seeking their own paths and cutting against the grain. They’re not looking to do the same things as everybody else. The duels described earlier in this section were between teams not only doing things differently from each other, but differently from the rest of the NFL, too.

Pyramid view, with "basic competence" at the bottom, "good to great" in the middle, and "built to last" on top.

This pyramid structure represents how I think of NFL team-building. We start at the bottom with the foundation: having a vision, aligning the organization around that vision, and ownership support. These qualities characterize basic competence and are hard to notice—except by their absence. Organizations that make poor decisions generally do so because their vision is scattered, the front office and coaching staff are misaligned, ownership is throwing a monkey-wrench into the decision-making process, or some combination of the three.

The middle layer, to use the terminology of business guru Jim Collins, is the “good to great” layer, which elevates teams from basic competence into a special group that can compete for Super Bowls. The key characteristic here, as noted above, is uniqueness, doing things differently from other teams. NFL decision-makers are smart, and it’s hard to out-compete other teams doing the same things and looking for the same players. A different path to success and a strategy for uncovering undervalued assets can unlock greater success. “If we are all thinking alike, no one is thinking,” said Walsh, the brain behind the 49ers dynasty of the 1980s and 1990s.

The top of the pyramid is another of Collins’ concepts: “built to last.” Some teams reach excellence over a brief period of time but cannot sustain that success. Others, like Walsh’s 49ers, endure for years, seemingly across generations. The ability to change and adapt to an evolving game and shifting markets separates the short-lived supernovas from the unchanging points of light. Reid has built successful teams over more than two decades by shifting gears when necessary, as in diverting receiver resources to offensive line over the 2021 and 2022 offseasons, or incorporating college concepts to best suit his All Pro quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, a product of the Air Raid system.

The unique edge that takes a team to greatness won’t last forever; the best franchises are constantly looking for new ways to gain an advantage over 31 opponents. The landscape is always shifting, and advantages tend to be fleeing. Find one untapped market, and teams around the league will play copycat, erasing that edge. For many of the specific strategies described in this book, competing teams have already caught on and eliminated those advantages. The tactics teams use are not recipes for future success, but models for thinking about problems that exist and applying the core team-building principles to find solutions.

In this chapter, I’m going to introduce the principles that guide successful team building, aligning with the pyramid described above. The rest of the book will delve more into the details: decisions teams make, how organizations are structured, what avenues a team has to build out its roster, how teams attack various positions, and winning strategies for the future. Examples of successful and failed team-building efforts will reinforce the importance of these principles as we move through the book.

Sources
Lombardi, Mike, Gridiron Genius, p. 11